Shortage

I'm going to try some posts of purposely shorter length. They won't take as long to write, and I'm not sure that I can do it. Let's see.

Jack Vance is a brilliant writer. Everything I'd like to say about him has apparently been said here by someone named Nick Gevers. The piece also mentions the Vance Integral Edition (or VIE) which was an edition (two actually, one a bit fancier than the other) of his collected works, restored as much as possible to the original manuscripts.

This was done by a group of several hundred volunteers and took years to complete. The books were sold on a subscription basis and once printed, were gone. Someone involved had said he'd figured out a good way to get a free set of the original 44 volumes: purchase 2 and then wait until the subscriptions closed, then sell the second for double the purchase price. Based on the few sets that have appeared on eBay, he would have been right.

The "corrected" VIE texts are also serving as the basis for commercial reprints, another gratifying result of the project. Now if the band could just get back together and give the same treatment to other worthy authors...