‘We ordered some asparagus and got triffids.’ This joke complaint from a 1997 British cinema and television ad (for—it turns out—telephone banking services) alludes to the novel The Day of the Triffids originally published in 1951 by John Wyndham, who died in 1969. There are not many science fiction writers who have imprinted any of their works on the consciousness of a nation to the extent that the recognition of an allusion could be so readily assumed. This has something to do with the fact that Wyndham's paperback publishers, Penguin Books, have kept his best works continuously in print. Other SF titles come and go but that rectangle of orange, made up of those Penguin spines, remains a sober, respectable fixture of the SF shelves of English-language bookstores worldwide. (Outside the English-speaking world, too, Wyndham has been widely read in translations, the translators of The Day of the Triffids into Serbo-Croat being none other than Darko Suvin and his late mother.) And yet the amount of critical and biographical attention that Wyndham, or John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (as he was amply named in full), and his works have received is negligible. In what follows I shall refer to the authorial persona as ‘Wyndham’ (often within quotation marks) and, more frequently, to the man himself as Harris. While ‘Wyndham's’ books are well known (if little studied), Harris is the invisible man of British SF.

When, in the 1980s, Tom and Alice Clareson embarked on what was to be the first book-length study (a project aborted by Tom Clareson's death), they quickly came up against a major stumbling block—the unavailability of Harris's papers. At that time they were in the possession of Harris's brother Vivian at Vivian's home in Hythe, Kent. After Vivian's death on 12 June 1987 and that of Harris's widow on 2 June 1991, they were apparently sold to a private collector who, in 1992, engaged the London antiquarian bookseller, Bertram Rota Ltd, together with Harris's (and Vivian's) solicitor, Brian Bowcock, to sort them into the John Wyndham Archive. In 1997 Bertram Rota Ltd resold the Archive (now augmented by five hundred letters that, during the Second World War, Harris wrote to the schoolteacher Grace Wilson—his eventual wife) to the University of Liverpool's Sydney Jones Library, where the Wyndham Archive may now be consulted by interested researchers.