Want to read something really obscure?

I began research for a Harry Harrison bibliography back in the mid-nineteen eighties, and I’ve been collecting information about Harry’s writings ever since. But given that his writing career now spans almost sixt years, I long ago gave up any ambition to compile a complete HH bibliography.  Every year I discover things I didn’t know Harry had written. And in various interviews he has given over the years there are references to items I haven’t been able to track down — information on the items he wrote for True Confessions magazine in the 1950s, for example, which were published under a pseudonym; and an article on how to write for comic books, written in the late 1940s or early 1950s published in Writer’s Digest or some such magazine.

At the moment I’m in the process of compiling a new edition of the HH bibliography, trying to fill in some of the gaps and give details of items I was only able to mention in broad terms in the first edition. I now have an almost complete list of Harry Harrison’s comic book artwork and writing credits, for example. And I’m currently researching the articles he wrote – often in collaboration with Hubert Pritchard – for men’s adventure magazines.

I’ve also tracked down a few of the more obscure pieces which I knew existed – because Harry’s manuscripts for them were housed in a university library in the USA – but had never seen. They range from the obscure to the bizarre – many written as ‘fillers’ for comic books, or contributed to convention books where HH was a guest of honour.

Having found all this stuff – and tracked down copies of the actual texts so I can list them properly – what should I do with it? I talked to Harry about what I had found. “That’s quite a list of odds and sods you have put together! Someday you must tell me how you do it…”  In the afterword to the bibliography HH said that my finding this stuff had a ‘whiff of black magic’ about it – but it’s really just a combination of research, luck and an obsessive personality.

I’m not sure how many people out there are interested in these obscure bits and pieces of Harry Harrison’s, but having found them, I think I ought to give other people a chance to have a look at them. So I’m going to post them here. I asked Harry if he wanted to see them first, to give him chance to veto the appearance of any item he didn’t want to see here, but he said “By all means slip them in. No need to query me about them first – I would like to be surprised like the general reader!”

So here we go – I’ll post the first one today, and one or two each week from now on as I OCR them. Let me know if you enjoy reading them and want to see more. And let me know if you come across any other obscure items written by HH.