Thread of Gone Missing Book Introductions

Because although you might choose skip over them before your first reading, surely you might want to refer to them at a later point in time.

1. Things That Never Happen, by M. John Harrison. In its Night Shade Books incarnation, this had an extremely useful introduction by China Miéville, complete with a list of Mike's most common tropes, but the UK publisher Gollancz saw fit to remove it. Maybe the book even had a afterword interview with the author himself, can't remember.

2. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. Prior editions had an introduction by Angus Wilson, but this has gone missing from the Anchor Books edition, even though it is still listed on the table of contents.

Guess this really should be further specialized to be "introductions by other, relevant authors."

Bowen's own Preface to her collection of wartime stories known here as Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories- original title The Demon Lover and Other Stories is well worth seeking out, you can google it and find it more or less the first hit, albeit at one of those dodgier sites.

You can also read Eudora Welty review of the big collected stories here: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/08/books/seventy-nine-stories-to-read-again.html

the older edition of bruce duffy's 'the world as i found it' has something paratextual in it of value, i forget, an interview or an afterword or something - but the nyrb edition no longer does. iirc. maybe.

but the UK publisher Gollancz saw fit to remove it

When Gollancz republished many of the H. G. Wells books, they used the Everyman editions of a few years earlier, but stripped out the intros and all of the endnotes. Unfortunately they left in all of the asterisks sending people TO the now-missing endnotes.

This
volume boasts a curious publishing and pre-publishing record. It represents the major part of a larger chronicle-novel with divergent histories in the UK and the USA. In Britain, the expository narrative, on which I set great store, was discarded, and some of the stories were published separately as The Canopy of Time. In America, the book fared better, but nevertheless some of the stories and part of the narrative were discarded, to make a paperback volume called Galaxies Like Grains of Sand. This latter volume was eventually reprinted in the States in hardcover, with an Introduction by Norman Spinrad. This edition follows the American hardcover edition with two exceptions: Spinrad has kindly revised his Introduction for the English market, and one of the original stories, ‘Blighted Profile’, has been reinserted in its correct place in the narrative.

Needless to say, Spinrad intro is missing from the ebook.

"Blighted Profile" is there all right, but not "Poor Little Warrior!" which I guess was not part of the US edition and the general theme, apparently.