Karl Edward Wagner (and his "39 List")

There are pros and cons to the 2010s. On the one hand all the stuff on KEW's 39 list can be accessed and analysed now without luck (or serendipity) and vast expense. On the other all the paperback racks and a vast number of bookshops are vanishing. So it's kind of a trade-off in one sense: stumble (incredibly!) across a battered copy of RR Ryan's Freak Museum for a few bucks in a store during the 1980s that didn't know of its rarity or alternatively pick it up in the 2010s via an online internet resource that advises you it's recently been cheaply reprinted. Thing is, IMO, it wasn't really worth having in the first place. Its cache was solely its earlier unavailability.

I think any future motherlode of undiscovered classic weird fiction (I mean undiscovered in the Anglophone countries) from the past is going to lie in untranslated stuff. The discovery of, say, other stellar imaginative authors like Stefan Grabinski or Dino Buzzati in Europe (or perhaps the likes of a Leopoldo Lugones or a Horacio Quiroga in South America) is far more likely than finding another Lovecraft buried in the pulps. So too, here in England, as far as inglorious Miltons of the past go, we're almost certainly all played out.

Mark S.