We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from the launch page:
“Once on the Gallery page, you can search to reveal everything the archive contains for a particular author, title keyword, illustrator or publisher; you can select Slide Show for an ever-changing presentation of available pictures, more than 1800 of them on launch day; or you can simply click on Lucky Dip for another unpredictable image, to be replaced by further visual serendipity as often as you care to hit the button again.”
As of this evening, there are 1,837 covers uploaded with more to come. We’d especially welcome help with attributions for some where we’ve been unable to track down the artist.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 
According to the conventional wisdom that one picture is worth a thousand words, we just added the equivalent of 1.8 million words to the existing 4.1 million in the SFE text.
This week, the Gallery image count passed 7000. Roger Robinson, who did most of the captioning and uploading, estimates that he’s added a book cover to the gallery every 30 minutes since mid-April, and has captioned one every 34 minutes or thereabouts. In other news, the entry count has passed 14,000 and a check on contributor word-counts reveals that John Clute has written well over 1.8 million words of the total text. We have many more statistics as boring as this …