I knew that would get your attention. If I’d written “RTL Bibliography Updated,” most of you would have ignored this post, right?
That sexy title is only one of the many titles in our Bibliography of Lesbian and Lesbian-Friendly Anthologies of Short Fiction on the RTL site. After the recent update, the list has grown to about 175 entries. http://www.readtheselips.com/RTL2bib1.html
Not all of them are erotica titles, of course. In fact, the scope of the “Bib” is very broad. Our ambition is to record as many anthologies of short stories and poems by and about lesbians and queer-identified women as we can find, both in print and out of print, including those in languages other than English.
Why are we doing this? It just seemed appropriate, since Read These Lips itself is an ongoing lesbian anthologies project with an international bent. Not to mention that some of us on the RTL team are Virgos and therefore obsessively driven to make lists and to organize chaos.
By definition, an anthology is a collection by multiple authors—of lesbian stories, in this case. We couldn’t decide on the cut-off, though. Would a collection by five authors be included in our Bibliography? Sure, why not? Then what about a book by only three? Well, okay, I guess. And so on. We finally decided to include any book of lesbian stories by more than one author. We had to draw the line somewhere, so we don’t include single-author collections.
Since the Bibliography’s purpose is to gather together lesbian stories and poems, the “Lesbian-Friendly” and “Poetry” sections do have some anthologies in which other kinds of stories and poems are included. Leaving these collections out would mean missing many fine lesbian works.
Some of you will probably have noticed that the Bib is not arranged in traditional bibliography format; that is, not by name but by title. The martinet in charge of the duct tape convinced me that browsing by titles would be more fun. After initially balking at this blasphemy, I had to agree. It would be kind of boring to come upon editor after editor’s name with a list of all their titles underneath. This way they’re mixed in with the rest, to be found serendipitously. If you do want to find quickly all the books in the Bib from your favourite editor, you can still do that by simply using the find-on-page search. Eventually, if the Bib becomes too long and unwieldy for browsing, we may reorganize it.
Just an explanation about the link after each entry. When a book is in print, there’s a link to the publisher for more information. When the book is out of print, there’s a link to the WorldCat union catalogue if it includes that title; this catalogue will tell you which of thousands of libraries around the world have the book. There may also be online bookstores, both new and antiquarian, where you can buy it, but we don’t link those.
I hope you enjoy browsing through our Bibliography. Comments and title suggestions are always welcome.
Thanks to our webmaster, Anni, for making the Bib look so good.
Renée (Bibliographer & Copy Editor)
bibliographer@readtheselips.com
ReadTheseLips