Saturday, March 13, 2021

Signal Boost ~ The Cosmic Courtship Crowdfund!

Find it Here!


Most of the projects I try to include here are new ones created by NewPub authors. We are, after all, creating a new landscape for entertainment. However, today I'm presenting my readers with something a bit different: a project attempting to archive a nearly forgotten work. That would be the space romance tale, The Cosmic Courtship by Julian Hawthorne, the son of literary great Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Cirsova Publishing, as well as Michael Tierney and Robert Allen Lupton, have got together to preserve this old story by creating a kickstarter meant to offer readers the material in every available publishing format, as well as bonus content! This is a project unlike any other. The crowdfunding campaign can be found here.

The description:

A Lost Pulp Adventure Restored!

While most are at least somewhat familiar with Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the great American authors, less well known is that his son, Julian Hawthorne, was an incredibly prolific writer in his own right. Julian wrote on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from literary analysis of his father's works to poetry to period romances and adventures. Late in his career, Julian even dabbled in the emerging genre of Science Fiction [Hugo Gernsback had only recently coined the awkward term "Scientifiction" when this story was first published.]

The Cosmic Courtship was serialized in Frank A. Munsey's All-Story Weekly across four issues, beginning with the November 24, 1917 issue and running through the December 15, 1917 issue. While this story has been in the public domain for some time, it has never been collected or published elsewhere until now.

Cirsova Publishing has partnered with Michael Tierney and Robert Allen Lupton to preserve this story for posterity and ensure that it is not lost to future generations.


Goals of this Project

The foremost goal of this project is to get an exciting, essentially lost, classic pulp story back into print and into the hands of scifi fans, pulp aficionados, and readers in general!

What do we mean by "essentially lost"? While The Cosmic Courtship is a work in the Public Domain and part of the world's common literary heritage, there's virtually no way for anyone to read it! It has only ever been printed in now very expensive and hard to find pulp magazines. Even if cost were not an object, availability often is.

This is the case for many novels and novellas from the early pulp era. Julian Hawthorne's The Cosmic Courtship is only one example.

The main issues with a project like this are the investment of time and the risk to (often nigh-irreplaceable) physical materials required to reproduce the texts.

It is important that the team be compensated for their time and work that they put into making these texts available.


There are multiple different formats being offered from a "magazine" edition, to hardcover, trade paperback, and the ever-important pocket paperback. There are even bulk order classroom sets for those who wish to pass lost classics down to the younger generation. I'm fairly certain my readers already know which one I have chosen to back.

Once again, you can find the project here.





For something new, how about HP Lovecraft in a Catholic girl's school?

1 comment:

  1. I was wondering about that cover art in my feed. Who is making Indy book designs like that and-? So cool

    Not a Hawthorne, Sr. admirer - at all. But junior's epic looks intriguing!

    ReplyDelete