However, I do. And I love him. Or did, until this past summer when he died without me or anybody else noticing, at the grand old age of 90. Good going, Everett.
I think that Bleier was an American, but I don't really care, and he might as well have been British: right now on the shelves in my bedroom I happen to have three books edited by him--Three Gothic Novels, Three Victorian Detective Novels, and The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories by Robert W. Chambers, selected by Bleier. All of these volumes have authoritative introductions setting out the context and significance of the works they precede.
In addition to his editorial work, Bleier wrote something called Firegang: A Mythic Fantasy that I suspect was best left unpublished (it only came out in 2006 from a tiny SF press) but who knows? Maybe it's great. Doesn't matter, because even if proof came out tomorrow that he was secretly a Nazi war criminal, having commanded an Einsaztgrüpen in the General Government during the winter of 1941, killing Jewish and dark-haired Poles (including women and, naturally, children) just to keep warm by burning their bodies arranged into huge and architecturally magnificent bonfires, I honestly wouldn't be able to help but still be glad that he'd lived--and all because of stuff he didn't even write. Allow me to explain.
Here's how it works: lots of people write books. Some people read some of these books, sometimes a lot of people read a book soon after it comes out, making it "popular". But then as time goes on, fewer and fewer people read those books, distracted as they are by something sparkling/something new. Some people do keep reading them, because they happen to find them in a used bookstore, because somebody recommends them, because of this, because of that--but basically, less and less, fewer and fewer. Some books come back with a vengeance under the steam of what I believe are called "the arbiters of public taste" or "gatekeepers of the canon" or "Harold Bloom". But they don't read everything, and funnily enough sometimes the people who read the most have the least catholic (small "c"!) tastes.
But none of this to say that some of the books that got read when they first came out only some time thereafter to be all but forgotten, or even books that hardly got or didn't get read at all when first published (Moby Dick) aren't any good. Sometimes, depending on where you're standing in time and where you're looking back to, quite the opposite is true.
So sometimes there are books, books which are very good or at least very notable, either influential or heralding something new or as artifacts of their time or just (the best) because of their weird, uncategorizable nature, that get lost between the cracks in the floorboards of the library of the mainstream's literary consciousness, except that such a metaphor is both grotesque and unlikely, and so someone has to go and rescue them and say, "Look! Look at this! Can't you see?!"
Only, nobody has to do that. And if someone didn't, all we'd have today are a few printed copies left over that were never used to wipe some child's ass and Project Gutenberg files that no one ever reads, not only but partly because they are unreadable. The someone who did--well, one of the someones--was E. F. Bleier. If I haven't already said it, thank you.
Things I have to thank Bleier for: I read Byron's "Fragment of a Novel" (probably the first vampire fiction ever written) in one of his books, included to give some context to the painful but interesting Vampyre of Polidori; in the same volume, Vathek--I might never have read Vathek (!) if it weren't for him, and that is was crazy, wonderful book, a book one could say, if one was tempted to say things like this, isolated like an island (like the Isle of Redonda, perhaps?) from the rest of English literature; the first police detective protagonist (and first female detective, in the same person) in The Unknown Weapon by Andrew Forrester, Jr. ("Little is known of the author, beyond the titles of his three obscure books of crime and detection and the fact that he read Poe."); Wilkie Collins' My Lady's Money, not published anywhere else that I know of (a post or posts on my exhilarating, torrid re-reading of Woman in White coming soon); and so, so much more: Max Carrados, for example, and I also first read Algernon Blackwood's best stuff in a selection he edited, etc.
Why did Bleier never edit a book of M. R. James' ghost stories (some of my favorite--or, I'll just come out and say it: my favorite bedtime stories ever)? I'm just curious. Maybe he didn't like them, or he didn't like James personally, if they ever met, or maybe James' stuff wasn't going cheap enough or in the public domain so that Dover (who Bleier did his best work for, or at the work that I and most people who've heard of him known him from) couldn't get their hands on it. Regardless, I'd like to read something that Bleier had to say about James and that ghost story tradition--if any knows of anything, please let me know.
Well, that's enough and certainly not enough on this guy, who wrote so much about what other people wrote. I wonder how he actually managed to earn a living, but then again I suspect that mysterious process will forever remain obscure to me, particularly in regard to my own life.
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