Dr. Douglas Alton Smith founded the S.L. Weiss Sämtliche Werke in the early 1980s. From its inception, the edition has been sponsored by the Musikgeschichtliche Kommission, with further support in the form of research grants from the Alexander Humbolt Stiftung, the Leverhulme Trust, and King's College London. Tim Crawford is current editor of the Sämtliche Werke. With an œuvre of more than 750 pieces ranging from galanterien to large-scale concerto movements, Silvius Leopold Weiss ranks as one of  the greatest lutenist of all time. The pieces are usually arranged into suites or Suonaten which are frequently of great length (c. 20 minutes in performance with repeats is common). They are found in a large number of 18th-c. manuscripts located in libraries all over the world, of which the most important are the British Library and the Dresdener Sächsiches Landesbibliothek. Because of the great difficulty of establishing a chronology of Weiss' output, the editors decided to publish the works by source. The first 4 volumes are of the London manuscript, a partial autograph probably compiled in Prague between 1717 and 1725; it contains 32 complete sonatas and a number of orphaned movements, as well as a good deal of other music by Weiss including his famous Tombeau for Count Losy. The next 4 volumes consist of the facsimile and staff-notation editions of the Dresden manuscript, made up of 6 manuscript volumes assembled shortly after Weiss's death in 1750 from diverse sources, including several autographs from different periods of his life. The 9th and 10th volumes represents music from miscellaneous manuscript sources, an enormous undertaking due to the complexities of the source material and notational idiosyncrasies.