Article
Well before the launch of Orbit, there was Pynchon Notes. This journal, which ran for thirty years from 1979 to 2009, was a remarkable resource for scholars around the globe working on Pynchon and on a broader range of American literature. If Orbit can even half match its longevity and reach, we will feel proud of our work.
That is why we are delighted today to bring Pynchon Notes to the digital world, hosted openly online by the Open Library of Humanities and digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS archive. We do so with the full blessing of the original editors of the journal who made the articles available to us for this purpose. The journal is available online at https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/.
We feel that the availability of this closed back-archive in a publicly available, free-to-read, digital form will greatly enhance scholarship on postmodern fiction around the world. Pynchon Notes will not accept new articles but its incredible legacy will live on.
A few small technical notes. It is possible that during the import of hundreds of articles we have overlooked some errors in the metadata, although we have undertaken to check these as thoroughly as possible. This is a peril of checking works imported from typewritten pages into the digital space on a small team. Furthermore, Pynchon Notes did not provide abstracts and so we have here taken the first paragraph of the article as the abstract. In some cases, this is less than ideal but better than nothing. If you find mistakes in the metadata, please contact Martin Eve at martin.eve@bbk.ac.uk.
Finally, we extend our thanks to many figures here, but in particular: John Krafft, Bernard Duyfhuizen, and Khachig Tölölyan for their long-standing work on Pynchon Notes and for their assistance in making the archive available. Without their invaluable work over many years, there would have been nothing to make available. We also thank Erik Ketzan for his invaluable assistance in double-checking the metadata and file contents after the import. We are extremely grateful to the staff at Ubiquity Press who helped us in the migration process and especially Jin Gao, Tom Mowlam and Andy Byers. Finally, we thank all who contributed to Pynchon Notes over the years for making it such a fantastic publication.
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
