PA Fireside Tales — Volume 8

Once again I seem to be making a liar of myself.  I mentioned in all honesty in my Pennsylvania Fireside Tales Volume 7 that I felt that it was definitely the last one in the seven volume series, thinking that I had run out of tales I wanted to share with my readers.  However, the types of stories that so fascinated me in the past seemed to keep seeking me out and to be crying out for an appearance on the printed page.  This in turn once again caused that compulsion I had always had to share them with my readers to flare up and inspire me.  Consequently I published revised and expanded editions of my volumes 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 which contained those new tales that trickled in to me since those editions first appeared.

In those revised editions I kept the volume numbers the same, even though they contained appreciable new details I added to many of the original tales that were in the first editions and new chapters that were not in the first editions.  I was proceeding along that same path with my Volume 4, it being the last volume for which I had not yet published a revised / expanded edition, but I was not enthused about the project.  Even though I had collected some additional material for some of Volume 4’s chapters and was moving toward a second edition, I had noticed that people seemed not inclined to buy my second editions if they already had the first editions, their thinking appearing to be that they already had that volume number in their collections.