30 years of the Avram Davidson website, and other news

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)
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

The Avram Davidson Centenary

Sunday 23 April 2023 is the centenary of the birth of Avram Davidson.

On this occasion, worthy of celebration wherever the readers of this website may find themselves, it is worth looking back at origins. I count myself fortunate to have discovered the work of Avram Davidson, when in late 1992 I first read a battered but intact copy of The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy paperback. I was surprised, again and again. The rambling sentences and digressions impressed me, but most of all it was the way in which Davidson integrated obscure and bizarre knowledge into these stories: knowledge that in anyone else’s hands would be dusty and uninteresting or an info-dump that strangled or squashed the flow of language. Davidson was genuinely learned, as even a single sentence taken at random will reveal. There is a healthy measure of irreverence to temper this erudition, too, so that a reader is never oppressed by the weight of information imparted. I know that I was re-reading the Enquiries in late April or early May 1993, for when I decided to order the two books then in print and called up George Scithers, publisher of the Owlswick Press (and Weird Tales), in King of Prussia*, Penna., he answered my inquiry with the statement, “Avram Davidson died last week.”

portrait of Avram Davidson (1923-1993), American science fiction author and essayist

Over the next several months and years, the quest for other works by Davidson, at first to read them, but soon I began preparing lists in an attempt to understand the range of his work. I corresponded with or met folks in and out of science fiction, many of whom I still count as friends. The rest is history, some of it chronicled in back issues of The Nutmeg Point District Mail newsletter and in the archives of the Avram Davidson website. From small seeds and many friendships, the Avram Davidson Society (largely imaginary but important for all that) has fostered interest in the writings of Avram Davidson.

In recent months, I have been re-reading lots and lots of Avram Davidson with great pleasure, the Eszterhazy stories (a perennial favorite), but also “Lord of Central Park” and El Vilvoy de las Islas (if Naples is the most elegant book I have published with the imprint of the Nutmeg Point District Mail, El Vilvoy is the most important). And then there is The Avram Davidson Treasury (1998), the great triumph of Grania Davis and her efforts in the first wave of posthumous publications. And if the Treasury unaccountably omitted three essential stories, “Lord of Central Park”, “The Dragon Skin Drum”, and El Vilvoy de las Islas, well, all three appeared in collections within the next few years, in The Investigations of Avram Davidson and The Other Nineteenth Century. And Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven gathered together material relating to Avram Davidson as an American Jewish writer; the biographical essay by Eileen Gunn remains the most important survey of Davidson’s life and work. These are solid foundations upon which all else has built.

And now, for the Avram Davidson Centenary year, there will be a century of stories, AD 100. 100 Years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories, a two volume collection assembled by Seth Davis and forthcoming in 2023 from  Or All the Seas with Oysters, the publishing arm of the Estate of Avram Davidson. Your correspondent had an early look at the table of contents and it is a fascinating assembly: early writings, some of which I have never seen, and stories published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies — within and without the genres— many of them ephemeral, fleeting, and extinct. Once upon a time, dear reader, it took fantastical amounts of luck and patience and effort and, above all, TIME to trace these stories, simply for the pleasure of reading them. Now, this pleasure will be yours, as you peruse two thick volumes. I look forward to doing so myself.

The preparation of AD100 is a colossal accomplishment and a landmark in the posthumous career of Avram Davidson as significant as publication of The Avram Davidson Treasury in 1998. Here’s to the next twenty-five years!

On the occasion of the Centenary, I acknowledge, in memoriam, a short list friends and correspondents who were instrumental in promoting the legacy of Avram Davidson: Grania Davis, Guy Davenport, Reno W. Odlin, George Scithers, and David G. Hartwell.

* King of Prussia, named for an eighteenth-century crossroads tavern, is the wonderfully named town near where I spent much of my youth. I suspect Avram Davidson took a certain amount of pleasure in the unusual name of the town where his friend and long-time editorial champion George Scithers (1929-2010) lived for many years.

[This essay appeared in slightly different form as part of The Nutmeg Point District Mail, vol. XXI, no. 1, archived at http://avramdavidson.org/nutmeg48.htm.]

Naples by Avram Davidson

just published : NAPLES by Avram Davidson

NAPLES is a fine press edition of one of Avram Davidson’s darkest tales, originally published in the first Shadows anthology edited by Charles L. Grant. NAPLES won the World Fantasy award for short fiction in 1979, the same year Jorge Luis Borges was named the recipient of the World Fantasy Life Achievement award ; Davidson received that award in 1986.

Publications of the Avram Davidson Society, number six.
Edition of 160 copies, designed by Jerry Kelly and printed by hand at the Kelly-Winterton Press from Hermann Zapf’s Aldus type. Stitched in yellow Hahnemühle wrappers printed in burnt siena. [16] pp. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches.

Ten copies, numbered i to x, were reserved for presentation; 125 copies for distribution to members of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (AIB), on the occasion of the congress in Napoli, September 2022. Twenty-five copies are available for members and friends of the Avram Davidson Society.

Published in Napoli on 11 September 2022.

Details and subscription price at the order page :
https://temporary-culture.com/books/naples-avram-davidson/