On February 28, 2008, the creator of this website, Professor Frederick S. Frank, passed away unexpectedly. Professor Frank was, as always, hard at work on various Gothic projects, including a substantial revision of The Sickly Taper. While his energy and enthusiasm for Gothic studies will be difficult to match, several of his friends, colleagues, and collaborators have committed to preserving and maintaining The Sickly Taper's presence on the web. It has proven to be a valuable resource to many scholars of the Gothic, and was an important means for Professor Frank to do one of the things he most loved to do: share his passion for and delight in the Gothic. This site will continue as both a research resource and as testimony to Professor Frank's passion, and while this site will always, as he intended, remain dedicated to Gothic bibliography, it will now also be dedicated to the memory of Professor Frank by those who found in him a generous scholar, a mentor, a friend, and an inspiration. He will be sorely and sadly missed.
This site was last updated by Prof. Frank on Feb. 20, 2008. Additional updates and revisions to this site will be forthcoming, although the details of this site's future support are still being worked out.
— Jack G. Voller
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
A Tribute to Frederick S. Frank
Fred Frank was many things as a human being and a scholar and it is sobering to have to write these words knowing that he will never edit them for me. To me Fred was a fellow gothic junky, a bibliophile addict, a straight-shooter, a dear friend, and a man totally without pretensions. I first met Fred at a conference in Milwaukee in 1992, when we were introduced by Syndy Conger. Fred quickly introduced me to his wife Nancy, who always traveled with him, and within minutes I felt like I had known the two of them for years. They were both down to earth, genuine, and warm, and we began an email correspondence that continued until his sudden and unexpected death in February 2008. I saw Fred and Nancy again at the IGA Conference in Halifax in 1999 and we had a chance to talk again about the state of gothic studies. Fred was a serious scholar of the gothic, and his work went a long way to making the gothic respectable and, I would like to think, an important part of the literary canon. I knew I had made it as a gothicist when he asked me to write a Preface to his reprint of Bertrand Evans’s classic study of gothic drama, and we agreed around then to co-edit a new edition of Poe’s
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym for Broadview. Meticulous, generous, quick to meet deadlines, and always professional, Fred was the ideal coeditor. We finished the book in December 2007 and began talking about possibilities for our next joint project. Fred thought he was having a routine hip replacement and that he would be back at his computer in a few weeks. It was not to be, and I face the unpleasant task of doing a postmortem editing of him now as I see
Pym into print. He wrote the notes to the final section of
Pym and I know he spent a lot of time pondering their meaning. I guess when I think of Fred now I want to imagine him sailing with Pym into that white embrace.
— Diane Long Hoeveler
Marquette University
March 2008