Poe in Cyberspace: Have Poe Websites Become an Endangered Species?

Whenever I surf the Internet to check up on my favorite Poe websites, I hold my breath a little. How many of my old Internet friends will still be there? Looking back from our current moment of unprecedented computer hardware evolution and burgeoning social media, we can easily be shocked to discover that favorite Poe websites have fallen by the wayside, frozen without updating, or gone without a forwarding address. However, it can be both heartening and reassuring when an interesting new Poe website joins the galaxy—but more of that in a moment.

Specialist Poe sites have been with us for about twenty years. Electronic texts themselves are almost as old as the Internet. Soon after the original ARPANET Internet stimulus of the late 1960s, Michael Hart, who later founded Project Gutenberg, created the first electronic text when he typed the U.S. Declaration of Independence into his computer at the University of Illinois in 1971. The earliest known Poe etexts were typed in by Judy Boss for posting to Tom Almy’s Bitter Butter Better bulletin board system (BBBBBS). Other early Poe etexts prepared by the Online Book Initiative appeared on Internet Wiretap, and the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) rescued for reuse more than a dozen Poe etexts. In those bracing early days, raw Telnet and FTP commands, often committed to memory, had to be typed in at the Unix command line. Only later did menu systems appear under such suggestive names such as Gopher, Archie, and Veronica. Meanwhile, other early Poe etexts appeared on CD-ROM on the Library of the Future and on Core1 World’s Greatest Classic Books.

The modern Web dates from Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction of HTML (hypertext markup language) in the early 1990s, which magically transformed the original hard-to-use Internet into the convenient World Wide Web, making it universally compatible and relatively easy to produce, rapidly linking up sites to one another. For literary texts, in 1994 Eric Lease Morgan’s release of the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts at http://infomotions.com/alex/ was an important advance as perhaps the first list of a fairly complete set of 112 unformatted Poe works online, then available in the Virginia Tech Eris Collection. Incidentally, the printed source of this etext set seems to have been the Borzoi Poe (The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Knopf, 1946, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and E. H. O’Neill).

The first website specifically dedicated to Poe was Peter Forrest’s The House of Usher, at http://houseofusher.net/, launched in 1995; at one time it was also available in French. PoeDecoder, at http://poedecoder.com/, followed in 1997; my own survey, A Poe Webliography, at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/poesites.html, appeared soon after; and this column began the following year. Regrettably, the life span of pioneer Poe sites on the Web was often short; after eleven years The House of Usher was frozen in 2006. PoeDecoder enjoyed updates until 2001; its offshoot, PreciselyPoe, at http://www.poedecoder.com/PreciselyPoe/, kept going until 2006; and the page maintained by founder Christoffer Hallqvist, at http://www.poedecoder.com/Qrisse/, seemed quiet until it was refreshed by a blog in 2012. (Disclosure: I froze my own Poe Webliography in 2010 when a majority of the links pointed to sites that were no longer available.)

What is worse than suspended animation, of course, is the sadder fate of those dedicated Poe sites that went dark entirely, such as Stefan Gmoser’s page, The Poe Perplex, and Poe Central. In addition, some general purpose websites with memorable Poe content also vanished, including Intute (originally Humbul), a highly selective academic site that closed in 2011, and the once indispensable bibliography of the SSSL (Society for the Study of Southern Literature), which closed in 2010.

By 2010 the freezing or disappearance of so many Poe websites reflected the fact that the nature of the Web was changing. In the beginning, etexts had to be keyed in by hand; later they could be scanned as images and rendered mechanically...