Monday, May 10, 2021

Last Call for the Cosmic Courtship!

Find it Here!

After an extremely successful campaign, we are now in the final stretch for Cirsova's Cosmic Courtship crowdfunding kickstarter. It's been quite the run, and now is the last chance to give it a boost!

The kickstarter has smashed every stretch goal, finally reaching the recent $15,000 one to make all the original images available. There is still time to reach the final mystery goal at $20,000, so jump in while you still have the chance!

In case you are in the dark as to what this is all about, the description is below:


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.

Physical Reproductions of the Work

The initial goal for this project is to bring The Cosmic Courtship back into print. People who want to read this work will be able to read this novel without having to invest hundreds of dollars into 100+ year old pulp magazines as they infrequently appear on the open collector market.

All backers will be credited in an appendix for helping bring this to fruition.

We are offering both paperback and hardback formats, as well as a novelty magazine format [similar to Cirsova Magazine] and a no-frills pocket paperback edition.

Want to spread the love? Be a super backer and donate a classroom set to your favorite teacher or librarian! Help get this work into people's hands!


As for the stretch goals:


$3,000 - Bonus Materials

Not only will we be including the original text of Julian Hawthorne's The Cosmic Courtship, we will including some additional biographical materials and other works by Julian Hawthorne, including a facsimile version of "Scenes of Hawthorne's Romances," an essay on his father's writings, featuring the text as it was originally presented with numerous illustrated plates.

$8,000 - Digital Copies + Donation of a Public Domain Copy

As mentioned, there is a lot of labor, risk, and costs involved in salvaging these texts--we want to ensure that the team working on this project are compensated: if it is worth everyone's while, this will be the first of many.

The ultimate goal of a project like this is to make these available to the world because they are part of our literary heritage and everyone should be able to discover and analyze these works to better understand the patchwork history of this fascinating era of fiction.

If we raise $8,000, not only will we provide all backers with digital copies of the volume we are creating, we will create and donate a digital text version of the original story to Project Gutenberg.

These will be made available after backers have been sent their physical copies.

Please consider donating to sponsor this project, or order multiple copies, so we can reach this goal!

$10,000 - Ongoing Imprint

Michael Tierney has an impressive pulp library, filled with innumerable stories that are public domain but have never been in print since the early 20th Century. If we raise $10,000, that will show us that there is sufficient interest and support to turn this into an ongoing project where we work with pulp archivists to "rescue" these nearly lost works and make them available both in print and for the general public domain so that they can be preserved and enjoyed by future generations!

$15,000 - Original Images Available

Michael has agreed to release the images we used of the four issues of All-Story to compile this edition. Michael will host these these images, nearly 100 pages of pulp, on his website.

$20,000 - ?????

What will we do for $20,000? I don't know yet, but we'll have to think of something fast, since it looks like it's in the realm of possibility!


As mentioned, it has already achieved every stretch goal but the last one. What could it be? Make it a reality today!

For more info, you can see the campaign page here.


For more Cirsova goodies, the summer issue is now up for preorder! Be sure to put in your preorder for the quality oddness sure to come your way!

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