This version of the site is no longer being updated, and will soon be taken down entirely. The new site can be accessed at:
| www.Icshi.net |
Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

> Summary of Changes Made
> Dec 13 | New bibliography created, the Storysource
> Nov 15 | Slan Hunter news, one new link added
> Nov 3 | News item added, Links page updated
> Oct 12 | Icshi site given the Encyclopaedia Britannica Internet Guide Award
> Sep 6 | Links page re-sorted, new sites added
> May 24 | Gerry Daly interview posted, and 8 new coverscans
> Mar 26 | Compendium 2.1c posted
> Feb 12 | Site maintenance
> Jan 30 | Coverscan improvements complete
> Jan 25 | 9 new covers, Compendium 2.1b, and most images improved
> Jan 10 | News item added

> December 13th, 2006
> The Database and Compendium have both been replaced with a new PDF bibliography called the Storysource. This is vastly superior to both of those documents — you can read more about it and download it here. The E. Mayne Hull page has been updated for reasons explained in the section "Edna Mayne Hull" contained in the Storysource. And finally, just to make things look a little nicer, I've created new titles and banners for the site.

> November 15th, 2006
> More news on Slan Hunter added to the News page, and updated the Links page to add another Lego website, Peeron.

> November 3rd, 2006
> I've added an item to the News page, and updated the Links page to include some new information relating to the recordings Fernando Valenti did of Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas.

> October 12th, 2006
> Encyclopaedia Britannica selects sites to supplement their own online articles for members. These are called iGuide sites, and I'm deeply honored that my Icshi website devoted to A.E. van Vogt has recently been given their Internet Guide Award and become such a site. Aside from being a tremendous honor, this also comes with a very useful privelege. I am able to link to any article in their online repository of knowledge, and the full text of that article will be displayed to those who are navigated to their site via a link on mine. Normally, only paying members have access to such untruncated articles. I've therefore taken the liberty of linking to several articles of particular interest to myself for the benefit of the visitors to this site who may be interested in those topics. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank such a prestigious organization as Encyclopaedia Britannica for bestowing me with such a wonderful honor, and to thank all the van Vogt readers, SF fans, and art enthusiasts who have given me ample reason to create this site and keep it going over the last five years, and special thanks to all those who have contributed to this site in the numerous ways that are listed in these Update pages. In addition to all this, I've also added two more items to the Links page: an Enya website, and an illustrated guide to Lego sets.

> September 6th, 2006
> I've resorted the Links page, adding two new sections (Music and World Events) and added 8 new sites (Russian van Vogt site, Doctor Who novelization guide, Domenico Scarlatti biography, Laurie Riley harp music, DebkaFile news site, Counterterrorism Blog, Arab-Jewish conflict booklet, and Wikipedia).

> May 24th, 2006
> I'm delighted and honored to be able to present an interview with Gerry Daly, creator of some of the finest covers ever to grace SF books. Gerry was gracious enough to agree to my suggestion, and so over the last few months we've been working on this long series of questions and answers. This interview gives a fascinating insight into his own creative work as well as a glimpse into the world of book illustration. I hope you all — and especially all you cover art fans out there — will enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it. Thanks, Gerry! During our email discussion, he also explained to me some of the more tangled ins and outs of copyright law and how it applies to book covers. I've therefore corrected the erroneous copyright notice on the site's main page, and have inserted the copyright symbol (©) next to each artist's name (where known) on the Covers mainpage, as well as adjacent to artwork embedded in HTML pages in the Favorite Covers section. I intend to tackle the Illustrations pages as time permits. Oh. And, at the last minute, as long as I had my scanner out for other reasons, just for the heck of it, I decided to throw in 8 new coverscans — the front & back covers from 4 books I recently acquired on a book-buying spree in Phoenix. The Book of Ptath — Paperback Library, May 1969 — art © by Jeff Jones (front & back) Destination: Universe! — Berkley Medallion, 1975 — art © by Richard Powers (front & back) The Man with a Thousand Names — DAW Books, November 1979 — art © by J. Penalva (front & back) The Voyage of the Space Beagle — Manor, 1976 — art © by Bruce Pennington (front & back)

> March 26th, 2006
> Hervé Hauck has again provided great assistance with the Compendium, as he recently supplied me with scans and information on many editions, some of which are entirely new to the list: The Best of A.E. van Vogt, Volume 2 Printing #2 added The Book of Van Vogt All printings under this title cost $0.95 and have cover art by Karel Thole The Book of Ptath 1984 Panther edition added Computerworld There is a degree of uncertainty now about its first printing date. The copyright page of the 1986 NEL edition says "First NEL Paperback Edition February 1986," but many other sources give detailed information on a printing in August 1984 Cosmic Encounter The ISBN of the NEL edition has been confirmed The Darkness on Diamondia In the Ace edition, the placement and even inclusion of specific ads not uniform in all copies Destination: Universe! The 1972 Panther printing has 172 pages, not 160. Also, its cover price is 30p rather than 50p, and its ISBN is 0-586-02484-0 not 0-586-1063 The 1978 Panther printing has the ISBN 0-586-02484-0, not 0-586-02482-0 Mission to the Stars The first Sphere edition was in 1976, so the edition listed before that (which was already in doubt) has been removed from the list Moonbeast The ISBN of the December 1969 printing has been confirmed The price of the 1973 printing has been corrected (should be 35p, not 30p) More Than Superhuman David Hardy's cover art appeared on all the NEL printings in the early and mid 1970s Planets for Sale The ISBN for the 1979 edition is now given, and features cover art by Chris Foss Rogue Ship A Panther printing in 1980 has been added The Secret Galactics The cover artist for the Sphere editions has been tentatively identified as Angus McKie Slan An October 1962 Panther printing has been added Chris Foss did the cover art on all later Panther editions Tyranopolis The 1987 printing cost £2.99 The Universe Maker (omnibus including "The Proxy Intelligence") Peter Elson has been identified as the cover artist for all printings The Voyage of the Space Beagle The 1979 Panther edition cost £0.75 The 1978 edition may not exist The War Against the Rull The 1962 Panther edition was printed in October The Weapon Shops The ISBN for the 1969 and 1970 NEL editions (found at the bottom of the copyright page) are now given in addition to the serial number printed on the book's spine The August 1973 NEL printing may not exist An April 1974 NEL printing has been added Page count and cover artist information added to all later NEL printings — see the Compendium's entry on the The Weapon Shops of Isher & The Weapon Makers omnibus volume for more details The Weapon Shops of Isher & The Weapon Makers (omnibus) Detailed information is now given about a previously unknown printing of this book in 1979, which would make it the first edition of this omnibus. Details on the 1979 editions of the two Isher novels have been deduced from this omnibus volume (see the Compendium's entry on this book for more details). The Winged Man Page count now given, and cover artist confirmed, for the 1977 Sphere printing The World of Â The third printing of the Simon & Schuster edition was in 1948, not in 1949 The World of Null-A A 1980 Sphere printing has been added I'd like to extend my thanks yet again to Hervé for his continued contributions to the Compendium project.

> February 12th, 2006
> As part of general site maintenance, all summaries (except for The World of Null-A) are now available only as online HTML documents. Previously they were also available as downloadable PDFs.

> January 30th, 2006
> The coverscan improvements described below are now complete. With only two exceptions every coverscan has been replaced with one of higher image quality. The two exceptions are the February 1974 Manor edition of Masters of Time and the February 1970 Avon edition of The Violent Man. The inherent crappiness of these two covers — in terms of the "art" as well as the condition of the book — battled every effort to improve them. And, in the end, I realized it wasn't worth the trouble anyway.

> January 25th, 2006
> Firstly, I was able to install and use my old scanning software on my new iMac. (And it actually seems to run better in Classic in OS X than it did in OS 9, oddly enough.) So I finally got around to making some new book cover scans: The Blal — Zebra, August 1976 — art © by D.A. Daily (front & back) Science Fiction Monsters — Paperback Library, September 1967 — art © by Jerome Podwil The Universe Maker — Ace, March 1974 — art © by Bart Forbes (front & back) The Weapon Shops of Isher — Pocket, August 1977 — art © by Adams (first name unknown) (front & back) The Wizard of Linn — Ace, 1962 — art © by Ed Valigursky (front & back) Secondly, almost all of the book covers on my site have been replaced with images with cleaner, more vibrant color. All photographs have likewise been improved, as well as the scans for the illustrations to The Book of Ptath. All other illustrations, however, will remain as they are. Due to the age of the original sources, the yellow tint cannot be removed without messing up the contrast. Besides, I rather like the look of old pulp paper... (As of March 2007, further restorative improvments have been made to the illustratoins.) For those of you who may be wondering why I chose to do this, the answer is rather involved. A couple of weeks ago, when I swung by Kevin J. Anderson's Dune 7 blog page about Slan Hunter, I noticed that the three van Vogt book covers linked to along the left side looked eerily familiar. Sure enough, when I viewed the larger pictures, I recognized every nick and scratch on those covers as being from the books sitting on a shelf not two feet behind me — they were my own copies which I had scanned in long ago and posted on my website. I noticed, however, that in the images on Anderson's site the whites looked whiter, the blues looked bluer, and the overall image looked cleaner. He'd obviously run it through some program that made them look better. I must admit that the color and shading of my scans was never quite to my satisfaction, especially after I got my new iMac and the files that looked great on my old iBook suddenly looked like murky trash, and no amount of monitor-tinkering did the trick. Coincidentally, my brother came home last week after spending half a year teaching English in Shanghai. Those of you who actually read these update pages in full, and actually remember my ravings, will recall that he's something of a computer and digital photography expert. I happened to see him using an application called iPhoto on his laptop to clean up some pictures he took in China. I also have iPhoto on my iMac, but never had any reason to use it, so two and two came together in my mind to create four. I decided it would be worthwhile to experiment with iPhoto to see what good it could do on my coverscans. I discovered ways of improving the image quality considerably — usually it just took a single click on a fantastic magic button called "Enhance." This made the whites whiter, the blues bluer, and so forth and so on. In a few cases enhancing made the image too harsh, so I had to experiment with different brightness and contrast settings — two friendly little sliders that I just had to move around and see what happened, and stopped fiddling with when things looked nice. So I've been busy this weekend with chugging all the old scans through iPhoto and seeing them come out the other side all clean and pretty. Most coverscans now look even better than the actual covers! I struggled with this issue for some time — for years my aim was to create an exact duplicate of each cover. However, when playing around with iPhoto I realized that not only is improving on the original an acceptable idea, it makes the artwork stand out even better. And, after all, with book covers the art is the main attraction. ISBNs are all very well for dullards like myself, but after a while they just loose their luster. ;-) While I was at it, I also did all the photos on the site, and some of the illustrations. I also made a few minor alterations with individual scans, changes too tedious and dull to mention. Undoubtedly, at this point there are groans aplenty as those of you who had already viewed all the covers must face the prospect of viewing them all over again. Believe me, I know how you feel. I have a slow dial-up connection (downloads usually top at 6 KB per second on a really good day, uploads at 3 KB per second), and in addition to re-uploading everything I had to first manually tinker with each and every one of them. Consider yourselves lucky that you're not me: a crazed, obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist SF-art fanatic. It may sound like an exciting, glamorous life I lead, but I assure you it's not. You're only fooling yourselves. I think the Covers section is probably the part of my site I get the most satisfaction from, and the traffic statistics show that only the front page is more popular than the Covers page. So I know these efforts are well worth the time. I haven't yet finished improving the book cover scans yet — there are, after all, 178 of them to do — but they should all be done in the next couple of weeks if all goes well. I'll post notice here when this is complete. Just so you can see for yourselves that I haven't gone completely out of my mind, I've left a few of the old scans up so you can compare them with the new ones: Earth Factor X — DAW, October 1978: You can see that in this case iPhoto effectively scrubbed away the decades of dirt and grime and made the colors brighter. OLD VERSION NEW VERSION The Silkie — DAW, January 1982: The colors were dark and muted, now vibrant and more "alive." OLD VERSION NEW VERSION The Book of Ptath: Illustration #1: The Return of Ptath: Here, iPhoto turned the faint yellow tint bright white, making the black stand out better, and almost completely eliminated the bleed-through letters from the other side of the page. OLD VERSION NEW VERSION Thirdly, I've updated the Compendium to 2.1b — this includes a few minor corrections, mostly dealing with the 9 new covers, but also many editions that should have been indicated as having been examined first-hand by myself were not. I've rectified this. Fourthly, I've updated the Links page to include a few new websites (Terry Riley, Hymns & Carols of Christmas, Lingua Mongolia). Lastly, my days using Mozilla are at an end. I gave it a good try, but it just kept cluttering up my HTML with more and more extraneous crud every single time I so much as opened a page with it. It got to the point where most of the HTML read like this: < font size="3" > < font size="3" > < font size="3" > < /font > < font color = "#ff0000" > < /font > < font color = "#ff0000" > < a href="../../%7Eicshi2/Shops69-12Ace.jpg" > < /a > < font face="Times New Roman,Times" > < BR > < font color = "#ff0000" > < font face=Times New Roman,Times > < font face="Times New Roman,Times" > < BR > < font face="Times New Roman,Times" > < /font > < /font > < /font > < /font > < /font >< /font > < /font > < /font > < BR > < BR > And all that just to display this: I've finally had more than I can stand of seeing such an abominable clutter when I viewed a page in HTML to make one tiny alteration using my simple text editing program, so I've decided to ruthlessly un-Mozilla the Covers.html page and the main page. I intend to do the same with every other page that has been tainted by its foul touch as time permits.

> January 10th, 2006
> I've updated the News & Announcements page to include information about a sequel to Slan, entitled Slan Hunter, that's being written by Kevin J. Anderson.