He died at forty, in a Baltimore hospital, in another man's clothes. The first thing his literary executor did was print a memoir calling him a friendless drunk. The work outlasted that, and it has outlasted every writer who was respectable in 1849.
This is sixty two pieces in one volume, arranged in four parts, every one of them set whole.
Part one is the horror entire. A man walls his friend up alive over an insult he never names. A heart goes on beating under the floorboards. A house splits down its front and goes down into the tarn. A prince bolts a thousand courtiers behind iron gates and holds a masque while the country dies outside, and the thing outside walks in anyway. A blade swings lower on every pass and the walls of the cell begin to move.
Part two is the other thing Poe invented. A locked room in the Rue Morgue. A girl pulled out of the river and a stack of newspaper columns read the way a man reads a chessboard. A cipher on a scrap of parchment that takes thirty pages to break and earns every one of them. Detective fiction begins here, in 1841, with a bored Frenchman in a shuttered house who takes crimes apart because nothing else holds his attention.
Part three adds six more, among them Hop-Frog and his torches, Ligeia coming back, and Metzengerstein and the horse that is not a horse.
Part four is the verse. The Raven entire. The Bells, four times over, once for each metal. Annabel Lee, Ulalume, Lenore, The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, Dream-Land, Israfel, Eldorado, Alone.
What is left out is left out on purpose: the sea voyage novel, the lectures, the juvenilia, and the funeral notices other men wrote about him. What is kept is the work he is read for.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 516 pages, printed on 60# cream stock. Thirty three tales and twenty nine poems, unabridged, with Poe's own notes to The Mystery of Marie Roget set where he put them and the Gold-Bug cipher reproduced as a table so the puzzle can actually be followed.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
