Long-time readers of the Henry James Review will remember the Winter and Spring 1990 issues for Steven Jobe's chronological catalogue of James's published letters as having provided a valuable service. James's 2,322 published letters at the time appeared in 113 publications, and Leon Edel's recently completed four-volume selection (for Harvard University Press) offered less than half of the letters then published. As a result, reading all of James's published letters over any given time span required a large library, much legwork, and the thorough catalogue Jobe provided.

Once the catalogue of the published letters appeared, Jobe blithely embarked on cataloguing James's unpublished letters (Daniel Fogel, HJR's founding editor, almost as blithely promised to publish the completed catalogue). If Jobe had known that completing the new catalogue would take almost a decade, I suspect that he would have taken on some other project.