Tales of Hoffman (1951), conducted by Thomas Beecham and starring Robert Rounseville as “the definitive Hoffman,” is an imaginative, spirited English-language version of the Jacques Offenbach opera. Three weird love stories—one science-fictional and the others supernatural—derive from the fantasy fiction of E. T. A. Hoffman. My late friend Bob Rounseville told me he was especially proud of the final scene of the opera, which the producers excised after the initial release. One hopes some film historian will unearth the missing footage and issue a restored version.
The Virgin Spring (1959) is Ingmar Bergman’s ostensibly simple but broodingly complex fable of a rape-murder and the revenge its perpetrators suffer.
Acknowledgments
“Journeys End” copyright © 1957 Mercury Press, Inc., renewed 1985 by Poul Anderson. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Share Alike” copyright © 1953 Beyond Fantasy Fiction. Reprinted by arrangement with Agent Forrest J. Ackerman, 2495 Glendower Ave., Hollywood CA 90027.
“Teacher” copyright © 1992 C. H. Sherman. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Songs of My Young” copyright © 1992 Dan Burrello. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“Minotauress” from Amazing Stories March 1991. Copyright © 1991 TSR, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
“A Matter of Taste” copyright © 1984 Parke Godwin. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Wild Wood” copyright © 1953 Mildred Clingerman. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Secret” copyright © 1992 Julia L. Keefer. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“Gentleman on the Top Floor” copyright © 1965 Frederick Laing. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Sunday in December” copyright © 1992 Joan Andelman. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Old Woman Who Dragged Her Husband’s Corpse” from A Silver Thread of Madness, copyright © 1989 Jessica Amanda Salmonson. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Laura” copyright © 1992 Carole Bugge. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“Minnie Field” from Crick Bottom Plays, copyright © 1928 Samuel French, Inc., renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Samuel French, Inc.
“The Strange High House in the Mist” from the October 1931 Weird Tales, copyright © 1931 Popular Fiction Co., renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by courtesy of Arkham House Publishers, Inc.
“Let No Man Dream” copyright © 1992 Paula Volsky. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“Princess” from the Summer 1988 Weird Tales, copyright © 1988 Terminus Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
“The Satyr” copyright © 1992 Toby Sanders. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Legs That Walked” from the November 1953 Weird Tales, copyright © 1953 Weird Tales. Reprinted by permission of Weird Tales Ltd.
“The Bridge to the Liver Pies” from the May 1981 A mazing Stories, copyright © 1981 Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Black Wench” copyright © 1985 Ray Russell. First appeared in Playboy. Used by permission of the author.
“The Master of Rampling Gate” from the February 1984 Redbook, copyright © 1983 Anne O’Brien Rice. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Deadly Ratio” from the January 1948 Weird Tales, copyright © 1947 Weird Tales. Reprinted by arrangement with the Pimlico Agency.
“Will the Real Dennis Casper Please Stand Up?” copyright © 1992 Amy Wasp-Wimberger. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“Expedition” from Nightmares and Geezenstacks, copyright ©1961 Fredric Brown, renewed in 1989 by James Brown and Linn L. Brown. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Fredric Brown and Roberta Pryor, Inc.
“Tripping the Light Fantastic” copyright © 1992 Dan Potter. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Fiend” from Digits & Dastards, copyright © 1964 HMH Publishing Co., Inc., 1966 Frederik Pohl. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Happy Hour” from Fantasy Tales (U.K.), copyright © 1991 Marvin Kaye. All rights reserved.
“Horace, Nellie and the Computer” copyright © 1992 Richard L. Wexelblat. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“I’m in Marsport Without Hilda” copyright © 1957 Fantasy House, Inc., renewed 1984 by Isaac Asimov. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Moonflower” copyright © 1992 J. Timothy Hunt. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Language of Love” from Notions: Unlimited, copyright ©1957 Galaxy Publishing Corp., 1960 Bantam Books, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Pimlico Agency.
“In the Morgue” (original title, “The Dimple”), copyright © 1923, renewed. Reprint arranged from the agents for the Literary Property Trustees under the Will of Lillian Heilman on the basis that Dashiell Hammett asserted rights to the story during the renewal term of copyright.
“Himeros’s Daughter” copyright © 1992 Thomas D. Sadler. All rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“A-round the Corner” words and music by Josef Marais, copyright © renewal 1990 Fideree Music.
“Voices in the Coalbin” copyright © 1989 Mary Higgins Clark. Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
“The Maiden” from Dark Carnival, copyright © 1947, renewed 1975 by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
“In the Shadows of My Fear” from Women of Darkness, copyright © 1988 Joan Vander Putten. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Lady and the Tiger” copyright © 1948 by Jack Moffitt.
Version History
Version #: v3.0
Sigil Version Used: 0.7.2
Original format: ePub
Date created: August 9, 2014
Last edited: August 9, 2014
Correction History:
Version History Framework for this book:
v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.
v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. 40-50 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.
v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.
v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.
v4.0 ==> I've done a
complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.
Some additional notes:
vX.1-9 ==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".
Correcting my ebooks — Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.
Lovers and Other Monsters Page 59