It's my pleasure to announce that I have signed a contract with Cornell University Press to serve as general editor of a forthcoming series of books by and about the great Progressive-Era horticulturist, philosopher, educator, poet, administrator, and naturist Liberty Hyde Bailey!
The series will feature new editions of Bailey's works that have long been out of print, including fresh editorial and other supplementary material, as well as works never before published, and it will also feature new secondary literature about Bailey's life and legacy and an online database that will begin to collect electronic editions of his writings and serve as a central hub for Baileyana online. Potential titles for the print series include The Nature-Study Idea, Onamanni, The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil, a collection of new essays assessing Bailey's impact on twentieth-century environmental thought and his relevance today, The Outlook to Nature, The Garden Lover, and many more.
I'm thrilled that Cornell University Press has agreed to embark on this long-term project with me as we seek to reintroduce Bailey's work to a twenty-first-century readership. We are in the midst of finalizing an advisory board of Bailey scholars to help guide the evolution of the series, and so far Scott J. Peters, Daniel Wayne Rinn, and Jane L. Taylor have all agreed to join the team. Work on the series is slated to begin in the summer of 2020 (just after I defend my dissertation!), but, in the meantime, there's no need to wait—you'll have plenty of time to enjoy the anthology of Bailey's garden writings that John Stempien and I have coedited, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings, which is available for preorder now and should be hitting the shelves of your local bookstore in September.
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Image: adapted from George Silk, "Liberty Hyde Bailey and his books," Images from Cornell's Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Library, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, c2005, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:545630.