I loved the heyday of blogs. Blogs were great levelers, bringing new writers into friendly contact with established scholars, authors, and thinkers, while blog readers rewarded a certain long-form quirkiness that I confess may, perhaps, occasionally characterize…some of my writing.

Yet blogs were also highly ephemeral. Although I plan to keep it online indefinitely, “Quid Plura?” will eventually go the way of all pixels, and I put too much into it back in the day to let the best of it vanish. For that reason, I’m going to turn collections of posts into thematic books that can stand alone on the basis of likely interest in the subject.

To begin, I’ve compiled four blog posts from 2018 into Fortress of Failure: Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Forgotten Medievalist Stories.

All four of Fitzgerald’s late-in-life, little-known Redbook magazine stories about Philippe, a ninth-century Frankish warlord, won’t be in the public domain in the U.S. for another fifteen years, but this four-part essay offers the curious reader a glimpse of them. Specifically, Fortress of Failure considers Fitzgerald’s stories in light of American medievalism, a tendency to make our own bespoke versions of the Middle Ages to suit the needs and concerns of the moment.

This pocket-sized, 50-page paperback, available on Amazon or soon at your online bookstore of choice, is the latest to be published by Quid Plura Books, the imprint name I’ve used since the early 2000s for books that originate as posts on this blog. (You can see other QP Books so far in the sidebar on the right: the gargoyle-poem book Looking Up, my translation of the Middle Scots Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier, and my year-long poem The Beallsville Calendar.)

The four original posts about Fitzgerald’s “Philippe, Count of Darkness” stories will no longer be available on this blog. I hope anyone who came her looking for them will pick up a copy of Fortress of Failure, which is a bit more polished and quite inexpensive.

A few more Quid Plura Books paperbacks are coming—and I have a couple other books coming from publishers large and small as well. If you followed this blog when it was thriving, I’m hoping these books will be well worth your time.