first fruits
May. 15th, 2006 07:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacWhen I undertook to write appendical material for Diana Pavlac Glyer's book on the Inklings, the plan was for three appendices. But six months after the publishers got a look at the result, they said the back material was too long. They've published books with longer, but that's what they said this time.
Our retrenchment in response involved cutting two of the appendices entirely. What we'll do with them is a story for another time. The third appendix had started out as a simple handlist of books by the Inklings: all of them, including the ones you've never heard of. But some of them were obscure, or scholars on recondite subjects, and many readers might not even be familiar with all the works of Lewis and Tolkien, who were quite prolific (in Tolkien's case posthumously). So I added introductory biographical paragraphs, giving their relationship with Oxford and the Inklings, and explaining briefly their scholarly and creative interests.
In the reconstruction we cut the space-consuming booklists entirely, and I substituted additional narrative paragraphs going into a bit more detail on that last matter and pointing to their most important or interesting work. And I also added a note at the beginning revealing our Secret Plan, which was to put the original booklists on the Web as a supplement to the appendix.
It may take another six months to publish the book, but the booklists could go up right away. So here they are. This is the original plan for the appendix: it doesn't explain anything about the authors, it just lists their books. Later on, since space is less limited on the Web, I'll expand this from a handlist into a bibliography, with publication info and so on. The narrative paragraphs are staying in Dr. Academic's book for now. But this is something, and as a list it's more complete than you'll find anywhere else. It's also entirely up-to-date, the latest edition mentioned having been published last fall, and I'll keep it so.
Our retrenchment in response involved cutting two of the appendices entirely. What we'll do with them is a story for another time. The third appendix had started out as a simple handlist of books by the Inklings: all of them, including the ones you've never heard of. But some of them were obscure, or scholars on recondite subjects, and many readers might not even be familiar with all the works of Lewis and Tolkien, who were quite prolific (in Tolkien's case posthumously). So I added introductory biographical paragraphs, giving their relationship with Oxford and the Inklings, and explaining briefly their scholarly and creative interests.
In the reconstruction we cut the space-consuming booklists entirely, and I substituted additional narrative paragraphs going into a bit more detail on that last matter and pointing to their most important or interesting work. And I also added a note at the beginning revealing our Secret Plan, which was to put the original booklists on the Web as a supplement to the appendix.
It may take another six months to publish the book, but the booklists could go up right away. So here they are. This is the original plan for the appendix: it doesn't explain anything about the authors, it just lists their books. Later on, since space is less limited on the Web, I'll expand this from a handlist into a bibliography, with publication info and so on. The narrative paragraphs are staying in Dr. Academic's book for now. But this is something, and as a list it's more complete than you'll find anywhere else. It's also entirely up-to-date, the latest edition mentioned having been published last fall, and I'll keep it so.
