The Living Wilstach ◆ The Permissioned Stratum
For a century the only way into Wilstach was to be dead long enough for copyright to forget you. We keep that vigil still — every January the public domain yields a new vintage. But a living record should not have to wait for its authors to die.
So the dictionary now grows a second way: by permission. Send us your work, or your chosen lines, and every genuine simile in them takes its place in the record — verbatim, under your name, beside Dickens and Brontë and the eight hundred Wilstach indexed by hand. The work stays entirely yours. We take only the similes — permanently, the way a record should — and we hold them under conditions chiefly written to constrain us.
Admission here is by form, not fame. The test an entry must pass is the same one Smollett's lines passed: is it a genuine simile, and is it new to the record? Nobody asks how many copies you sold. Your line stands on the same page as the masters', attributed the same way, set in the same type.
There is also the arena: the best lines written in As…As… are entered into the dictionary from the game's boards. The prize is the page.
Think of it as lending your lines to the permanent record a little ahead of schedule — the record keeps them whether or not the century does. Before anything is published we send a proof sheet: the exact entries we propose, their attributions, nothing else. You strike what you like. Discretion is assumed; announcement is yours to make or not.
A backlist is a seam of similes nobody is mining. Submit by catalogue or by excerpt sheet — for rights-holders we prefer chosen passages over whole manuscripts, with a one-line warrant that you control the rights. Attribution is always to the author and the work; the dictionary credits houses only where asked.
The simile does not live only in novels. A column, a lyric, a rendering of Dante — if the line is yours and the comparison is genuine, it qualifies. Translators are credited as translators, beside the original author; Wilstach himself shelved his Dante that way.
A letter to the editor, exactly as it was done in 1916 — with one improvement: the reading is no longer done by index card. Two routes, by temperament:
Attach the text — .txt, .md, .docx, .epub or PDF — and we do the reading. Our extraction engine finds the candidate similes; an editor settles the record. The file itself is then deleted. We keep the entries — the simile, its sentence, a sentence of context either side — and nothing more of the work. That bound is a promise, in writing, in the conditions.
If you would rather no manuscript left your desk, choose the passages yourself and paste them into the letter — each simile with the sentence it lives in, and the work it comes from. You do the extracting; we do the filing. Rights-holders and the cautious tend to prefer this door, and we think no less of them for it.
Begin the subject line with Submission, and say in the letter that you submit under the Submission Conditions — that sentence is the whole of the paperwork. Tell us the name to print, the works the lines are from, and whether you also opt in to the As…As… game corpus (separate, never assumed). We read everything, and we answer.
The Submission Conditions are one page, and they run in an unusual direction: nearly every clause is a constraint on Medlara. What we may take, how much we may ever quote, what we must delete, what we must never do with your text. One clause asks something of you in return: the record is permanent — entries stand the way Wilstach's 16,604 stand, which is the point of a record. The grant is forever because it is small. Read the conditions before you write — they are short on purpose.