A Little Background on the Stafford Library

When I first made the publishing deal with Issaries, Inc. back in 2005 I quickly discovered I had a lot of housekeeping to do. In particular, the electronic files available for all of the past and current Issaries products were in disarray. Regardless of how they got that way, getting even a good clean sellable PDF of an older product was often a minor heroquest. Some books only existed in Word Perfect, others in MS Word, and others in Quark Express. Sifting and sorting through various floppy disks and cd’s to find the latest and best version of something took a fair bit of time. The “unfinished works” series of books Greg had written throughout the 90’s posed a number challenges. There were no “printer ready” electronic files. I got mailed to me a series of manila folders that had a fairly clean set of printed pages that I could get photocopied and bound. Book by book I started working with a few volunteers recreating what we had into a single MS Word document for each volume. Sometimes that meant piecing together a series of electronic chapters (and trying to verify they matched the latest photocopy masters) and often it meant scanning in pages, OCR’ing them, scanning in the “art” or graphics, and then cleaning up the combined file. This added a whole new dimension to these “works in progress”. After many of the volumes were restored, the remaining work got set aside as new projects consumed most or all of our time. This last week I went back and finished a few more of them, and hope to have more done shortly. Revealed Mythologies just needs its index created and I need to also make sure all the pictures have been restored. Missing Lands is more problematic. The files are still in a crude format, need to be checked for completeness, and the graphics are an unknown. Considering the info was largely superseded  by the Guide to Glorantha, this may or may not happen. That said, I am a completist collector, and having a gap in the product line that can be filled is hard to ignore…

Are these new editions? Unfortunately, they are not. Greg may have added a word or two here or there, but that would be about it. The Glorious Reascent of Yelm did get a number of Greg’s handwritten corrections incorporated into it, but none of the others have had a similar treatment. Most of the volumes have a better index now, and the covers are new, of course, but these are best described as the latest printing. I have been asked how many different editions/versions/printings exist for these, but the answer is a rather disappointing “we don’t know”, and we probably never will. They got printed in very small batches over a very long period of time. They were printed by different photocopy shops using different paper, binding, card stock, etc.