Re: (Tears) A Pride of Monsters by James H. Schmitz

On Mon, 13 May 2024 07:53:52 -0500, "Michael F. Stemper"
<michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/05/2024 08.26, James Nicoll wrote:

A Pride of Monsters by James H. Schmitz
 
Five answers to "What's eating you?"
 
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/scratching-through-the-wall

>
You said, "Too bad it is long, long out of print." Any ideas (from
you or others) as to why it wasn't included in all of the Schmitz
reprints that Flint edited several years back?

As I understand it, if you know the stories in the collection under
discussion and have a source that lists the contents of existing
collections for the same author and a spreadsheet, you should be able
to identify the optimal books to purchase to get of the stories in
this collection.

Just don't be surprised if you end up with multiple copies of some or
all of the stories. I did this a long time ago and, for popular
writers, it was a major problem in some cases. Modern collections that
omit one or two of the stories I wanted but have all the others -- and
it was never same one(s) that were omitted. I found this particularly
unhelpful.

OTOH, IIRC, a lot of Bradbury short story collections were published,
intact, but paired together so it wasn't clear without checking which
collections I was getting. I think I got 100% coverage of those early
collections, in new trade paperback twofer form. This was, of course,
pre-Kindle, when I went to the book store with a printed list of what
I was looking for to avoid buying the a book I already owned over
again.

Sort of like the folk song albums (groups like The Brothers Four, for
example) where you got two LPs on the same CD, as it were. Except that
there it was because the LPs were so skimpy (but satisfying) to begin
with.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"