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> Summary of Changes Made
> Dec 15 | Compendium 2.0
> Dec 10 | Apologies, new favorite cover commentary, and minor fixes
> Dec 9 | Added 20 illustrations (The Players of Â
> Dec 2 | Added three new links
> Nov 15 | Added one new coverscan (more updates to follow)
> Aug 17 | Updated news page: film adaptation of "A Can of Paint"
> Aug 9 | Various tinkerings, two new links
> July 2 | Added an excellent summary by Alexander Martin Pfleger for the short story "The Perfect Day"
> Feb 2 | Site moved to Earthlink, 99 new coverscans, new interview, etc., etc.

> December 15th, 2004
> Finally finished the new and improved Compendium file, which I've christened 2.0. I now include the full ISBN for each entry (where known) and indicate which printings I've actually seen in person to verify the information de ore equi (so to speak). I've also made numerous corrections and added more information, the most notable of which are: The 1970 NEL edition of Out of the Unknown probably has a cover by Bruce Pennington Empire of the Atom — Shasta cover price is $1.00, not $1.50, and cover artist is Malcolm Smith, not H.W. McCauley (thanks to Michael McKinney for these two items) The Pawns of Null-A — added a 1985 Sphere printing (ISBN 0-7221-8773-4) that evidently precedes 0-7221-9773-4 The Universe Maker and the Proxy Intelligence — at least one Sphere printing of ISBN 0-7221-8815-3 was done before February 1985, since I have such a copy and mention is made of World and Pawns being available from Sphere but not Null-A Three The Winged Man — Sphere 1977 — cover art may be by Peter Elson Eleven Tales From the SF Master — now known to have been the subtitle; full title was Science Fiction Monsters Plus — reliable information about this book is very sketchy at best In all likelihood, my review for Robi Michael's film A Can of Paint will not be ready until after the new year. My apologies to everyone who was looking forward to reading it!

> December 10th, 2004
> Due to a little mix-up on my part, I failed to credit Mark Applin for identifying the cover art for the 1947 Sphere edition of The Best of A.E. van Vogt to be the work of British artist Tony Roberts, and that the 1993 Caroll & Graf edition of The House That Stood Still may also have cover art by Roberts . I also needed to thank Michael McKinney for suggesting the artist who did the 1977 Ace edition of The War Against the Rull may be Kenneth Smith, and for notifying me that it was Malcolm Smith (not H.W. McCauley) who did the cover art for the Shasta/SFBC edition of Empire of the Atom. I originally meant to update the Covers page when I uploaded the new Compendium file. However, by impulsively doing the The Players of Null-A scans and redoing all the internal links yesterday, my usually streamlined system was circumvented, and I neglected to list credit for cover artist identification. So, my sincerest apologies to Mark and to Michael for this error. I also added one new favorite cover commentary, for the 1980 Pocket Books edition of The House That Stood Still. I've also re-evaluated an earlier estimate as to when the Pocket edition of The Weapon Shops of Isher with the Gerry Daly cover was printed. While recently looking at the cover again, I noticed there's a very clear copyright notice next to the signature saying "1979" — I could smack myself upside the head for being so unobservant. I've also done a bit more research into the matter, comparing information in the front and backs of other Pocket editions published around this time. So this was probably printed in late 1979 or early 1980, since artists often do the cover art several months, or even a year, before a book is released. As late as May 1979, Pocket was still selling the 1977 edition (which can be seen on Magnus' site here) with the ISBN 81354 and costing $1.50. The edition with the Gerry Daly cover has the ISBN 43129 and cost $2.25. Stephensen-Payne's bibliography makes mention of an edition published in July 1980, but it has the ISBN 83429 and cost $1.95 — I don't know what to make of this, as I can't imagine Pocket changing the ISBN and price twice in a single year.

> December 9th, 2004
> In typical Isaac fashion, instead of writing my review of A Can of Paint or doing some additional research for the updated Compendium file, I suddenly decided to scan and post all 20 of Hubert Rogers' illustrations for the magazine publication of The Players of Â. I've been meaning to do this for quite some time, and a recent re-reading of the novel spurned me to action. I've always liked Rogers' style far more than Orban's, so posting these drawings is a real treat for me. I've also taken this opportunity to tinker with the illustrations page so it will be easier to use — now each illustration is briefly described so you have a rough idea what the picture will contain. This also helps you pick up where you left off if you leave the site, and then come back a few days later to look at the rest of the drawings. I've also begun noting at the top of the page when it's been updated, how many drawings are new, and placing an asterisk next to each one. I created this system for the Covers index and found that it really made the page easier to use. Needless to say, Compendium 2.0 and the review will be delayed in their appearance, but at least you have something nice to look at while you wait! Also, at the beginning of the year Michael McKinney explained to me how to create internal links using relative paths rather than the full URLs. Well, I finally got up the mental stamina to tackle this, and after a few spectacular errors got the hang of it. I've combed through the existing pages and redone all the links — the pages load faster now, and if you like you can now download the entire site to your hard drive, keeping the structure exactly the same within folders, and you can view it all offline. At any rate, it's satisfying to have the HTML tidier, and it has certainly helped me test my site's internal links without having to bother connecting to the internet. So I would like to yet again express my gratitude to Michael McKinney for his continued supply of helpful suggestions.

> December 2nd, 2004
> Added three new sites to my Links page: (1) Bruce Pennington Art; (2) The Hymns and Carols of Christmas; (3) TV Tome. I finally received my copy of Robi Michael's A Can of Paint film, and I hope to write and post my review within the next couple of weeks (as soon as circumstances permit in this busy holiday season). A new version of the Compendium file is also due to make its appearance, hopefully by the end of the month.

> November 15th, 2004
> Added one new coverscan, the 1985 Sphere Books edition of The Pawns of Null-A. This is a Bruce Pennington cover, one of his best, and goes nicely with the art he did for Null-A Three also put out by Sphere. I also added a new link, to the official Philip K. Dick website. I hope to follow this up with some more substantial updates some time soon.

> August 17th, 2004
> I've updated the News page to include some exciting information about a newly finished short film by Robi Michael based on Van's story "A Can of Paint," including a link to the film's official website.

> August 9th, 2004
> Just a few minor fixes, and added two more new items on the Links page (Jack L. Chalker, and FantasticFiction).

> July 2nd, 2004
> For the first time since I launched the Summary section of the site in October 2001, I've received a synopsis written by a fellow van Vogt reader — Alexander Martin Pfleger, a resident of Germany, has sent in a summary of Van's short story "The Perfect Day". This story has only been published in German, and so has been inaccessible to those of us who can't read that language. I am therefore delighted and honored to present Pfleger's summary for this rare story here on my site, and hope that more of you out there emulate his fine example.

> February 2nd, 2004
> For various reasons I changed internet service providers from Ridgenet to Earthlink: 1. Ridgenet is a local company where I live, and their quality of service has been deteriorating for over a year and a half now. To read more about my grievances, told in excruciating detail and encased with grimly sarcastic humor, go to the Troubles With Ridgenet page. 2. I've been wanting to expand my site in many way, but was already paying Ridgenet an additional $5 a month for 5 extra MB of space (on top of my free 5 MB). This was immensely frustrating, and was forcing me to delete existing items to make room for others. And I certainly wasn't going to be responsible for giving Ridgenet any more money! One of the perks of Earthlink is that I get up to 80 MB of webspace for a lower price than what I was paying to get just 5 with Ridgenet. 3. Last summer I fell victim to identity theft — part of which entailed my email address becoming known to a horde of vicious e-marketing organizations, with the result that I was starting to get a dozen or so emails per day that were determined to criticize my God-given anatomy in a variety of humiliating ways, and get me to remortgage my toaster. For more details, including some tips on how to avoid falling victim to identity theft yourself, go to the Identity Theft page. Since I was going to have to move the whole site anyway, I've also taken this opportunity to create a fresh start by restructuring it, redesigning many pages, and expanding it. Perhaps the biggest addition is the posting of 99 new coverscans. As always, these are all editions from my own collection, shown at slightly than actual size. I'd like to offer my sincerest gratitude yet again to Magnus Axelsson — I'd sent many (if not all) of these scans to him for his van Vogt website over the last couple of years, but for various reasons they never appeared there. He not only offered no objection to me using them (even after I had gone to great lengths to distance myself from them), he also displayed great enthusiasm that more high-quality van Vogt covers would be appearing on the internet. All new covers are marked with an asterisk on the Covers mainpage. I've also redone a few scans. When I first got my scanner I was not as knowledgeable about such things as I am now (which still isn't saying much). For quite a while now I've been trying to get the colors more vivid by tinkering with the exposure — and just recently discovered a setting that controls color intensity... Yes, I know what you're thinking — the scanner did come with a manual, but it's practically useless. It explains all about how it works, but not how to work it. A subtle but vital distinction. Here is a list of the redone scans: Chang74-02Manor.jpg Mission80-11Pocket.jpg Ptath92-01C&G.jpg I redid some others, but they turned out lousy — there are erratic problems in the way my new version of Quicktime (6) interacts with my scanning software. I'd go into the painful details, but I'd just bore you silly. Suffice to say that this problem has — along with several other issues I've recently become aware of, thanks to my brother who works with university computer networks and digital photography — convinced me that the entire computer industry has gone stark raving mad. A few years ago it was on the edge, but now it's really crossed the line. If ever a technology needed institutionalized (in the psychiatric sense of the word), computing would be it. And yet a padded cell would be too lenient. It needs to be tightly bound up, strapped to a steel table, and put into a welded-shut vacuum-sealed subterranean chamber, guarded by pits of fire, poisonous snakes, and ancient Egyptian curses. In connection with adding new covers, I've marked a few more as my favorite and written commentaries for some of them. These are likewise marked with an asterisk on the Favorite Covers page. I'm also excited to present here on this new site a hitherto unpublished interview conducted with Van in 1980 by none other than Robert Weinberg. You can learn more about it, as well as actually reading it, by simply clicking here. The Compendium and Database files have been fiddled with, mainly just updating internal links to point to the new URLs. A few little changes have also been made, most notably with the Compendium: Best of A.E. van Vogt (Sphere) — Foss not cover artist (thanks to Kevin Birnie — I'm in the process of writing an essay on Chris Foss and what I call the "Foss Phenomenon," along with some very perceptive quotes by Birnie, which will be the first of a series of artist profiles I hope to do) Enchanted Village — cover artist is Joan Hanke Woods (not "N/A/"), same as interior artist Lost: Fifty Suns — cover artist should be "Jim Souder" not "Sounder" On a more humorous note, one of the most important parts of my restructuring was how to store and load images under separate Earthlink accounts. Speaking as a person who consults HTML manuals only when he needs special characters (such as Â), I remain largely ignorant of what the language is capable of. Website design is another weakness — I know fairly little and understand even less. Much of the "fancy" tricks done on this site (and mind you, a BLOCKQUOTE command to me is a fancy feature that is both complex in construction and mind-bendingly impressive in effect) are summoned with HTML much as, say, the Witch of Endor would summon the spirit of Samuel — I know what to do to get the desired results, but have no idea how the process actually works. Since my 80 MB maximum webspace with Earthlink is segregated into 10 MB chunks (based on 8 different-named email addresses), I ran into an interstructural conundrum. Since Google's cache of the Ridgenet site was based on a single, downward-branching URL, I was wracking my brains as to how I was going to get the text pages, book covers, magazine illustrations, and photos all cached if they were underneath separate URLs. I knew I wanted www.home.earthlink.net/~icshi/ to be the main URL, but was going to store the various images and their related text pages on /~icshi2/, /~icshi3/, and /~icshi4/, etc. Google's caching of pages is very important, since it is used as the basis of their keyword searches. I wanted it so that someone typing in a search like "A.E. van Vogt book covers," they would get a positive result for my site based on the Google cache of /~icshi/. Yet Google wouldn't cache the contents of /~icshi2/ or its siblings, since they were separate accounts. I could see no way of solving this problem, yet solving it was central to structuring the new site. I'm involved from time to time with various bulletin boards, and recently had to post some pictures. I had to link to the pictures' URLs, and they would load as part of the page as if the file were in the same directory. Being an ignorant neolithic savage in this regard, I assumed this was some voodoo magic unique to that bulletin board's fancy display system. However, after devoting hours of thought to the problem, a possible solution popped into my mind the next morning as I got up. It seemed a ludicrous idea, and was afraid it wouldn't work, but I figured it would do no harm to do a little test. So I created a new version of one of the illustration pages, and uploaded it to /~icshi/. I however put the embedded image in a directory in the /~icshi5/ account. The new page had the IMG SRC command pointing to that image with the full URL. I then opened my browser, and hesitantly loaded the page, afraid that my brilliant and daring scheme would be a dismal failure, and my restructuring ambitions would prove to be a mere pipe dream. Imagine my utter surprise and delight when the image loaded as part of the page! I was so proud of myself for having solved such a thorny, insurmountable problem with a plan so original and revolutionary that it staggers the very foundations of the mind! I promptly leapt up and explained my unparalleled genius to my father in glowing details. After a short pause he looked at me strangely, and quietly informed me that people do that sort of thing all the time. My pride and enthusiasm burst like a balloon carelessly tossed onto a sizzling stove. Seeing the effect of his words on me, he nevertheless admitted it was impressive that I thought it up and tried it myself without consulting any manuals. That made me feel a little better, especially coming as it did from a man who designs online databases for a living. Anyway, I went off and restructured my new site on this principle of storing most images on /~icshi2/ through /~icshi6/, with all the text pages on /~icshi/ which would be catalogued by Google. And since it's words that count in keyword searches, everything worked out nicely! About a month later, I got another kick in the pants from the ever-helpful Mr. McKinney, good friend and stout chastiser of overconfident webmasters, when he informed me that I was putting in full URLs for links in my pages when relative path commands would do just as well, even between accounts on the same server. He gave me numerous enlightening examples, which I may come to understand some day. Ironically, now that this new site is up and running, I'm just beginning to wrap my brain around this basic concept, leaving for the future yet another agonizing page-by-page sift of the site, meticulously working my fingers to the bone by altering all internal links to relative path commands... Oh, will the madness never cease! You see, I told you that the entire computer industry belongs in a heavily fortified dungeon.