Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe discussion

Fellow creative mythographers,

What creative mythography reference materials do you enjoy? I haven't read or made use of much in the way of reference materials beyond Jess Nevin's annotations of Alan Moore. Of course, the rest of Nevin's body of work and Crossovers Expanded (though more narrative than a traditional reference) are on my radar but are there other things people enjoy?

This question came to mind because I was reading around last night in Jorge Luis Borges' bestiary The Book of Imaginary Beings, a reference book of sorts . The book is meant to be more amusing than exhaustive, but the subject matter is broad and satisfying.

Borges' range includes oddities from Greek & Jewish antiquity through Celtic folk tales and Persian medieval poetry up to Emmanuel Swedenborg's angels and devils and the inventions of modern authors like C.S. Lewis and Franz Kafka. He even includes H.G. Welles' Morlocks and Eloi.

Each entry is only about 1-3 pages but I think the book is really good for our purpose for two reasons:

(1) Borges and his translators did a good job balancing simplicity with whimsy and elegance in terms of the prose. It's just very enjoyable.

(2) As in any good reference, Borges makes clear what his sources are. In the English translation, the translator collaborated with Borges to find English language equivalent resources where available.

What do you like and why?

I guess I would say the works cited in my books 'Myths for the Modern Age' and two-volume 'Crossovers'... these include fictional biographies and articles written in that style, essays such as those by Rick Lai and other creative mytholgraphers. I have found that for my purposes, the best research sources are the original books. Usually I end up reading an entire series and making detailed notes, which is very time consuming.

Farmer's completism is one of the things that attracts me to his work

Win wrote: "I guess I would say the works cited in my books 'Myths for the Modern Age' and two-volume 'Crossovers'...

Win, are you sure there aren't maybe a couple other books written by a certain someone you might want to add to that list? ;)

Sean wrote: "Win wrote: "I guess I would say the works cited in my books 'Myths for the Modern Age' and two-volume 'Crossovers'...

Win, are you sure there aren't maybe a couple other books written by a certain..."

Yes, sorry Sean, I meant to cite 'Crossovers Expanded' as well. :-) I think I was writing my reply taking into account that Will mentioned them in his original post. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it. ;-)

I just read William S. Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street for the first time, which was fun. It was much more on the creative mythography side than other bios I've read of fictional characters, like John Pearson's biography of James Bond.