Some 'New Anthologists' that I forgot

There's someone I forgot in the list of the 'New Anthologists', and these might be the ur-example. In 2009 husband-and-wife team Leonard Richardson and Sumana Harihareswara published the creative commons anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments (but they didn't publish me, instead giving me one of my earliest experiences of rejection. Well, of literary rejection anyways.) The thing that makes them one of the 'New Anthologists' is that they published an appendix of information specifically intended to help others produce their own anthologies. And yes, there's graphs. If the new anthologising is about anything, it's about free sharing of information and leading by example.

As Leonard himself puts it:

This appendix shows how we did it. It was not difficult but it did take a lot of time spread over four months. I write this appendix in the spirit of the old Whole Earth Catalog, in the hopes of inspiring other people to put in some time and money and produce their own anthologies of the fiction that tickles their fancy. We also hope that we have interesting data to present about the state of the market.

In the appendix Leonard goes into extreme detail about how they did each step of the process, including estimations of time spent, money spent, and descriptions of technologies used, turning 'Thoughtcrime Experiments' into a genuine 'Anthology Howto'.

They didn't, as I recall it, use the net as a means for 'encouraging and shaping' what was being written-for/sent-to the anthology, as "Historical/Future Lovecraft" and "Rocket Science" have done, but they are doing the 'new anthologising' as regards blazing a data-trail for other anthologists to follow.

It's going to be interesting to see if this new approach is adopted by more editors. I'm actually surprised that it hasn't become de riguer already, but it does lay quite a bit of extra work on the editors, and I suppose that's why it hasn't. To me this seems to be the start of a new wave, and soon all anthologies will be made this way. But only time will tell.