"The wedding took place five days after I returned from my two-week trip to Ireland, where I was lodged at Dunsany Castle in County Meath and spent the entire time sorting through thousands of pages of manuscripts by Lord Dunsany. By some miracle—and with the invaluable assistance of Martin Andersson, who in many ways knows Dunsany’s work better than I do—we were able to catalogue all the loose manuscripts (novels, short fiction, essays/reviews, poetry, plays), although a few of the items were unknown or unclassifiable. Dunsany also wrote any number of works directly into notebooks or scrapbooks, and we catalogued a good many of these. (There were also several scrapbooks of clippings relating to Dunsany’s plays, but we did not have a chance to examine these.)
The end result is that we came upon hundreds of uncollected or unpublished works of whose existence neither we nor anyone else were aware. Now that this material is catalogued, it can serve as a quarry for many future volumes. Martin will work on what will no doubt be a delightful and potentially popular collection of Dunsany’s writings (stories, essays, poems) about dogs. These are some of his most charming works, and I think a volume of them will prove very successful. I myself came upon 8 or 10 unknown plays (some, admittedly, only 2 or 3 pages in length), and they will be added to my ongoing edition of Dunsany’s collected plays. But we are also determined to get out some e-books of Dunsany’s most important novels—The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926), The Blessing of Pan (1927), and The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933)—to attract a new generation of readers who like reading on Kindles and tablets. So much work is to come!
I cannot leave this issue without expressing my inordinate thanks for the courtesy and hospitality of Maria Alice, Lady Dunsany, and her son, Randal Plunkett, the current Lord Dunsany, who hosted us during our entire trip and provided us free room and board. I trust we worked hard enough to justify our keep, but their kindness is nonetheless much appreciated."