Andrew Porter writes to tell us of the death of sf editor and bibliographer Everett F. Bleiler on 13 June 2010. Born 30 April 1920, he won the 1978 World Fantasy Award (Special, Professional), the 1984 SFRA Pilgrim Award, the 1988 World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, the 1994 First Fandom Award, and the 2004 International Horror Guild Living Legend Award. He was an editor and senior executive at Dover Publications from 1955 to 1977, and edited a number of ghost story collections during his time there. He also edited single-author collections covering the works of H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, and others.
Alone, or with his frequent co-editor, T.E. Dikty (1920-91), Bleiler edited the annual Best Science Fiction Stories series (which ran from 1949 to 1954), the Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels series (1952-54), and several anthologies between the 1950s and the 1980s. His nonfiction work includes The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948), The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror (1985), Science Fiction: The Early Years (1991), and Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998). The latter two titles were both nominated for Hugo Awards.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base credits him with a great many essays and an almost uncountable number of reviews throughout the 1990s (see this page for the ISFDB’s full bibliography of Bleiler’s work).
The ISFDB reviews/plot summaries are primarily from the two books “Science-Fiction: The Early Years” and “Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years”. Dragoondelight recently completed documenting the second book while I did the first. Both books are invaluable reference aids covering works that are difficult to find or are prohibitively expensive. Thank you Mr. Bleiler.