Some thirty years ago this month, in September 1995, the Avram Davidson website went live on a subfolder of a borrowed server, courtesy of my former colleague Jim Nicholson. He responded to my asking for help turning a mess of information into a database by saying, Let’s turn it into a website. And so using a primitive DOS text editor, I coded a preliminary title index to the writings of Avram Davidson (1923-1993), and the website was launched. I never met Davidson but when I first started reading his work it compelled my interest and curiosity. Science fiction is a warm room on a cold night, as Paul WIlliams once wrote, and the field is pretty welcoming to newcomers. As electronic penpals and in real life, I met dozens of readers who shared an interest in Davidson’s work, or who had known him, or edited him, etc. The list is long: Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, Gregory Feeley, Gordon Van Gelder, Phillip Rose, and others; and also friends now dead, among them Reno W. Odlin, David G. Hartwell, and George Scithers.
The first few years were rich in correspondence, especially once The Nutmeg Point District Mail electronic newsletter took shape, and the Avram Davidson Society (still largely a notional organization). The late Grania Davis, executor of the Estate, worked diligently to bring new books into being over a period of a decade, and I helped with many of them. The website grew organically and sent out digressions and personal flourishes, and even produced a monograph series of the publications of the Avram Davidson Society (the most substantial evidence of its existence). In 1999, the website came into its own with the avramdavidson.org domain. Always coming back to the work of Avram Davidson, with delight and wonder. For me it was always an irregular shoestring midnight sort of operation, with periods of high yield followed by fallow periods. That title index remains at the core of the website : a bibliographical resource for the ages.
And if some of those digressions of mine (such as the Endless Bookshelf) are now more active than the Avram Davidson website, that is partly because other writing projects compel my energies and attention (there might be one of two publications still to come from The Nutmeg Point District Mail). But most importantly, once Grania’s son Seth Davis started his own process of discovering the writings of Avram Davidson, he began building the Avram Davidson Universe — https://avramdavidson.com — and recruited a wide pool of new contributors and participants for interview podcasts and simultaneously embarked on a systematic project to publish the works of Avram Davidson. Always coming back to the work of Avram Davidson, with delight and wonder.
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2025 has been a bonzer* year for me in books, with publication of the following works :
A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (January)
The Elfland Prepositions (February)
A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Bronte (Brontë Parsonage Museum / Tartarus Press, April), which includes my essay, Travelling with Charlotte
Another Green World (Zagava, June 2025)
The Critical Mess by Michael Zinman (Distributed by Temporary Culture, August 2025)
and the hardcover issue of Another Green World is in production at Zagava’s binders.
If you haven’t already done so, buy a book or two from Temporary Culture. The Private Life of Books is always a nice gift for a friend.
* (that’s an Avram Davidson word, which he traces to bonanza and the Sydney Ducks, a California Gold Rush era gang in a neighborhood of San Francisco)
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I have been reading my way through a box of Penguin paperback editions of works by Michael Innes, whose books were recommended to me (independently) by John Clute and Mark Valentine. I share their high esteem for Appleby’s End (1945), also praised by H. R. F. Keating in Crime and Mystery The 100 Best Books. I am having a fine time and will write something about the Innes books. Kelly Link sent me the beautiful Small Beer edition of The Book of Love (2024) in four volumes, and that is next on my reading list.
I will be in Boston for the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair 7-9 November 2025, if you are there, come say hello (at the Cummins booth 213)
Peace,
Henry Wessells, 29 September 2025