I’ve had several conversations of late about small press publishers producing sets of ‘collected works’ or ‘collected stories’ volumes. In amongst mention of the Leiber, Simak and other sets, I’m almost always asked about whatever happened to that Vance project? For those who don’t recall, a group of dedicated and very well organised Vance readers, working under the Vance Integral Edition name, proposed to produce a set of 44 volumes reprinting all of his published works. More than that, they sought to restore the texts, with his approval/agreement.
Although it wasn’t very widely recognised beyond those most immediately affected, the VIE people decided to divide the books into two 22 volume ‘waves’. The first wave was published in the Spring of 2003, and I’ve just seen on their website that the second wave has been printed and delivered to the binders in Italy. Copies, one would expect, will ship in the next month or so.
There’s a lot to like about this project, and only one or two things that I have reservations about. I like that they were so respectful of Vance’s work, that they endeavoured to do the right thing by him, and that they created pristine digital texts that other publishers could use (a number of VIE texts have been used by mass market publishers, most notably ibooks, to produce new Vance mass market editions). I’m less sure about restoring texts, but that’s a call for Vance himself, whose wishes should be respected. For those interested, there are a number of variant options on obtaining VIE volumes, which you can find here.