Yeah, Astounding was great. I hadn’t realized how far Campbell went with Dianetics.
Both my websites got a mention on today’s File770, probably the premier news site about f&sf. The sites are lavishly quoted to pique the interest of anyone interested in f&sf history. I couldn’t ask for better publicity.
I don’t know if one of you was responsible for this good news, but I don’t believe in coincidences like this. To whomever, many, many multiple thanks.
Congratulations!
Cool!
GnomePress.com. The Complete History and Bibliography. It’s finished. It’s complete. It’s online. It’s safe to access. It’s educational, nutritional, existential, exhaustive, and exhausting. Over 100 articles. Over 150,000 words. Over 800 images.
Each of the 86 Gnome titles has a short biography of the author or authors, some context about the state of the field at the time of publication, and dish about the book itself. I’ve tried to add contemporary photographs that reveal what the authors looked like at the time of publication. At least three were dug out of newspaper archives because no photos at all existed online. I also went back and included the covers of the original magazines material in the books appeared in, if the authors’ names also appeared on the cover. I threw in other relevant covers, newspaper articles, and rare old stuff as well, presumably because I wanted to prolong the process as much as humanly possible. You’ll also find more than a dozen auxiliary articles about things connected with Gnome, including ephemera nobody has ever seen, lists of stuff nobody has ever compiled, an image of the 1951 Fantasy Calendar which definitely does not exist, bios and photos of all the cover artists, and of course the titular bibliography, an essential for dealers and collectors. That’s cumulatively why I haven’t posted about this for four mouths. Just to increase the degree of difficulty, I got COVID. So did my wife. You probably can hear her coughing in the background. I don’t think there is a connection, but you might want to wear a mask while browsing.
As before, thank you if you do go browse through it. And as before, please let me know of any problems you have with access or mistakes you find in content. They are there, lurking in plain sight. I know: I just found one clicking on a random page.
Bookmarked! I’ll study it as soon as I dig out from my backlog.
“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.”
Whatever that means.
I’ve gotten numerous responses from people just in the past couple of days, so I know it’s generally working, but you’re the second person who’s run into this problem.
I’ll dig into it.
It was an error on the host end. They claim the engineers have fixed it and are rolling out the changes now. We’ll see how long “now” is.
“It’s longer than you think!” Stephen KIng
It is. Why now? Why me?
I’ve been getting great responses, including this absolute wow.
Thank you so much for the note. We took a look at the site, and we’re frankly astonished – this is the most complete and incredible bibliographic resource we’ve ever seen for a small-press publisher (and perhaps that I’ve ever seen for any publisher, period).
That was from Jude Feldman of the major sf bookstore Borderland Books. Others will just see an error message that looks like I fucked up and maybe dump me into spam. I know that life isn’t fair but this is a low blow.
Without meaning to be flippant; I know how much effort you’ve put into this and how great the result is. And hence how awfully frustrating this is to start malfunctioning just now.
But there’s this:
The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.
Looks like it’s back. I hit a bunch of random entries and they all appeared.
Would somebody else here check it and see if it works for them? I want to double-check everything at this point.
I just opened about 8 random links, and they all seemed to work for me on my Win10 laptop running Chrome.
I’m seeing it OK from here - of course, Firefox on Linux is probably not the platform most of your target audience will be using to view the site.
Great. That’s a relief.
Now I just have to send everybody an email of apology and tell them it won’t happen again.
Just tried a few entries on my expired Acer Chromebook, and no problems. Looks fascinating; will keep coming back.
Thank you for this labour of love, Mr Mapcase. 
Maybe I should change my name to Exapno_Bookcase.
Gnome_Bookcase!
The Gnome_Bookcase
