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Hello, Johndoeqwe, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! RockMagnetist (talk) 21:24, 10 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

Maugham's lost stories edit

Hello,

I am amazed that you have found three stories by Somerset Maugham that apparently have never been collected in book form. May I, out of curiosity, inquire about the source of this information? Is there any way to obtain access and read the pieces? It seems that my evaluation of the total number of Maugham's stories needs revision. Waldstein1981 (talk) 18:24, 20 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

I am often confused myself by the posting system here. Thanks a lot for your detailed answer. Right now I don't have the opportunity for the paid membership, but the sources seem quite reliable. I will edit the section about the total number as soon as possible. I have, meanwhile, checked again Raymond Toole Stott's bibliography and the Seventeen Lost Stories compiled by Craig Showalter, but in none of them is anything about these pieces mentioned. And, judging by the titles, the stories are unlikely to be revised versions of known ones. Thanks a lot for this very valuable contribution to the Maugham oeuvre. Much appreciated. Waldstein1981 (talk) 14:10, 21 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

William Edward Norris edit

Thanks for your impressive chronological list of Norris's short stories! Two questions - 1. what general sources did you use? I'd like to put a reference in to help readers know how the list was compiled. 2. where the chron. list gives a date by the short story without giving the periodical in which it was published, what does that date mean? Dsp13 (talk) 04:30, 7 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

The List was compiled entirely from online resources: Digitized Books and Magazines at Google Books, Internet Archive, Hathi Trust; Newspaper image pages at The British Newspaper Archive, Gale News Vault, GenealogyBank, NewspaperARCHIVE, Old Fulton NY Post Cards, Chronicling America, Trove Australia, Papers Past New Zealand, etc. Stories with just a date in parentheses means that UK publication if any is not known, and the date is the earliest newspaper publication discovered elsewhere in the world. All of the stories, except for about a dozen, can be found online at the above-mentioned sites, many in other versions not listed being in better quality notably at Papers Past New Zealand. Johndoeqwe (talk) 14:30, 7 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

*gulp* that's a lot! Digitization certainly makes it much easier than it ever used to be to put together a bibliography, but it's not easy to see how to summarize that list. (Without any references, I'm a bit worried some editor will complain that these bibliographies are original research. Which would be an enormous shame. I suppose a single British Newspaper Archive reference could be used for all the BNA newspapers, and just two or three generic sources like that would cover a lot of the list and provide a reassuring sprinkle of references for readers to try if they're interested but don't know the terrain. Not sure. I hope I haven't spoiled the feel of your Locke biblio by the way - I thought making it take up less space vertically would lessen the danger of people thinking it was unbalanced. Any idea who's going to be next on your hitlist...? Dsp13 (talk) 16:16, 8 January 2013 (UTC)Reply
I don't see that a source needs to be given where specific magazine and newspaper titles are given, although a reference to BNA would not be amiss. As to the dates with no sources, my originally prepared bibliography is much fuller, and was purposely reduced for posting. I am happy with the changes to Locke. I have several other Lists already prepared but not posted. I prepare them for my own benefit (for reading purposes) and wondered myself about the wisdom of posting them, which I was only doing to share the information. Perhaps you could let me know your thoughts on this. Are you actually interested in the Lists yourself or are you just editing?

Johndoeqwe (talk) 22:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! I'm just editing, really - to my shame, I've never read a short story by Norris or Locke - and I browsed by your page after I'd created a brief page for the Manchester Times. I do very much like falling into lists of books though (e.g. laboured on African Writers Series and Cedar Paul), and in a previous life remember teaching a course on Victorian periodicals. So I appreciate you putting these up very much. It would be interesting to have more on wikipedia about the syndicates who (as your lists so vividly show) globalized this fiction - Irving Bacheller etc. Best, Dsp13 (talk) 22:31, 8 January 2013 (UTC)Reply