I saw a sign offering a free lunch so I wrote TANSTAAFL on it.

Hello All,
I look at the date for the last post and realize that it's been far too long since I've written on here and I do apologize.
As I believe I've mentioned--if only to the current subscribers--a hurricane hit Houston and we lost power, structure, and sanity for about two weeks or so. Most of my time since then has been taken up with catching up the lag both here at the office and elsewhere--a delay exacerbated by illness on the part of Nancy Hanger of Windhaven. We're about one week past where I wanted to have the second set ready to go, but the only ones left for me to work through are the Future History volumes, How to be a Politician, and Time for the Stars. I plan on getting through most of the Future History this weekend, How to be a Politician Monday/Tuesday and Time for the Stars as soon as I read it.
On a tangential note: It's been interesting reading through all of the juveniles--as much as I pray it be a long while before I have do so again--after a while they start to run together into a haze of PDF pages. When I first read Farmer in the Sky, for example, I didn't pick up on the English-Irish tension between the scouts when trying to name their troop. Then there are the recurring themes I didn't quite pick up on until I had to read all of them back to back--f'r example, that every boy in these stories was completely oblivious to the existence of the opposite gender or the use of the phrase "So? Skip it" and so on and so forth.
Bad news: After ten odd months, neither Scribners nor I have been able to track down the copyright holders for the illustrations in the juvenile volumes and, due to US copyright law with regard to orphaned works, we simply can't legally print them. This has been the first time I've ever seen the illustrations and I'm rather upset that we won't be able to include them.
Bill Patterson has been doing good work and has finished assembling the non-fiction and short story volumes and the volume of Heinlein-Campbell correspondence. He's currently working on the last two volumes of correspondence at which point we'll just need to keep trucking through the remaining twenty-four volumes with resolute good cheer.
As soon as I finish with the books from set 2, I'm going to go ahead and have the posters with the art from the original edition printed up and I've got a few ideas for some neat extras I'd like to try sending out, we'll see how that fares.
We've established archives access for those folk who ordered the old exclusive edition and we'll aim to extend that to all subscribers starting around the new calendar year.

--SJ