British SF publisher Gollancz is to set up a special ebooks website, called SF Gateway. We won’t have the nice heft of those old yellow library hardbacks. But hopefully we’ll see tempting prices from the new site. I can just about remember reading some Asimov and Clarke as a youth in those famous yellow hardcovers (which now apparently cost a fortune to collect) so I guess Gollancz will trade on a significant ‘nostalgia factor’ and goodwill. The authors being chosen are out-of-print (at least in their Gollancz editions), and will include, among others…

L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Keith Roberts, Clifford D. Simak

The aim is to have 5,000 ebook titles by 2014. I’m pretty sure that all those wonderful UK Panther paperbacks of Lovecraft from the 1970s were Gollancz reissues under their Panther paperback brand? There must be a lot of other weird stuff in those Gollancz files. For instance, I found a 1970 Gollancz book called The Man Who Called Himself Poe, an anthology of stories all featuring Poe as a character. It would be very nice if the books were broken down into per-story files, and then the fans could recombine and share them in new anthologies that would download as a collection. So if you wanted all the fantasy and ghost stories set in Roman Britain, you could have an on-the-fly ebook. But probably there’s some gruesome little copyright thing that would crawl from the abyss and prevent that from happening.

If you’re interested in the Gollancz Lovecraft, there’s H.P. Lovecraft in Britain : A Monograph by Stephen Jones. Jones had…

access to the original Victor Gollancz publishing files which consisted of around seventy-five letters and memos. From these and for the first time we can see the relationship between Arkham House that was run by August William Derleth and Victor Gollancz here in the UK – from the rather shaky start to the impressive collection – some of which are unique to Britain that we now have today. [and the book] details the history of [Lovecraft’s] printed volumes of work in the UK.

Gollancz are also going to have a new online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.