‘Valancourt? and who was he?’ cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmammas’ gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away. Ah, woe is me that the glory of novels should ever decay… Inquire at Mudie’s, or the London Library, who asks for ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ now? Have not even ‘The Mysteries of Paris’ ceased to frighten? Alas! our best novels are but for a season…”
—William Makepeace Thackeray
Valancourt Books was
founded in 2005 when we decided, after a 40 hour round-trip drive
from Seattle to Nebraska to access some rare books on microfiche that
could be found nowhere else in North America, that it was time for a
publisher to use modern technology to restore widespread access to
rare, neglected, and out-of-print literature. We began publishing in
March 2005 with our first two titles, the first two entries in our
Gothic Classics series, the anonymous The Animated Skeleton
(1798) and Francis Lathom’s The Castle of Ollada (1795).
Since then, we have gradually expanded our focus, publishing more
than 150 titles in various genres, from the 18th, 19th,
and 20th centuries.
Valancourt's titles have
been favorably reviewed by many publications, including The Times
Literary Supplement, Library Journal, The Times of
London, and numerous academic and scholarly journals, and our
books have been acquired by libraries worldwide and adopted for
university course use in schools in the United States, Canada,
Europe, and Asia. All titles are carefully edited from the original
editions and contain the unabridged original text, newly typeset in
clear and attractive typefaces and attractively designed and bound.
We currently publish in
three series: Twentieth Century Classics, Gothic Classics and Valancourt Classics. Most of our titles are published both
in paperback and electronically for Kindle and Apple devices, while
some of the rarest texts are reprinted in collector's hardcover
editions. Although our editions are high-quality and many of the
books we reprint are works of exceptional scarcity, we strive to keep
our prices comparable to or below those of other larger publishers.
Twentieth Century
Classics
During
our first eight years, we focused on restoring access to important
18th and 19th century works, making these
scarce texts widely available in quality editions for readers,
students, and scholars. However, recent large scale efforts to
digitize these works by Google Books, HathiTrust Digital Library,
Open Library, Gale’s Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Collections
Online, and others, have made many 18th and 19th century public domain works freely and widely available. Perhaps
unexpectedly, in many cases is now easier to gain access to a book
from the 1880s (or even the 1780s) than the 1980s.
Recognizing
the fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of excellent and important
copyrighted novels are out of print because they do not sell well
enough to attract the attention of large publishing houses,
Valancourt Books in 2013 launched a groundbreaking new series
focusing on out-of-print, scarce, and neglected modern fiction. Each
volume is newly typeset and professionally designed, and all titles
in the series contain introductions by top writers, critics, and
scholars, including Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Harlan Ellison,
Michael Dirda, Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z Brite, Kim Newman, and many
more.
The
titles in this series will be a diverse selection with one thing in
common: they’re all excellent reads. Titles confirmed so far
include several winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary
prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the
Somerset Maugham Award, as well as fiction by critically acclaimed
authors like Francis King, C.H.B. Kitchin, Keith Waterhouse, John
Wain, John Braine, and J.B. Priestley, as well as the very best of
supernatural and horror fiction, such as works by Colin Wilson, John
Blackburn, Basil Copper, and Oliver Onions, among many others.
Additionally, the series will have a heavy focus on gay-themed works
and works by gay authors.
In
2013, Valancourt Books has already released more than twenty titles
in this exciting new series and plans to release more than 60 by the
end of the year.
Gothic Classics
Although Gothic
literature in English dates back at least to Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth and continues to be popular in new novels being
published today, our Gothic Classics series focuses on the
heyday of the Gothic novel's original popularity, from the 1790s,
when classic bestsellers like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of
Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk appeared, to the
1830s, when this type of Gothic novel generally began to be replaced
with the “penny dreadful” in works like Varney the Vampyre.
Our Gothic Classics titles include the seven “horrid novels” read by Catherine
Morland and Isabella Thorpe in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey,
five of which have already been published, with the other two
currently in the press, as well as numerous other extremely rare
Gothic titles. Some of our offerings, such as The Forest of
Valancourt (1813) and The Monastery of Gondolfo (1801)
have survived in only one known copy each and would be unobtainable
if not for our new editions. In all, we have published more than four
dozen extremely scarce Gothic texts, with many others planned for
future publication.
In addition to restoring
access to these lost novels, our volumes in many cases contain
never-before-published scholarship revealing the details of the lives
of their previously unknown authors. So far, our editors'
introductions have uncovered the life details of Northanger novelists
Peter Teuthold, Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom and Eleanor Sleath, as
well Gothic luminaries such as T. J. Horsley Curties. The importance
of our Gothic Classics series has been recognized in articles
in scholarly journals such as Gothic Studies, European
Romantic Review, and Eighteenth Century Fiction.
Valancourt Classics
Our Valancourt
Classics series includes new editions of forgotten or neglected
classics from the 18th and 19th centuries, and
includes titles by many important authors, including Bram Stoker,
Arthur Conan Doyle, Ann Radcliffe, Walter Pater, Ouida, J. Sheridan
Le Fanu, and Oscar Wilde, as well as titles by excellent writers who
had been forgotten prior to our new editions, such as Bertram
Mitford, Richard Marsh, Charles Johnstone, John Moore, and Baron de
la Motte Fouqué, among others. Our Valancourt Classics titles
generally contain longer and more substantial introductions than our
Gothic Classics titles and contain useful annotations and
appendices to aid in the appreciation of the text.