Word Index to Poe's Fiction, (1982), title page and table of contents

Notes:

All material in this edition is protected by copyright. Permission has been obtained by the Poe Society of Baltimore from the estate of Burton R. Pollin to provide this electronic edition for academic and research purposes only. The Poe Society of Baltimore asks all users of this material to respect these copyrights, and not to exceed what would typically be considered as fair use (generally interpreted as selective quotations and/or paraphrasing of only a small percentage of the total material, and with the appropriate attribution and citation). Although Poe's writings are essentially in the public domain, the index presented here embodies often painstaking editorial work by the author, and that editorial work is protected by copyright.

It must be noted that this index is keyed to the Mabbott edition of Poe's tales and sketches, and the Pollin edition of the Imaginary Voyages.

The text for this electronic version of the book was taken from an original printed form, revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination of the original edition has been included only for prefatory material, and not for the concordance sections. (It is presumed that there is no practical reason to refer to the pages within a concordance, and thus no justification for the visual interruption that is inherently necessary for internal page numbers.)

The table of contents is a reasonable representation of the table of contents from the original printing.

The volume was published without a dust wrapper.

The original edition of this material was printed from pages and type directly produced by a computer printer of the era. Each page was divided into two major columns, and the various entries for each word were essentially also aligned into columns. As a result, it was extremely difficult to scan the text and convert it to OCR. It was necessary to purchase an inexpensive copy of the book, which was regrettably destroyed in the process of scanning. Each page was cut out and had to be carefully folded down the middle such that each major column could be scanned separately, on both sides of each sheet. The OCR program sometimes still got confused about what text belonged on a single line, and moved entries around in ways that were not always predictable. Consequently, the resulting text required a great deal of manual intervention, although this intervention was partially mitigated by the creation of a series of WordPerfect Macros that were able to make an initial stab at correcting some errors.

In the print edition of the book, entries with more than 50 occurrences are provided only with a total count, the specific references being suppressed due to size limitations for the book. As a reference work produced with the aid of a computer, it was possible to print an additional set of pages that include these extended entries. (These copies were produced by impact printers, with an upper and lower case chain, on standard, white computer paper that still carries the lines of tractor holes on each side.) Burton R. Pollin deposited a few copies of this extended form in institutional libraries. The Poe Society of Baltimore is very grateful to the Washington State University library for loaning one of these copies, and to Jim Stimpert and the Special Collections Department of Johns Hopkins Library for making it possible to borrow and copy the pages of computer printout, as bound in six volumes.