H.E. Bates Companion

The H.E. Bates Companion provides information about every known published writing by the English author Herbert Ernest Bates (1905-1974). 

The Companion includes all items listed in Peter Eads's H.E. Bates: A Bibliographical Study (1990), additional items unknown to Eads (seven stories, and numerous non-fiction pieces), and a large number of book reviews intentionally excluded from his work. The total number of pieces will eventually be over 800. The Companion does not attempt to duplicate information in the Eads bibliography, such as bibliographical collation and description of particular editions.

The Companion records 23 novels (with an additional entry for Bates's unpublished and lost novel The Voyagers) and over 300 stories (of which about 30 may be considered novellas). It also records six major non-fiction works, three volumes of autobiography, and a very large number of minor non-fiction works (some published separately but most published in serials).

Acknowledgements:

Much help creating this Companion has been given by Dean Baldwin, Richard Holroyd, Josh Alper and Tara Gooden (University of California, Santa Cruz, Interlibrary Loan), Phil Stephensen-Payne (Fantastic Books), Martin Rowsell, Julia Robinson, Chris Eads, and Andrew Whitehead.

In recent years, I have been grateful for a wonderful collaboration on this project with members of the Bates family -- Brian Wicks, Victoria Wicks, and Tim Bates -- and the incredible assistance of Inam Ulhuq, friend of the family. As a team, we have discovered hundreds of new items by Bates, obtained copies and created readable scans, and found new first-publication dates for dozens of items. The Bates estate has generously allowed the loading of PDFs of virtually all of Bates's non-fiction items, a great boon for Bates scholars and fans.

I am also grateful for the long-term support of this project from the University Library, University of Santa Cruz. Initial conversion of the project from one computer system to another was done by Paul Ferlito. I am tremendously grateful to Bryn Kanar (900monkeys.net) for ongoing assistance with the current web presentation, data issues, and with the overall look of the site.

Paul Machlis
Felton, California