The “rediscoverer” and annotator: Brian Gibson is a professor of English literature and film at Université Sainte-Anne, in Nova Scotia. He is the author of Reading Saki: The Fiction of H. H. Munro (McFarland), “‘The Unrest-Cure’ and Saki’s Uneasy Anti-Semitism” (Jewish Culture and History), “Murdering Adulthood: Lost Girls, Boy Soldiers, and Child Killers in Saki’s Fiction” (in Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time), and an essay on Munro/Saki’s front-line writings (First World War Studies).

While searching the British Newspaper Archive online, in early December 2020—shortly before the 150th anniversary of H. H. Munro’s birth—he rediscovered Saki’s story “The Optimist” (1912), tracked down “Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity” (1911), and found several minor pieces, including the essay “Camels” (1903). None of them had been republished or collected since their first appearances in a newspaper or magazine, and none of them had been noted or mentioned in any publication by a Saki scholar or Munro biographer.