With word that David E. Schultz and his literary partner S.T. Joshi had published the twelfth volume of Bierce’s Collected Essays and Journalism, I cornered Schultz to find out about the scholarship involved. Little doubt their approach to Bierce is similar to their work regarding other great authors in the sphere of weird fiction, predominately H.L. Lovecraft. Disclaimer: Joshi was the editor of my 2016 novel The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story and Schultz was the book designer.

Here, I posed the questions, Schultz the answers.

How did you and Joshi get together in the first place to begin your many comprehensive volumes about Bierce, starting, I suppose, with the bibliography?

Yes, it all began with the bibliography, though the roots of that were in Joshi’s book, The Weird Tale, which contained a chapter on Bierce (along with chapters on H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Lord Dunsany, whose work has been, or will be, published in definitive editions by Hippocampus Press. I distinctly remember Joshi once writing “I want to do Bierce—all of him.” Something to that effect. My thought was, “Leave me out!”

Research on Lovecraft, which we’d been doing at that time, was itself very difficult, and he was an early twentieth-century author. It was challenging to come by the key Lovecraft documents because of rarity or distance: Providence newspapers, Weird Tales magazine and others, amateur journals, Lovecraft’s own manuscripts. All that was very difficult to obtain because Lovecraft manuscripts were housed in a library very far from Milwaukee.

To work on Bierce would be a monumental challenge (I thought), because he was mostly a nineteenth-century writer, and his work was primarily in old, newspapers and his papers are scattered all about. Furthermore, Joshi is a free-lance writer. I was employed, raising a family, paying off a mortgage—I really didn’t have the time to devote to Bierce that Joshi did.

Note that now all the Lovecraft papers at the John Hay Library in Providence, R.I., are scanned and online. Old issues of Weird Tales are also available. Alas, the same cannot be said of Bierce.

Needless to say, my comment went unheeded. And so we began to comb through microfilms looking for Bierce’s work. It began very slowly, because we had to order microfilms interlibrary loan. Two trips to St. Cloud allowed us to spend days on the Examiner, thereby speeding up the work.

In order to identify Bierce’s work, we typed nearly everything we found. Doing so allowed us, for example, to identify first appearances of the verses in Black Beetles in Amber and Shapes of Clay, and of all the little paragraphs found in the three “Dod Grile” books. Doing searches for wording of the poems in those books in time helped us to identify where they had first been published. I remember looking at text in the Wasp and thinking “I recognize those lines”—verse in unsigned editorials—and by doing more text searching, we concluded that Bierce was the author of those and various other unsigned pieces. For example, by virtue of typing all the horrible “Little Johnny” tales, we could identify all the components of “Kings of Beast,” even though Bierce tidied them up a bit for his Collected Works.

I found The Devil’s Dictionary to be interesting and wanted to annotate that. Joshi had the idea of publishing a semi-autobiography, using all of Bierce’s great autobiographical pieces but expanded with snippets of stray personal comments in his newspaper columns and letters. And the future histories are amusing.

It was only natural to take our accumulated texts, since they were already typed and lying dormant for 25 years (I see electronic files dating to as far back as 1998 though surely our work began earlier than that) and make books out of them, much the same as Joshi’s ongoing publication of H. L. Mencken’s newspaper and magazine work.

Why Bierce?

I ask myself that question a lot. His writings are from the newspapers (though not was all commentary on the days’ events). The Rolling Stones sing “Who wants yesterday’s papers . . . Nobody in the world.” Meaning, the day after you read the paper, you toss it. Old news. But, aside from his “creative” writing—fiction, verse, satirical dictionary definitions—there are moments of fire. I think folks other than me will be able to extract insight with respect to certain topics.

How were you able to track down all of Bierce's published efforts, including, perhaps, his correspondence, and how did you know where everything was?

Joshi snagged all the Bierce correspondence himself. There were listings (before the Internet) of where manuscripts were held. He made note of the long list of repositories, contacted them all, and obtained copies of the letters. And he typed them all—and has annotated them! They were done long ago but still are not quite ready for publication, as certain elements need further annotation.

As for published material . . . Joshi had leads on certain items. And Bierce himself mentioned where he had been published. With newspapers, we just flipped through them, page by page, looking for material. Sometimes going through them several times. Much of Bierce’s work was unsigned, so judgment was applied to certain texts. The earliest story by him that we know of—or perhaps I should say are reasonably certain of—are his “Letters from a Hdkhoite.” I remember coming across these (four of them) in the News Letter. The unusual name made me think it might be by Bierce.

Upon reading them, we found certain turns of phrase that Bierce himself often repeated. Plus the theme of an entity from an unusual foreign land was used throughout his career. Of course, I did not tag Bierce as the author of unsigned pieces unless we were quite certain that they could be by him—usually depending upon three good clues within a piece. I can’t say this was foolproof, as we may have passed over some pieces by him.

How many of the places where the Bierce source material was located were you able to visit in person?

I visited none in person. My work has mostly been done in libraries in Milwaukee (having obtained microfilms by purchase or interlibrary loan) and in St. Cloud, which had an enormous run of the Examiner on microfilm. Obtaining printouts from microfilm, I could then type text at home. I purchased microfilms of the San Francisco News Letter, Wasp, and Argonaut. These I consulted at the library of Marquette University, making printouts of pages that were definitely by Bierce (his “Town Crier” and certain other known pieces) as well as those that seemed to be by him. The typing could be done at home, or on break or lunch at the office. The Examiner was obtained through interlibrary loan, but because the daily Examiner was enormous—getting only a couple of months on a single reel—it was taking the two of us forever to get microfilm, because the library would obtain only six reels at a time. Because many were coming from the U. of Minn. at St. Cloud, we made a trek there to burn through the films. Alas, when Joshi consulted Bierce’s scrapbooks at the U. of Va., he found hundreds of items we did not have. They also had no places of publication, no date, no page number. This necessitated a second trip to St. Cloud, where he found most of the clippings from the scrapbook. But Joshi did most of the legwork, and I did much of the grunt work.

Once you located the material how were you able to retain it in sufficient form to reproduce it?

I have cartons of microfilm printouts and xeroxes. Think about it: Joshi himself has a duplicate of it (and probably even more.) When we started to type text, I used Nota Bene and Joshi WordPerfect. Obviously a big disconnect there. I’d convert his WordPerfect files to Nota Bene, because Nota Bene had an add-on that allowed one to “index” thousands of files for searching. Nota Bene was the big workhorse on the project. When I told the developer how I was using the program, he said he knew of no one using it that way, even though he developed the program for use by researchers—oh, it happens also to be a word processing program.

I find at this late date that electronic files of various newspapers are now online—wish they had been in the 1990s. I’ve been able to extract text from Argonaut, Wasp, Overland Monthly, London Sketch-Book, Tom Hood’s various Year-Books, Figaro, Daily Alta California, and probably a few others. But the Examiner and various other papers are not available in pdf format, although the Examiner can be found online—as image files only. Still, better than nothing. A colleague unearthed various items online that we knew nothing about (although Bierce himself had hinted at them), and so the published volumes contain a few lagniappes beyond the bibliography.

With Joshi in one city (Seattle) and you in another (Milwaukee) how do you work together?

Email mostly. Probably a lot of snail mail in the early days. We rarely see each other in person these days, and even then the reason is probably more social than anything. When it came time to assemble certain books, Joshi would give me the “recipe” and I’d look up the needed files and assemble them into a book ms., now in Microsoft Word since we both use that these days. The Word files travel back and forth between us until we feel a book is done, and then it goes to the publisher.

At this time, since no sane publisher would issue fifty volumes of Bierce’s journalism, Joshi publishes them through his press. I assemble the texts and format them bookwise, we both examine them to make sure all elements are in place, spellcheck (curiously we each find different errors and miss others), and Joshi uploads the pdf for printing. I then save the file in html format, doing minor tweaks for the variant platform, and he uploads them as Kindle files. One a month.

What sort of incentives, financial or otherwise, prompted you to continue detailing Bierce's voluminous output with the collected essays?

Certainly not financial, although I’d say our Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary has been our most successful book. I mostly now do this as a favor to Joshi (since I’m custodian of the electronic files that we both prepared) though along the way I enjoyed making books of the material for specific purposes: collected fiction, unabridged Devil’s Dictionary, correspondence with George Sterling, the “future histories,” and, of course, the bibliography.

How much of an audience do you think you're having as you go about producing volume after volume of Bierce's collected essays?

I expect the audience to be very, very small. It would be an expensive proposition for someone to invest in 50 volumes of Bierce’s journalism. Mostly I regard his Collected Essays and Journalism as a library that researchers can use for projects, and not as volumes to curl up with before the fireplace to read cover to cover. Fifty volumes! This is much like the situation of the Lovecraft letters. Twenty-five volumes of (often repetitive) correspondence is only for die-hards, but I notice lately that more and more articles are published that derive strongly from our editions of the letters, which contain numerous letters (or parts of letters) most of which had not been previously published.

For example, a couple of astronomers have written a book about Lovecraft the amateur astronomer, using clues dropped here and there in his letters. I reckon that some researches may find the books useful as fodder for their own special projects. The late Lawrence I. Berkove published (long ago) a collection of Bierce’s writings on the Spanish-American War—having done all the fundamental research on his own. With a published book of material otherwise difficult to come by, certain researchers may be more inclined to explore research topics without the need for travel, squinting at microfilm, and so on.

What conclusions have you drawn about Bierce after all of this work?

Best taken in small doses.