[page 44, continued:]

Editorial Announcements

This number of Poe Studies features the last of John C. Miller’s publications in our pages; its findings solve yet one more of the complex problems involved in John Henry Ingram’s transatlantic gathering of Poe materials that Professor Miller spent the final years of his life doing battle to solve, a battle that, for all its personal cost, he clearly loved. With his death, Poe Studies has lost a much-valued contributor and one of its most trenchant readers of submissions, a man who never suffered fools kindly but never failed to encourage valuable work, buried though he might find it beneath massive confusion. His gift of the core of his personal library to the journal daily reminds us of his support over the years, although he would undoubtedly add here that the books are to be used, damn it, not sentimentalized about. The editors personally have lost a delightful and witty correspondent and a warm friend.

With this issue, G. R. Thompson completes eight years as editor and four as co-editor of Poe Studies; beginning with volume 13, he will serve the journal as a member of the editorial board. Poe Studies remains, of course, the offspring of Dick’s energy, scholarship, and passion for Poe. With funding from Washington State University and with active support from Emmett L. Avery, then chairman of the Department of English at WSU, and Henry Grosshans, director of the WSU Press, Dick brought forth the first issue of Poe Newsletter in April 1968. Acquiring its present name in 1971, the journal soon became an essential tool for scholars and critics of Poe. Its distinctive features — articles and notes presenting original research and arguing for (or taking up arms against) particular critical insights and approaches; annual bibliographies and extended reviews reporting and evaluating current scholarship — follow Dick’s initial format. The journal also continues his original purpose of providing Poe studies with a central forum promoting informed, rigorous, cumulative dialogue without insisting on one strategy for all participants or presuming that the journal, rather than the dialogue itself, could be final arbiter of emergent perspectives. The present editor intends to maintain that design, adding to it only in ways that will complement, and I hope compliment, the example Dick has set.

Poe Studies abbreviates frequently cited texts of Poe’s writings. Citations are keyed as follows:

Works — Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe; vol. I,Poems; vol. II, Tales and Sketches 1831-1842; vol. III, Tales and Sketches 1843-1849, ed. T. O. Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969-1978).

Complete Works — The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902; or rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1965).

Poems — The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965).

Letters — The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (rev. ed., New York: Gordian Press, 1966).