Back when I was young and I was trying to read all the fantasy and science fiction I was able to lay my hands on, a holy grail of sorts was the books of the series Thieves’ World, edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey. It was one of the earlier shared universes in the genre, and it featured the works of an incredible selection of writers.
The volumes were published in Italy by Fanucci, in a series of hardback volumes that were very expensive if you were a teenager, that featured mismatched covers, sometimes iffy translations, and normally included extra stories by Italian authors that were a little more than iffy.
I think I have two volumes, bought at a discount from a second-hand bookstall by my old high school.
Side effect the second: they are a great tool for discovering new books to read and (sometimes) new movies to watch. There is the old Appendix N in Dungeons & Dragons, of course, and the bibliographies of games such as GURPS Transhuman Space, Eclipse Phase and Trinity, that make for an excellent introduction to some of the best science fiction and science non-fiction, but there are also games based on literary works. The already mentioned Call of Cthulhu led a number of people to discover the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Supernatural Horror, and the Elric/Stormbringer games were probably a gateway to the works of Michael Moorcock for a whole generation.
Born in 1949, Teresa Edgerton made her debut in her forties, at the end of the 1980s with the first Celydonn trilogy – also known as the Green Lion Trilogy.