History
As science fiction fans and book collectors, Mel Korshak, Mark Reinsberg, Ted Dikty, and Fred Shroyer recognized the need for a comprehensive list of science fiction and fantasy published up to that time. In 1940 they made plans to compile such a list and began writing letters to the readers' letter columns in the science fiction and fantasy pulp magazines, asking for help with the project; a card file was started, as was a manuscript. Unfortunately, these materials were put into storage when Dikty was drafted for service in World War II. After the war, the file and manuscript were unable to be located, and the work would have to begin again from scratch.
Korshak and Dikty began a book selling business in 1946, while still eager to publish the earlier attempted list. Korshak soon after met Everett F. Bleiler through a newspaper ad offering books for sale. Bleiler expressed interest in their project, and he eventually took it over; the result was The Checklist of Fantastic Literature, which was finally published under the Shasta imprint in 1948. Originally planning to primarily publish reference books on science fiction and fantasy, the new specialty press instead went on to publish fiction by John W. Campbell, Jr., L. Ron Hubbard, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and others. Ultimately, however, they were not successful and finally ceased publishing in 1957, having produced 19 volumes under the Shasta imprint.
Read more about this topic: Shasta Publishers
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)