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NESFA Press

Entry updated 25 September 2023. Tagged: Publisher.

NESFA Press is the publishing division of NESFA, the long-established New England Science Fiction Association, Inc. This major US Small Press publishes work in three main categories. First came reference works and Bibliographies, beginning with such indexes as The NESFA Index to the Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies, 1966 (1969) compiled by Anthony R Lewis (whom see, together with Erwin S Strauss) and its successors. Second, the Boskone Books assemble work by one or more current guests of honour of NESFA's regular Convention Boskone, held annually since 1965 in the Boston area and named Boskone rather than Boscon in memory of the arch-Villains of E E Smith's Lensman sequence: the first of these titles was Scribblings (coll 1972) by that year's author guest L Sprague de Camp, and further volumes have appeared in most subsequent years.

Third and perhaps most important, the NESFA's Choice classic reissues opened with the useful James H Schmitz selection The Best of James H. Schmitz (coll 1991) edited by Mark L Olson – a tribute to a popular though underrated author – and soon launched into a sequence of definitive collected editions, beginning with Cordwainer Smith's The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (coll 1993) edited by James A Mann. Further such compendious story collections are devoted to Anthony Boucher, John W Campbell's works as Don A Stuart, Charles L Harness, Zenna Henderson, C M Kornbluth, Judith Merril, Chad Oliver and William Tenn (the last with both fiction and nonfiction collections). Novels are not neglected: there are two omnibus volumes of Fredric Brown's sf, one of Judith Merril's and three of Hal Clement's, the last under the overall title The Essential Hal Clement. Other authors with novels reissued by NESFA Press include Lois McMaster Bujold Still longer sequences assemble the stories of Poul Anderson as The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson and of Roger Zelazny as The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. John Brunner contributed collections of verse and song lyrics. For detailed listings of all these, see the relevant author entries.

Publications not fitting into any of the above sequences include such compilations of Filk songs as The NESFA Hymnal (anth 1979) edited by A Joseph Ross, and the educational Role Playing Game If I Ran the Zoo Con (1986; rev 1987; rev 2015) compiled by Leslie Turek et al, which draws on Convention experience (including actual past incidents in light disguise) to dramatize the potential difficulties and disasters of bidding for and running a Worldcon.

At the 2008 Worldcon, NESFA Press was honoured with a Special Committee Award – presented at the Hugo ceremony and listed under that headword in this encyclopedia, though not actually a Hugo – for its publishing activities. These depend on NESFA members' enthusiasm, which can ebb and flow; there was apparently no Boskone Book in 2015 or 2016. Ebook reissues of many NESFA backlist items are either planned or already available. [DRL]

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