I read somewhere that best way to tell a narrative is to describe the events with 5Ws and 1H - What, Why, When, Who, Where and How. I'll try to do this with 3Ws.

First is Who am I?

My name is Sachin Walia ([email protected], if you need to reach me), and I am a Software Professional working in San Francisco Bay Area. I also happen to be a massive fan of Weird Fiction, Science Fiction, Crime, Pulp Magazines (Weird Tales, Unknown, Black Mask) from yesteryear. I am a book collector and love everything published by Centipede Press and many other small presses. Ash-Tree press happened to be my second favorite after Centipede. Too bad I discovered it only in the summer of 2022.

What is WeirdLit?

WeirdLit (not to be confused with sub-reddit /r/WeirdLit) is a website aimed at small press collectors like me who can find a place to learn about some arcane press or the ones that unfortunately went down due to unforeseen circumstances. It's also about celebrating the effort of the publishers who took such a daunting task of producing beautiful labors of love.

Website has no intention of becoming a database of every single small press because that's a full time job in itself. I'll start with the ones I love and care about most. The ones where credible information is hard to locate.

The second important goal is also to have some articles about the thing that I love most - books from these press. Will try to post review occasionally of the books from my collection and will keep it succinct.

This brings to the last question - Why?

ISFDB (The Internet Speculative Fiction Database) has done a good job at providing listings of Science Fiction and Fantasy books, yet there are always multiple wikis, blogs, websites out there talking about the similar things. Something tells me that while ISFDB is a good database, it suffers from one syndrome - generic, uncurated, and raw. I hope to address some of those challenges with WeirdLit for the small press I love, but we'll see how long this momentum and excitement sustains.

What did it take to build this website?

Although I said only 3Ws, but I figured this is an important question so I will address it.

Building Ash-Tree database and the first version of this website took 4 weeks. I wrote some code that helped building the web pages in a certain format. Enjoyed every bit of it!

The technology that went into building is extremely low tech. It's a static website running on CloudFlare CDN (The best Cloud service provider in my opinion). I will keep it that way for a long time as converting it into dynamic website will be a lot of work and probably will take over the primary intent - books. The only part where some technology is involved is the search feature which I figured should be significantly better than ISFDB. That is built using lunr.js which is like ElasticSearch but runs on your browser. I have plan to convert this entire website to Hugo templates in next couple of months as it'll be easier to change look and feel easily.

What it took to build is pure motivation. While building my Ash-Tree press collection I discovered there wasn't an easy discovery system that is also curated. This is also true for my other favorite small press like Fedogan & Bremer, Haffner Press or Arkham House. Keep an eye out as I'll add details for these presses.

This is the first version of WeirdLit and I am proud to say that this is near complete database of Ash-Tree press. The only thing I feel is missing is link to all the Kindle editions but that'll change in near future.