Press, 1998), a book that meant a lot to me when I came across it at age 18 or 19 or so, and which helped me discover a lot of great gay authors. Gregory Woods, who wrote the landmark History of Gay Literature (Yale Univ. Look Down in Mercy, for example, has an introduction by Prof.
I should mention, too, that one thing that sets our editions apart from many publishers who reprint older books is that our editions all have new introductions either by their authors or by leading writers or critics. edition, the author rewrote the last chapter to give a happy ending and a possible future for the two men. An intriguing thing about the book is that in the UK edition, the officer is consumed by guilt and self-hatred and throws himself out of a window at the end, but in the U.S. and UK, perhaps a little surprisingly, since a significant portion of the book has to do with the love between an officer and an enlisted man. WWII-themed novels were still very popular in 1951 when it was first published, and it was a bestseller in both the U.S. You mentioned Walter Baxter's novel of the British campaign in Burma, Look Down in Mercy, which is a really terrific book. How do you go about rediscovering the books you end up reprinting? I definitely think you guys are onto something - this is the next wave of what's been happening in publishing, and one of the positive things about the internet and books. Your reprints of Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy and Martyn Goff's The Plaster Fabric are great examples of gay men at war, and I also find myself drawn to Francis King's work, such as The Dividing Stream. Now I can add Valancourt Books to that list of resources for hard-to-find gems of gay lit. I also worked with Winston Leyland and Gay Sunshine Press for a few years in San Francisco before he shut it down and I was impressed with all the obscure early queer lit he'd published and kept in print: Charles Warren Stoddard's Cruising the South Seas, Adolfo Caminha's Bom Crioulo, Oscar Wilde's Teleny, the Gay Roots series, etc. TH: I've worked as a volunteer at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, and what I loved about working there was the thrill of discovering some amazing old gay novels - books like John Horne Burns's early gay classic, The Gallery, from 1947, and Luis Zapata's Adonis Garcia. More recently, in late 2012, we discovered - to our surprise - that there was a ton of great literature from the 20th century, sometimes even as recent as the 1970s or 1980s, that was out of print and almost impossible to find in libraries or secondhand copies, so we've begun republishing a lot of neglected modern works, most of them either of gay interest or horror/supernatural (though, of course, the two often overlap!)
So in early 2005, we began reprinting some of these old Gothic novels, and over time, we expanded into neglected Victorian-era popular fiction, including old Penny Dreadfuls and sensation novels, as well as a lot of the decadent and fin de siècle literature of the 1890s. It just seemed ridiculous in the 21st century - with the modern technology we have now for making books available - that books of such interest to readers and scholars should be out of print. The specific impetus for starting the press came when I was doing research on the Gothic novelist Francis Lathom (1774-1832), who was rumored to be gay, and discovered that the only place in North America where you could find his books was on microfiche in Lincoln, Nebraska. But there were hundreds and hundreds of other titles that sounded really enticing, yet weren't available anywhere, either to buy online or get at a library. As an undergraduate, I became really interested in the Gothic fiction of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and eagerly devoured the few books that were in print: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's books, and a few others.
JJ: My whole life, I've been someone who loves to read, but my reading tastes have always been a bit off the beaten path, and I continually found myself frustrated by the fact that so many great books that I wanted to read were out of print and unavailable.