Day 40. Flowers book has arrived

Wow, this book arrived from England much sooner than I expected: A classification of the folktale of the West Indies by Helen Flowers! So, I am now fully equipped for doing the kind of research and analysis I want to do to put the Harris stories in context: I already had the ATU (all three volumes), and now I have Baer's motif index of Harris, plus Klipple's African index and Flowers's West Indies index:

It came from England with a shipping window that went all the way up until July, so I wasn't even expecting it this week. This book is hard to find and expensive, but I finally found a copy for under $100 (it was $85 if I remember correctly), so I snagged it. The value is not in the production; it's just a reprint of a type-written manuscript... the value is in the monumental amount of work that Helen Flowers did in indexing all the West Indian folktales in 662 pages:

I've been working my way through Parsons's Antilles books (which are public domain, thank goodness), and now I'll be able to make even better use of Parsons. There is a mind-boggling chart, for example, that gives the type and motif listings for all of Parsons stories, variant by variant (obviously the same motif repeats a lot across the variants). It's 17 pages, with 3 columns per page. I guess that saves me months of work right there. So, $85 is more than I would usually pay for a book (I buy most of my used books for just a few dollars each), but with all the time this will save me, it is absolutely worth it.

I continue to be delighted how I am doing this project very much in the company of women: Elsie Clews Parsons, Florence Bear, Helen Flowers, and May Augusta Klipple. They are making this all possible. Thank you, ladies! I've never worked on an academic project before that was so much in the company of women. :-)