Last issue I described my quest in recent months for some of the multitudinous foreign editions of my books and stories. I explained that my works have been translated into some thirty languages, many of them in several editions apiece, but the overseas publishers have only occasionally sent their books to me, and so my files are lacking many hundreds of them. Lately, taking advantage of the search capacity of the Internet, I’ve embarked on a vast project to acquire them from booksellers far and wide. I noted that acquiring the books in some countries has been relatively easy, but getting them from others —Lithuania, for example—has turned out to be quite a linguistic challenge.

I had pretty much given up hope of finding some of these books. My long list of missing titles goes back more than thirty years. But just yesterday I crossed the oldest item off the list—Le Maschere del Tempo, the first Italian edition of my 1968 novel The Masks of Time. My records show that I was paid $284 for the translation rights in December 1977, and I knew it had actually been published because an indefatigable Italian scholar of science fiction named Ernesto Vegetti has compiled a vast bibliography of SF and fantasy published in Italy that I found on the Internet. Item 76 out of the 307 Silverberg entries on that bibliography is Le Maschere del Tempo, published by the house of Fanucci.

A copy of it is on my desk now: a big lovely paperback with a fifteen-page preface about my career, which I can more or less read, because I studied Italian in college midway through the last century. I acquired the book through very this-century methods: first using the Vegetti bibliography, then Googling for my book and learning that it was available on eBay, and finally paying for it, not by a laborious process of transferring money from my bank to the seller’s, but with a few clicks on my Paypal account. The whole thing took about half an hour. None of that could have been done as recently as fifteen years ago, which is why I had to wait so long for my copy. (I also got into a charming correspondence—in Italian—with the eBay seller, who was delighted to find that it was the author of the book who was the purchaser.)

If I had been trying to find my surprisingly numerous Bulgarian editions that way, I would have had a much harder time, because Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which I can’t read. But here I had the help of two of my loyal Bulgarian readers, Trayana Grigorova and Mihail Hadzhitodorov. Trayana belongs to a chat site that discusses my work. I visit it frequently, and mentioned one time that I was looking for many of my books in foreign languages. Quickly Trayana posted a complete Silverberg Bulgarian bibliography on the site, with splendid color photos of each book, and then she and her boyfriend Mihail located and sent me the whole group—not just the novels, but obscure paperback anthologies long out of print. They did heroic work, and I am deeply grateful.

Monica Fuchs, who was born in Romania but moved to Israel when she was thirteen, belongs to the same chat group. Monica was able to perform double service, because her parents still live in Romania and through them she got me several of my Romanian books. (Thus leading to a nice check from one of the publishers, who had—innocently, it appears—forgotten to pay me for the book.) Then she tracked down copies of all my Israeli editions, which are quite numerous. Just one item eluded her: the five issues of an Israeli SF magazine called Fantasia 2000, which are rare collectors’ items in Israel. But she did start an Internet search for them, and within weeks she had heard from Mika Namir, an Israeli who now lives in Pennsylvania, and who had a near-complete file of the magazine that she wanted to give away. Mika sent me all but one of the issues I wanted in exchange for an autographed copy of one of my books, and now my file of Israeli editions is essentially complete.

Martin Sust, the editor of a Czech science fiction magazine, wrote to me asking to buy translation rights to one of my stories. I told him about my project of collecting my translated work, and he e-mailed me a link to a bibliographical list of my entire Czech oeuvre. Even better, he put me in touch with the excellent Czech on-line bookstore, www.daemon.cz, whose owner was happy to send me a big box of my Czech books. The Czech SF publishing scene is a lively one and American writers who go to daemon.cz and type their names into the search box will get some interesting results. (Though navigating the all-Czech site is a bit of a challenge!)

Making one’s way in Dutch isn’t so easy, either. As I learned in 1990 when I attended the World SF Convention at the Hague, the Dutch language is Teutonic in its origins, but everything has taken on a kind of dreamlike sparkle, and even knowing a little German, as I do, is not terribly helpful when trying to read Dutch. I went searching for a 1983 Dutch edition of Lord Valentine’s Castle that I couldn’t find even when I was in the Netherlands, and quickly turned it up on a Dutch bookselling site with the charming name of www.boekwinkeltjes.nl. But trying to decipher the description of the book’s condition got me, well, in Dutch. “Redelijk tot goede staat,” I guessed, meant something like “Reasonably good state,” but what about “lees-vowen in rug, vouw in achterplat, randjes wat sleets, snede vergeeled”? Did I really want a copy that was snede vergeeled and leesvowen in rug? I had no idea. Instead of taking the risk, I searched again, and found a copy whose seller described its condition simply as “mooi.” Mooi? Suddenly I remembered that the Internet offers translation sites. A couple of clicks and I learned that “mooi” means “beautiful.” Good enough for me. I ordered the book and asked the seller how he wanted me to pay him—Visa, Paypal, what? Back from Holland came a quick reply from the seller, Conraad Meijer. Like nearly all of his countrymen, he’s perfectly fluent in English. He told me that he wasn’t a book dealer, just a reader disposing of his collection, and, delighted to be of service to the author of Lord Valentine’s Castle, he would send me the book without charge. Which he did, and it was indeed a mooi copy, for which I publicly thank the generous Conraad Meijer.

Jaroslav Olsa, a Czech SF fan who is also one of that country’s diplomats, spent some time in Iran years ago and found me a Persian edition of my early novel Stepsons of Terra. Are there others? I may never know, because Jaroslav is now his country’s ambassador to South Korea, and I don’t know how to find some helpful fan from Iran to assist in my research.

Greece is another country where I’ve been extensively published and where a language barrier gets in the way of my finding the books. The charming Nikos Theodorou of the northern Greek city of Ioannina came to the rescue here with big packages of books, and some that even he couldn’t find were obtained for me by Professor Donna Pastourmatzi of the School of English of Aristotle University (what better name for a university could there be?) in Thessaloniki.

And Jon Davis, who runs my web site for me <www.majipoor.com> got sent to China to do some computer work, where he discovered Chinese editions of Thorns and Lord Valentine’s Castle. The Hungarian editor and translator Attila Nemeth is tracking down a host of Hungarian editions for me. When I was in Barcelona years ago, book and magazine editor Alejo Cuervo found me a host of my Spanish editions, and I am trolling the Spanish web sites now for others. Some years back my friend Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, who was studying in Germany, sent me a big box of my German editions. And so it has gone, all around the world.

Where I have at least a smattering of the language, I’ve had a fairly easy time rounding up the books on my own. Germany has its own versions of amazon. com and ABE.com, using software pretty much like that of the parent companies, and it has taken only a little dictionary work for me to order dozens of books from them that Alvaro had been unable to find, making use of the excellent bibliography of my German translations that Dirk Berger of Leipzig compiled when I was guest of honor at a con- vention there in 1997. I’ve had dozens of stories in German anthologies with titles like Die Gehause der Zeit and Welten der Wahrsscheinlichkeit (the German word for “anthology editor” is “Herausgeber,” by the way) and some dextrous clicking has bought me nearly all of them. France, too, has an amazon.com and an ABE.com, and its own bookselling site, galaxidion.com, and those have yielded a lot of my French editions—though in one case I had to go to the Canadian amazon.com for a French title, because it was no longer available in France itself. My friend and French translator Pierre-Paul Durastanti has been very helpful in finding the books that even these web sites can’t provide. And this week the proprietors of the fine French bookstore cybersfere.com sent me four beautifully organized bibliographies of all my French publications, which will allow me to discover which ones I’m still missing.

Each day brings some new help in my search. Just yesterday I heard from Ernesto Vegetti, the Italian bibliographer who has joined the hunt. Perhaps next week will bring me contact with readers in Portugal and Turkey and Argentina, where I’ve made no connections so far. I’d like to find some of my Japanese editions, too. (I had no luck when I was there for the Worldcon in 2007.) And though I was able to gather a goodly number of my almost innumerable Russian translations a few years ago with the help of the agent Alexander Korzhenevski, I know I’m missing dozens more.

I’m sure I’ve left out the names of many other SF readers and booksellers around the world who have aided me in this quest, and, if you are one of them, my apologies go to you—I just couldn’t mention everybody. It’s been quite an adventure, one that I could not have embarked on without the help of the Internet. I’ve been aware all along that science fiction is an international phenomenon—as far back as 1957, when I was in Paris, I paid a call at the offices of the French magazine Galaxie to beg a copy, in my broken French, of an issue that contained an early story of mine—but now, as I look down the long rows of foreign editions sent to me by new friends in so many lands, I have an even deeper understanding of what a far-flung enterprise it is.