I own a copy of both of these SEP articles. I had Ray sign them a while back, he signed "AKA Ray Bradbury". He stated at the time that he did not like the stories, they were not very good. Probably written to sell at the time and not his real work. He asked why I would want them, I said, becasue they are history and came from the mind of the master. He chuckled.

The date on the first is May 24, 1952. It cost $0.15 a copy then. I thought the stories were readable, just not as memorable as some of Ray's better known works. The latent talent was visible through the mist of expediency.

Don't know that I'd call any of the uncollected stories classic but I thought these were cute and they and some of the others contained material well worth having.

I also have copies of these stories. There are still quite a few stories that have never been collected in a Bradbury book. Having read Bradbury books multiple times, it is a special joy to read something that you have never read before. When I find these treasures, I save them for a special time. Perhaps I am having a bad week and I need it. Perhaps it is a rainy day and a new Bradbury story is the perfect thing!

I still have a few stories that I have not read, and although I agree that there was wisdom in not including some of these in his books, they are still wonderful in that they are still Bradbury.

It is also facinating to see how his writing progressed from 1939 - 2008. The only way to really see this is to read the stories (especially the early uncollected stories).

JDV515 - is it excessive to pay $30.00 for a story? We must all place a personal value on such things. What is this story worth to you? The collector in me wants to pay big bucks to retrieve a story I don't have. The fan in me is content to wait until I find it in a used book store, or meet someone who has a copy.

Or even find it in an uncommon book in the library... sometimes it isn't about owning the story, but reading the story.

I do struggle with this. How much of me wants to know the story and how much of me wants to "own" the story?

It's a very good question, and one that only the author can really answer. According to my records, there are about half a dozen stories by Ray that were published in reputable or high-paying magazines such as the SEP, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy and The Magazine of Fantasy and SF that haven't been collected yet.

Mind you, that's not a very high number at all. He probably will get around to them, at the rate new books are coming out!

I really think Bradbury's stories should be published in a "Complete Stories" series of volumes, such as the ones being done for Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Silverberg. There are many of us who won't rest until we have them all.

I, too, spent many afternoons in the 1970s and 1980s sniffing around dusty old used bookstores for any snippet of Bradbury I could find. Sometimes I bought books that contained stories I'd already read, because of all those variant titles. About the only story that I still have from those days that still hasn't turned up anywhere, is "The Undead Die", co-written with E. Everett Evans. It's in an old Peter Haining anthology.

I splashed out for the Gauntlet edition of Dark Carnival, but these days money is just too tight to buy all these new Gauntlet books, no matter how much they make me drool.

Which brings me to the subject of the next "proper" collection, "We'll Always have Paris". I see HarperCollins have the cover up now, but does anyone have any info on the contents?

douglasSP - I am looking forward to "We'll Always have Paris" as many of Bradbury's recent collections have included previously unpublished and/or un-collected shorts. I don't have a copy of "The Undead Die" - but I always keep my eyes open for it.

My other favorite writer is Theodore Sturgeon and I have enjoyed receiving the collections (almost) every November. I also have 4 volumes of P.K. Dick and I just now realized that Silverberg has been releasing his complete shorts.

The Bradbury shorts would be a monumental task indeed! When Bradbury's " A Memory of Murder" was published, a number of difficult to find stories were included. I would love to see a new collection of previously unpublshed and uncollected stories (like the awesome Futuria Fantasia book that was recently published).

But at the rate he is going, Bradbury will probably re-publish them soon. ha!

Just for fun, here's an old list of stories that are on my bookshelf that used to be pretty hard to find. The list is about 8 years old, and I would now have to strike most of them off it, but, as I say, just for fun, here they are anyway:

‘The Piper’ (1943) in The Future Makers, ed. Peter Haining, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1968.
‘The Watchers’(1945) in Fever Dream and Other Fantasies, by Bradbury with Robert Bloch, Sphere, London, 1970.
‘Lorelei of the Red Mist’(with Leigh Brackett, 1946), in The Great SF Stories 8, ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.
‘Bright Phoenix’ (written c. 1947) in Argosy, November 1963.
‘The Undead Die’(with E. Everett Evans, 1948), in The Third Book of Unknown Tales of Horror, ed. Peter Haining.
‘The Illustrated Man’ in The Esquire Treasury (1954), originally from the July 1950 issue.
‘A Little Journey’(1951) in Rod Serling’s Other Worlds, ed. Richard Matheson, New York, Bantam, 1978.
‘A Wild Night in Galway’ in The Wild Night Company, ed. Peter Haining, London, Victor Gollancz, 1970.

When I spoke to Ray yesterday he mentioned that We'll Always Have Paris was soon to be released. Heck, I have just started reading Summer Morning, Summer Night and have yet to get Match to Flame.

And now there is another one to be released in 2009. As I have said before, what modern author has such action as our friend, Ray Bradbury?