Arkham House Rejects Ramsey Campbell's Latest Collection

By Ramsey Campbell ( - 195.93.34.184) on Wednesday, June 5, 2002 -
04:59 pm:
Well, let me not misquote the Arkham House editor. This is what he
actually wrote:

'Dear Ramsey,

Thanks for letting Arkham House consider your latest story collection,
"Told By The Dead." I regret very much that it doesn't fit our
schedule at this time.

Because we published 4 of your previous collections, I feel obliged to
mention that I had problems trying to read most of the stories all the
way through. While they contain fragments of excellent narrative
prose, too often the stories come across as intellectual
exercises--that is, they describe a mood or a reaction to something
perceived as a horror but lack a focused plotline. With a few
exceptions, they seldom reach a satisfactory conclusion one way or the
other, and come across as being very murky, ambiguous and obscure.

Aside from that, there's been a significant shift in customer
purchases over the last three years indicating a trend back to more
traditional ghostly and fantasy storytelling; and not surprisingly, a
growing demand for non-fiction, historical and biographical books
about the pulp fiction era and its writers. As we have a limited
publishing schedule, we have to actively pursue a mix of projects and,
accordingly, reduce the number of our fiction titles.

We know there's a small niche market out there that likes the kind of
stories you write and that you have a loyal following. A publisher
catering to that horror market would probably be more successful in
selling the book than we would.

I've packed up the manuscript portion of your collection and will air
mail it to you this week.

I wish you every success in placing "Told By The Dead."

Best regards,

Peter Ruber, Editor
Arkham House Publishers, Inc.'

For what it's worth, I don't think the book is any more obscure than
my previous Arkham titles. I'd intended to submit it to my New York
publisher but sent it to Arkham instead after they repeatedly asked
for a new collection. The contents include "The Word", "Agatha's
Ghost", "No Story In It", "Worse Than Bones", "The Entertainment",
"Never to be Heard", "Return Journey", "Tatters", "Dead Letters",
"Twice by Fire", "Becoming Visible", "All for Sale", "No Strings" and
"Slow". (RC)

****

This made me furious when I first read it over the weekend. Is there a
single person on this ng who does not find this appalling?

Jim

That even excellent authors have to buck up to occasional rejection is in
no way appalling. It's basic to the profession.

It's been a while since I've paid particularly close attention to what
Arkham House publishes, & their current disinterest in an author of
Ramsey's calibre is no doubt one very great reason why my interest has
wandered elsewhere in spite of the sentimental whelling the name of Arkham
House can muster.

Nevertheless, copyright of letters is held by the authors thereof, not the
recipients, & if Ramsey did not have permission to post this at his
website, he did something very wrong. If he was not also given a carte
blanc permission to pass on the same privilege to others, he caused you
likewise to do wrong.

Publishers decide on the direction their companies are going & select
authors accordingly. Very fine writers, with very fine works, are rarely
reach a point where they are absolutely not going to experience the
occasional rejection of a worthy book or project. When an editor takes the
time to write a letter to an author discussing sundry reasons for passing
on a project, that should be regarded as a courtesy, not as a serious
critique riddled with hidden revelations.

It's too bad this editor lacked a deeper appreciation of Ramsey's talent
whether or not Arkham could take on the project. One of Ramsey's editors
at Tor also disliked his writing & wanted Tor to stop publishing him, but
his sales figures were better than for authors she liked, so she was stuck
with him. She had no capacity for following subtlties in any story, but if
she'd been permitted to write the rejection letter she'd have preferred to
write him, it would very likely have revealed nothing of her true feelings
about the work.

So the Arkham House editor is being faulted for revealing his feelings,
privately, in private correspondence. I can't see the fault actually lies
with him in this case, unless the point to be learned is that editors
should not trust authors. And most of them in fact do not trust authors &
do not commit such opinions to print Ruber is either being an amateur to
have mistakenly addressed an author honestly, or he has not until now
realized there was any reason for never every better seasoned editor to
secretly mistrust the authors they pander to primarily with smiles & lies.
If Ruber learns anything from this it will be to always tell an author
some meaningless untrue excuse he'd rather hear, like "Arkham House is
overextended just now & I feel just awful about returning your
manuscript."

It is usually only the deservedly unpublished authors who have this
undying need to post on their websites (or in times past, in their crappy
little fanzines) quotations from editors' hasty rejection letters proving
all editor are dumbasses. I can't recall ever seeing someone of Ramsey's
great talent pulling such a sorry stunt. If the letter-writer's permission
is absent from this "sharing," then something "appalling" has indeed
happened, something much worse than failure to appreciate good stories,
namely, tackiness & copyright infringement.

-paghat

--
"Flowers are commonly badly designed, inartistic in
color, & ill-smelling." -Ambrose Bierce
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl:
http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/paghat/gardenhome.html#top

You make some very interesting points here, Jessica, though, copyright
infringements and ethics apart, I think you miss a very important one: that
the response Ramsey was given highlights the Arkham editor's inability to

So, what are we supposed to make of that? Robert Aickman and Walter De La
Mare quite often seem, to this simple mind at any rate, to lack a focused
plotline (though that doesn't stop me reading them, and trying to find
things I've missed previously, and attempting bloody hard to understand
them: even if I'm happy to know that I'm not the only one in that position).
In many of examples of their work, the stories fail to reach a satisfactory
conclusion, one way or the other, and certainly come across as being
ambiguous and obscure. Murky? Well, my dictionary defines that as 'dark,
gloomy', and I don't have a problem with murk if that's what Mr Ruber means
by it. However, we should bear in mind something that Aickman himself wrote:
'. . . the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of
poetry; . . . it need offer neither logic nor moral . . .'

A question I've been asking myself quite often over the past few days is
what would Mr Ruber have done had he been offered a collection by Robert
Aickman or Walter De La Mare. On the evidence of what he wrote to Ramsey, he
would have rejected such collections, because he had difficulty in reading
them.What would we be making of that?

Mr Ruber also commented:

Any publisher has to pursue a mix of projects, but the significant shift
that he attempts to define seems difficult to pin down in Arkham's list of
recent publications: there is still space for new material, etc. I'd suggest
that the growing demand for non-fiction, historical, and biographical books
stems from Mr Ruber's own particular interests, which he is, of course,
quite entitled to have. However, a major dealer in the supernatural field
commented to me only last week that looking at Arkham's recent publications,
and at their projected titles, is rather like staring into the abyss; and
one really has to wonder whether personal prejudice in not affecting the
quality of material now being offered by the publisher which broke the
ground for everything that followed.

Whatever faults may lie at anyone's door, be they Peter Ruber's or Ramsey's,
it distresses me to learn that a short-fiction writer of Ramsey's calibre is
being dismissed in so offhand a fashion, simply (and that is what it boils
down to) because one editor hasn't managed to find satisfaction in his work.

All editors make mistakes, and no one would dispute that. It's the reason
for making a mistake in this case that is in question.

CR

Jim, I agree it's an appalling state of affairs. What's happenned to Arkham House?!?

Huw

(Snipped in the interests of space)

I was not aware of this and offer my apologies to Mr. Ruber. The
letter has been on-line at another site since June.

(Snipped for space)

The most frustrating thing about this to me is that Arkham House is
the industry leader--they virtually created the industry--and continue
to produce fascinating books that rival those they were producing
when they first opened shop in the late 1930s, such as the recent
Nelson Bond collection, the memoirs of E. Hoffmann Price, the volume
devoted to reminiscences by Lovecraft's colleagues, and the upcoming
selected letters of Clark Ashton Smith. It is extremely dispiriting
that they too would turn their backs on Mr. Campbell's fiction after
he has had such difficulty retaining a publisher in his own country.

Jim

As fond as I am of Ramsey Campbell, I think you're dead-on in this
analysis. Generally, the author of a letter retains the ownership of
the copyright or "literary property" contained within, and the
receipient gets just physical ownership (Nimmer on Copyright, § 5.04 ;
also, see Sinkler v. Goldsmith, 623 F. Supp. 727(D.Ariz. 1985). Mr.
Ruber made no declarations as to any "free use" or any other purpose
the letter might be put to, so the general rule would probably apply.

I think the average large corporate commercial fiction editor's a
rather unimaginative creature, descending with his or her fellow
literary locusts on each next "big thing." Imagine the fact that
Ramsey Cambell's work actually might require some mental work to
unravel or that his characters might be neurotic, unsympathetic, or
just plain odd. Scratch your head editor, as you try to wend through
THE FACE THAT MUST DIE and wonder why there's so much ink wasted on
this Horridge character. Read ANCIENT IMAGES and try to recall who
Karloff and Lugosi were and why anyone should care. Wouldn't you
rather be sitting home watching SEX AND THE CITY instead of slogging
through this unfathomable Brit's typing?

Still, it's sad that a company with which Campbell's had a long
association (since at least 1964, and through several management
changes) could so unceremoniously give him the gate and for such
reasons. Harsh language aside, I don't really disagree with your
analysis of the situation, but I still find the matter depressing.
Say what you will about Derleth, he would go three years in the 1950's
without publishing anything just so he could keep someone like John
Metcalfe in print. I guess Arkham's become more of a conventional
business these days, which, is I guess, the latest management's right.

I had previously read the letter quoted on RC's website. I'm not a
regular on that site, it was just a curiosity visit, but I'd like to
point out that RC posted the letter _in defence_ of Arkham House's
editor who was being vilified by others on that message board for
rejecting RC's book rudely and out of hand. RC's point was that
despite the fact he may be puzzled or dissapointed at AH's decision,
he had recieved a courteous reply and not been rudely snubbed.

Of course this doesn't deal with the copywrite question raised above
(which I'll not pretend to know anything about).

- Chris

But the Price volume shows the alternate problem. This appeared a number of
years after the author's death, and was written I think some years before it.
Saying "we're cutting back, try somewhere else" seems better to me than
"We'll get to it one of these days, if we don't forget about it," which was the
case with the one Wakefield collection.
Mark Owings

Publishing is all about making choices; what you decide not to publish may
be as revealing as what you choose to publish (assuming there is some
critical faculty being exercised and that sales figures are not the sole
drivers of the decision).

This specific instance, however sad it may appear to all of us Cambpell
lovers, underlines how dependant the whole process may be on the tastes and
preferences of one single individual. For better or worse, it often gives
a specific personality to a line of books or to a magazine.

It should also put into some perspective Derleth's work at Arkham: for all
his faults as the rather careless editor of Lovecraft's work and his
trivializing of the HPL's vision by his repetitive pastiches, he did have
more openness and erudition regarding the field as a whole than what we can
infer from this letter from the present management.

--
Luc

The universal truth that even the best of us will get the bum's rush
from the dreaded Editor some of the time isn't what appals me. For
me, the issue is that a collection of fine tales by Ramsey Campbell
(one of the best writers - if not THE best writer - on the scene in
the opinion of his peers and his admirers alike) is being bounced by a
house which is supposed to know its supernatural onions. Of course
editors reserve the right, etc... but I can't begin to tell you how
deeply I now distrust this particular editor's taste

(snip)

When I'm writing a letter, unless I include an explicit and direct
injunction to the contrary, then I'm more than happy for anyone to
pass on any of the opinions I express therein. Of course, this is
just me, but I find it hard to get worked up over copyright in a
letter. "Very wrong"? Depends on your priorities.

(snip)

Courtesy, hell! A "serious" letter back is the LEAST you can expect!
Especially re: a project which was solicited...

Not by me, he's not - he's being faulted for having VERY questionable
taste.

SD

I acknowledged that unfortunate circumstance right off. It remains most
editors have limitations of taste or ability & select for commercial
viability not for quality. If Ruber had played the "professional editor"
game of saying something polite & meaningless no one would fault him.
Therefore he's being faulted for sharing dumb opinions, which he had every
right to believe he was doing privately.

If authors could REALLY see inside editorial offices (bigger ones than
Arkhams of course) they would not only be appalled, but would have a
greater appreciation of a gent who'd take the time to share his feelings
about a manuscript. Editors are rewarded by the publishers they work for
by showing them great sales figures, not by showing them authors who are
great authors with strings of deserved awards. Authors of stand-alone
books of merit get paid moderately for one book at a time, with never a
guarantee of selling the second book which is dependent on how the first
sells, not on what critics or a devoted few readers thought. By contrast
an author with a really dumbass but commercially socko idea for a series
of five books can get a contract for a series of five books & be fully
employed writing them (or farming them out to be badly ghostwritten).

I corresponded with a chap who was writing one such series based on a
Robert E. Howard character. He believed he was doing good work & was
appreciated, & with a contract in hand for three books (one of which he
sub-contracted to a ghostwrier since he couldn't keep up), he had every
reason to believe he was appreciated. But every time he turned in a new
manuscript, the entire editorial office gathered around the water cooler
reading passages out loud AND LAUGHING THEIR ASSES OFF. I don't
exaggerate. They thought of him as the most ridiculous writer imaginable
but he could meet a contractual deadline on time with books that had a
pre-established guaranteed number of sales. Now the author in question I
personally believe had some real talent, though these pastiches were not
the best evidence of that. He of course thought this excellent-seeming
contract would lead to many contracts for books really his own that didn't
have REH's name bigger than his on the covers. But of course every idea he
ever pitched to them for a book that would've had only his name on it they
turned down -- because they thought of him as a completely talentless
moron who met deadlines with books moronic readers would purchase in
droves.

Mostly authors are only going to hear from editors something positive.
More than half the time they're lying. If they rejected something with a
kind word, they didn't actually feel kind. If they contract something
letting you believe you're a genius, they're secretly thinking you're a
goopy putz who writes to the essential lowest common denominator audience.
The WORST thing they can think of your work is it is artistic & refined --
that is the same as saying unsalable.

So it seems to me the thing Ruber has failed to understand is that
professional editors don't communicate honestly with authors. It rarely
pays in anything but grief. Certainly it would've been a better
circumstance if he'd had the good sense to realize a better writer than
Ramsey would be next to impossible to find, & since Arkham is commercially
small potatoes, should've counted his lucky stars he had this opportunity
laid out before him. But easily half the time, whether contracted or
rejected, the authors would not like to know what an editor is really
thinking, & if Ruber had behaved as the major New York editors behave
(pandering dishonestly whether to dismiss an author or to keep them on a
string), he wouldn't now be faulted.

Ruber's wrongly publicized letter did underscore for me why I care less
about Arkham today than I did throughout most of my adult reading life.
When Turner aimed it more & more into Nebula Award Science Fiction, it
couldn't seriously be argued that the press had gone down hill, it had
just branched off somewhere where I wasn't following; & my full attention
has never been regained. I'm afraid we all have to face it, Derleth really
is dead.

But I'm not willing to suspect what Ruber likes INSTEAD is no good, just
as what Turner chose may in the majority of cases have been superior to
many of Derleth's choices. If I were to admit I wouldn't want to publish
books by Lucius Shepard, David Niven, Bill Gibson, or James Tiptree Jr.,
this could well be used as evidence of my having no taste whatsoever
because they are fine writers & the fact that they're not my favorites
proves I am incapable of editing a good line of books -- something I
wouldn't accept as true since my line would consist instead of Ramsey
Campbell, Fred Chappell, Jack Cady & Patrick McGrath. But try to convince
Larry Niven fans of that.

-paghat

--

And just who did they think made Arkham House what it is today? Not that Ramsey did it
all on his own, but he sure contributed a goodly share to the genre. Of course there were
companies that thought the Beatles wouldn't do anything.....

Then too, the stories he submitted may have been stinkers. It happens ya know.

--
katie

I'd rather read David Niven than Larry Niven any day...

;-)

J

An excellent point, it seems that the Nelson Bond collections I had in
mind for publication are tied up at Arkham and Nelson despairs of
seeing them published during his lifetime...

Some interesting points on this thread. Yes, it's wrong to pubblish
personal correspondence without permission, though in this case
Ramsey's intent was to quell a lynch mob.

Peter Ruber by all accounts is a nice man that should be President of
the August Derleth Brass Band and Chowder Society and *not* editor of
Arkham House. I submit "Dragonfly" as Exhibit A...

I usually find myself in agreement with Woolrich on most things, but I
don't think that Arkham's hideous edition of Metcalfe did anyone any
favors, least of all poor Mr. Metcalfe. Derleth chopped six stories
out of the book to save printing costs and from the looks of the text
didn't even bother to proof the novella, it's riddled with typos.

In fact, it's been my contention that Derleth's lauded programme of
publishing British authors was executed so poorly that he probably did
as much harm as good. Most of this was attributable to Arkham's
policies (many of which were from Don Wandrei) of being almost
vicious in their dealings with wholesalers and distributors. Let's
look at Coppard as an example, his collected stories were BOMC and
omnipresent during the fifities, an Arkham edition that was marketed
properly might have done quite nicely for them.

Arkham has frequently shot themselves in the foot, of late, however it
seems to be a weapon of rather large caliber that's leaving grievious
wounds...

Jessica makes some great points about NY publishing, though I must say
I've been treated very well by Laura Anne Gilman (ROC) and Steve
Saffel (Del Rey)... Though the fact of the matter is that I had a
senior official at Del Rey tell me that they thought Lovecraft was
unreadable and couldn't understand what all the fuss was about... ;-)

Of course they are business people and contiinue to write me nice
checks for anthologies even if they may not understand why they earn
out in the first quarter. ;-)

There is a level of goofiness in NY, however after spending a good bit
of time discussing film rights to various works of mine with Hollywood
folk, the goofiness of NY seems downright sane and sober by
comparison.

Cheers,

John

Derleth's faults as a publisher were many, many, many, & some few people
fault him even as a human being. As someone who has come to value
definitive texts, I would today be swift to trade an older Arkham edition
for a corrected edition. But I think the complaints people have felt about
Arkham under Turner or Ruber vs under Derleth comes from Derleth having
his finger more on the tastes of devottees of weird fiction, from the
local color school to the pulp variety to the Decadent to the truly
literary ghost, Derleth liked the stuff in the same way we do. If Arkham
is better proofread nowadays; if fewer of the authors die of old age
waiting decades to see a book in print; if there's no longer a
side-program to publish stuff with HPL's name on it that HPL didn't write;
well, all these "improvements" are too the better. But when it boils down
to it, the minority of true devottees of the literature preferred
Derleth's tastes. I only wonder if our minority is insufficient for Arkham
to really attend to. Perhaps the 250 to 600 copy editions of presses like
Ash-Tree, Sarob & Tartarus really is the extent of our numbers, & if
Arkham wants to print 6,000 copies & not warehouse them (as Derleth did)
for decades, maybe True Afficionados can't be taken into consideration. I
hope that's not the case, but it's a possibility.

-paghat

This is an excellent point. I wonder if the captains of Ash-Tree or
Midnight House could tell us whether they think they could sell thousands of
copies at a price point like Arkham's (leaving aside whether costs would be
covered).

- Todd T.

Excellent question. (Which actually should be deferred to Jason
Williams at Night Shade who *is* doing 2000 copies of the Wellman
books.)

My business plan is geared to strictly to the collector/avid reader
market, I don't sell to libraries, jobbers, distributors or other
markets that I'd need to deal with in order to move the quantity of
books you're alluding to. Further, the existence of a much larger
printing could cripple the chance of a mass market sale down the road
something that is an attractive possibility for many of our titles.

Our business model is based on reaching a level of 100-200 subscribers
(or individual retail purchases), with the rest of our sales to
specialty dealers. We're not quite at the 100 mark, but gettinng
there. I can't pretend to know what the Arkham model was, though I
suspect that the idea was always that you could move *all* your books
at full retail if you were just patient enough.

Personally, I think that sort of strategy is doomed to failure,
particularly when you're dealing with obscure authors known to only a
handful of people, I count on folks like Jessica, Otto, Matt, Alice,
and Bill K. to help bring the book-buying public up to speed on our
projects and certainly don't begrudge them their discount. Arkham
always seemed to think their dealers were some sort of loathsome
parasites that existed merely to siphon profits away.

As to your original question, could I sell 4000 to 5000 books?
Possibly, my last anthology just earned out in the first quarter
selling 10,000 hardcovers... Am *I* set up to handle that sort of
volume? No, not even close... I couldn't do that number of copies
without actually becoming a mass-market house, something I've neither
the money or desire to do. Once you're at that level, you can no
longer afford to take risks, and you're producing "product" instead of
publishing books.

I'd love to see Robert Hichens and Bob Leman in every bookstore in the
country and see Clive Pemberton discussed on Book Week, but it ain't
going to happen anytime soon.

Cheers,

John

BTW: Did I mention subscriptions to Midnight House and Darkside Press
are available? ;-)

> >This is an excellent point. I wonder if the captains of Ash-Tree or

Well, I'll throw in my two cents (I bore the hell out of anybody who'll
listen about Night Shade, so I'll certainly spill for a willing audience).
Be warned, this is going to go long.

I think the answer is yes, you can move high quantities of this stuff. Just
to throw some numbers out:

Wellman - 2000 copies
Wagner - 1800 copies
Lebbon - 1500 copies
Hodge - 1800 copies (800 hc, 1000 tpb)
Lovecraft - 2000 copies (1000-1200 hc, 800-1000 tpb)

My theory was/is that New York publishing is a nightmare, and I can do it
better. Yes, humble, I know. I have a few different types of books, and
I'll go into them separately:

Single author collections (contemporary) : We started doing 1500-2000
copies in hardcover, ranging from $25-$27 a pop. The decision to go to $27
was not taken lightly. I want to keep our books competitively priced with
New York. This sort of worked, and sort of didn't. We wasted a few titles,
mostly due to bad marketing. We believed that if you publish high-quality
fiction, at an affordable price, they will come. Well, they sure as hell
didn't come. We took a bath of several titles (and no, I won't tell you
which ones. The ones that tanked had nothing to do with literary quality,
they tanked because we couldn't market a book to save our asses, and I don't
want that reflect on the part of the authors. They did their job, we didn't
do ours.) Now the plan (and it seems to be working) is more along the lines
of what the big Brit houses are doing. A fairly small hardcover run at
about $25-$27, along with a simultaneous trade paper run that's much larger,
at $14-$15. There will be some people who will buy a tpb instead of a
hardcover, but there will be a lot of people who would never have bought a
hardcover to begin with, and maybe we can convince them with the tpb.
Hodge, Harrison, Cady, Lebbon, etc... are all getting this treatment.

Novels (contemporary) : These will stay at 1500-2000 hardcovers, around
$25-$27. Novels sell better than collections, sad truth that it is. We've
only done two so far, and both did extremely well. Once again, it's all
about the marketing.

Dead people : Night Shade pays the rent with dead people. It's also where
we've shown the least amount of faith, or balls. When I started Night
Shade, two of my dream projects were the Wagner and Wellman volumes. When I
announced the Wellman books, it was at $35, no jacket. I figured that I'd
sell some to libraries, and a few copies direct, but for the most part it
was a vanity project for me. After all, who cared about some dead guy named
Wellman? Well, as it turned out, a lot of people cared. I started out to
do 500 copies, and ended up doing 2000. Has it sold out? No, but that
wasn't the point. I wanted to bring Wellman back into print, not just for
15 minutes, but for years. And it worked, very well. We have sold *a lot*
of Wellman books. All of them are at least 50% sold out, but we'll still
have copies of Volume One when Volume Five comes out. I wanted to avoid the
Arkham House letters trap, where none of the books were in print at the same
time. And when we sell out all of the hardcovers, I want to bring them back
in trade paper. Keep Wellman alive! Wagner was the same way, except that
apparently even more people liked Wagner than Wellman. We blew out over
half of the Kane print run in the first 30 days. If it continues the way
it's going, we'll be sold out and going back for a reprint before the
reviews hit.

Now here's where the lack of balls comes in. We screwed ourselves with
both Wellman and Wagner. If they sold that well at $35, how well would they
have sold at $25? We should have said no to the easy money, and dropped the
price, and had faith that we'd sell even more copies and it would all work
out. But I didn't, and I've permenently denied myself those sales, and I've
denied the casual reader access to a great book.

I don't like a 300-500 copy limited edition. If it's a dead author, sure
you've brought them back in print, but only for a short while. And if it's
a living author, it's a blip on the radar. It barely counts towards a
bibliography entry. If I had done Norm Partridge's _The Man with the
Barbed-Wire Fists_ as a 500 copy signed limited, I would have sold it to the
same 500 people who either buy every one of Norm's books, or who buy
signed/limiteds. But that wasn't my goal. I wanted to sell 2000 copies to
people who had never heard of Night Shade, who didn't collect books, and who
hadn't heard of Norm. And I don't give a damn how they read it. $55
limited, $25 hc, $15 tpb, whatever. Just read it.

While I'm at it, I want to go on a small rant about POD. I hate it. I
hate it in special ways. I spend my nights staring at the ceiling, thinking
of ways to hate it even more than I do. That's not true. I love it, when
used the right way. On Friday, a truck will show up with boxes and boxes of
White, Things That Never Happen, and Mysteries of Time and Spirit galleys.
And every one of them was printed via POD. POD is wonderful for galleys,
and a hell of a lot cheaper than the way we used to do it. But for a real
book? No way in hell. The day I produce a POD book is the day I shut it
down.

POD publishing shows a lack of faith. Faith is critical in publishing,
particularly small/indie press. I make a living off of Night Shade, but you
wouldn't believe what a crappy living it is. I do it because I firmly
believe that the books I publish are great books, and deserve to be read by
as many people as possible. I have so much faith in the books I publish
that I pay the author for copies they haven't even sold yet. This is called
an advance. Many POD publishers would do well to look that up in a book
somewhere. And I have faith in the books I produce, enough that I print a
lot of copies, because I have faith that people will want to buy them.
Sometimes I have a little *too* much faith, but as I said earlier, that's my
fault, not the author's.

So when a POD press publishes a book, and pays no advance, and prints 25
copies at a time, they have no faith. They don't have faith that they can
sell the book, they don't have faith that anyone wants to buy the book. If
they had faith, they'd pay the author up front, because they knew the book
was going to sell. If they had faith, they'd publish more than 25 copies.
If they had faith, they'd send out a fucking review copy once in a while.
And if you've got no faith in the books you're publishing, then you're
wasting everybody's time.

Faith is producing 150 galleys for Things That Never Happen. I have faith
that 150 people will blurb/review/spotlight/feature/whatever this book,
because it's that damn good. Hell, it's better than that damn good. But it
works two ways. I have faith in the book, so I will make sure it gets in
people's hands. And Mike Harrison has faith in me, that I will produce a
nice book, and that I will do my damndest to make sure people know about it.
POD presses violate that faith.

POD also screws new writers. Failed Writer X starts a POD press, because
they can't get published. Fine, whatever. But at some point, they start
publishing their friends. And screwing them. Because they can publish a
book for $500, they don't need any faith. After all, it doesn't really cost
much, right? And frequently, the stuff they publish wasn't good enough to
be published. So now you have an author, who's running around waving their
brand new title, thinking they're a big dog now. They've been published,
the battle is over. So now it's all about getting the next book published,
when they should still be at home, honing their craft. I've seen POD
publications of crap that wasn't good enough to be at the bottom of my slush
pile. People who can't even construct a sentence, but they've got three
books in print. It used to be that they'd write, submit, get a rejection
letter, and start over again. And eventually, they'd get better. Now that
doesn't happen. And now they send me a copy of their book, and want to know
what I think. For better or for worse, I tell them. "Not only am I not
going to publish this, your last book shouldn't have been published either.
You were done a disservice." I'm a lot more gentle about it, and I'll tell
them why and point out examples, but basically that's what I tell them. Am
I the end-all-be-all editor? No. Am I qualified to tell them that? Yes.
Yes, because when I think a book *is* good enough, I back it up by putting
my $20,000 on the line. That doesn't make me right, but at least I have
faith.

Ok, I'm way off the topic here, so let me wrap it up with this.

Yes, it is possible to sell 1000, 3000, 5000 copies of a title. But it's
not going to happen with every book. Stuff like Ash-Tree does, for example,
isn't going to. There just aren't that many people that give a damn about
Mrs. Baldwin. But some of the stuff they do, I do think could move that
many copies. Produce a $20 trade paper of the magnificent James volume they
did, promote the hell out of it, and yes, I think they could move 5000
copies. I think they could easily move a couple thousand copies of somebody
like Ayecliffe or Lamsley, things that are more accessible. But it takes a
lot of work, and most of that work is promotion. Publishing is only half
putting the book out. The other half is getting people to know about it.
I'm not the expert at it, but I'm trying to get there. I'm embarrassed when
I publish a book and only sell 500-700 copies, because I told the author I
could do better, and because I don't want them to think that there's
something wrong with the book.

This doesn't mean that I think all of the other presses are wrong, or
should be doing things differently. Some books don't have legs past 400-500
copies, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't be done. It just means I don't
do them. If I don't think I can sell at least 1500 copies, then
unfortunately, I can't do them. But somebody should. John ran an idea past
me about publishing all of Nigel Kneale's fiction. Which is a great idea.
I love Kneale's movies, and his stories are a lot of fun. But while I think
500 people would be interested, I don't think 2000 people would. So I had
to pass. Much as I'd like to, I can't publish everything, so it's good that
there are different kinds of presses around.

Wow, that was a rant. I'm not even sure what the point was, but I took
the time to write it, so hopefully somebody will take the time to read it.

Jason

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Good lord that was a good post.
But there's an essay "In Defense of the LImited Edition" by Richard
LeGallienne which would ammend at least part of what you've written above.

Fact is, even 2,000 copies is a mere blip. If a television program had
2,000 viewers max; if a singer sold 2,000 CDs; if a newspaper had a
circulation of 2,000 -- they for all intent & purposes don't exist.

The underlying motivation for books of merit has never been in the numbers
printed, unless it is an inverse number. Leonard Smithers issued limited
editions & just about every single copy was preserved by someone & his
authors are still providing cottage industry activity to academics & the
books are prized in personal collections plus publicly available either in
Special Collections or in facsimiles.. But of the top ten best selling
authors of the same period, five or six of those will be hard to find
nowadays because nobody bothered to preserve the million copies sold.

There was once upon a time a popular author named Franklin Fitz. For many
years I've been watching for any of his many books (said to be
Stevensonesque so I'd like them, & I have read his short works in
periodicals so know he was pretty good), but despite that they were not
limited editions I've never been able to find even one of his books. By
contrast only 500 copies were printed of Alexander Drake's excellent &
prettily made & author-illustrated THREE MIDNIGHT STORIES (1916). I not
only have my own lovely copy for many years, but have over time had two
others for stock (one in dustwrapper). So for all its rarity there seem to
be nearly the entire print run circulating in the world cared for & read &
preserved -- but successful Franklin Fitz isn't even history. And to test
that I just this minute did a search for Franklin Fitz novels at
bookfinder.com and came back with not even one -- though he wrote many
that were widely circulated in their day -- but a search for Drake's one &
only posthumous book, five copies are being offered by three booksellers,
in the $45 to $85 range, which considering the print run has got to be
give-away pricing (though given the nature of this newsgroup they may all
three be gone by this afternoon).

The process continues; the best selling paperback originals of the 1960s
do not include many authors today remembered or reprinted, & no one
collects or preserves them unless they had garish paperback art. The
bestselling genre authors of 2002 are likewise going to be forgotten,
their books will moulder into nothing. The mass market exists to generate
money, the books don't matter; not to the publishers, not to the readers
-- they're just candybars & imagining your candybar purchase for posterity
would be moronic. Posterity is in the limited edition. The ideal might
well be to have both the money of the mass market & the posterity of the
limited edition, but most frequently they just don't go together, nor
should.

By the way, to Victorian authors "limited edition" maxed out at 300
copies; many that were produced even by major presses were limited to 50
copies in large format (usually but not invariably followed by a trade
edition -- Drake had no trade edition though the publisher was one of the
giants). Booksellers would never have been so bold as to call a 500 print
run "limited." Today the likes of a Franklin Mint will call an edition of
6,000 copies "limited."

(snippity snip)

> Then too, the stories he (Ramsey) submitted may have been stinkers.
> It happens ya know.

It does happen, yes... except I've read a couple of 'em, and they're
as good as anything else of Ramsey's that Arkham have published. Or
would they have preferred him to knock out some more Lovecraft
pastiches, in the style of his sixteen-year-old self? Perhaps that's
what they wanted - more of the same, and nothing that calls for too
much by way of... well, by way of thought. Familiarity and the
comfort zone: excellent concepts, to be sure, but do they really
belong in the spooky story? Shouldn't that position itself just a
little nearer to the edge... close enough so's it can peer over, at
the very least?

Just a thought

Steve

Then again, today's population (287,897,587 US according to the Census
Bureau Population Clock as of 9:49 EDT today) is roughly four times
that of 1900 (75,994,575 US per the 1900 Census). If we look at print
runs as a percentage of total population, then a print run of 1200
today is the equivalent of a print run of 300 in 1900, and so may just
as legitimately be called a "limited edition." The fact that a weird
fiction collection in an edition of 1200 would probably not *behave*
like a limited says something about something, but I don't know what.
Contemporary reading habits? The sheer volume of other books being
published?

Bill B.

Then again there were no televisions & cinemas nor even radios, & one
short story in one magazine issue could impact the entirety of America --
in the way that today only an "event" like the OJ trials on television
could match. Thus when FitzJames O'Brien first published "The Diamond
Lens" in Harper's, when Harriot Prescott (Spofford) published "The
Circumstance" in The Atlantic, or when Edward Everett Hale published "The
Man Without a Country" in the Atlantic, these had immediate overnight
impacts. No book or magazine has that kind of impact today, though in the
1960s the Ed Sullivan Show had it, & in the 1950s the Texaco Show had it,
& in the 1940s on radio Amos & Andy had it. This once belonged to
literature. And everyone first taste of anyone was in popular periodicals.

Magazines were the televisions of the day, & just as there is probably
nobody in America now who never heard of "Leave it to Beaver" and "I Love
Lucy," in Victorian America that kind of universality was conferred upon
magazinists' fiction. And a book -- Uncle Tom's Cabin for instance --
could even change the course of history.

Per capita, illiteracy in America is today far higher than it was in the
1870s. Far too many of the remainder, given what they do read, might as
well be illiterate.

Hmmmmm..... sounds a little like what we used to tell Granny at the Grand Canyon when we
wanted a pic for posteirity. Back up a little more.... oooops!

I'm just wondering now how he feels about the letter now after a bit of time has past.
Might goad him into even better efforts.

--

katie

We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night

>

snip, snip
This may be a collector's thing, not a reader's, though. In one of the
anthologies of public domain stories I did on disk years ago, I included all
three of the Alexander Drake stories, and neither reviewers or buyers even made
any reference to them.

I remember still picking up at a Goodwill book sale in 1974 a copy of James
Lane Allan's THE CHOIR INVISIBLE with the proud statement on the title page:
"This edition is limited to one hundred thousand copies." And that was the
1890s.
Mark Owings

I was shocked to hear on the radio recently that Indiana is striving
to reduce its 25% illiteracy rate despite education budget cuts.
25%! Gadzooks!

Jim

A digression: AMOS & ANDY's height of popularity was actually in the
late 1920's: that was when a New York newspaper reporter noted that he
could literally walk down the street and never miss hearing the show:
windows were open and radios on literally at every step of the block,
and even movies were stopped for the 15 minutes the show lasted then
in order to keep the audience from leaving. Yeah, it is hard to
believe now, and it wasn't your main point, I know.

I recall visiting the Poe Museum in Richmond and thinking: hello,
every good mid-sized American city in the early 19th century appears
to have had a literary journal, THE SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER in
Richmond and even one lively one in Charleston, South Carolina. This
in a part of the country with an antebellum rudimentary public school
system and a lower general literacy rate, and the circulations for
either journal were too high to just consist of a few bored planter's
sons as readers.

In more literate Britain, I recall the tales of Dicken's readers
mobbing the newsellers every time another chapter of LITTLE DORRIT
came to press. The "public," not just the upper class, had a vital,
excited interest in what was going on. Le Fanu used the DUBLIN
UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE and others of his publications for putting his own
publications in front of reader's: every newspaper and all journals
contained serialized fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
How many slick glossies on the stand now can make that claim?

I'm still not convinced that electronic media per se ruined reading
for the general public: on the literary end, there were still plenty
of AMERICAN MERCURY's and the like in the 1920's, not to mention the
vast sea of genre pulps at the newstands in the twenties in thirties:
BLACK MASK, WEIRD TALES, STRANGE TALES, AMAZING STORIES, WONDER
STORIES, DIME MYSTERY, DIME WESTERN, even down to the "weird menace"
rubbish in now rare titles such as HORROR STORIES AND TERROR TALES and
the like. Something for everyone: de gustibus non est disputandum.
Radio, movies, and victrolas alone just weren't enough to snuff this
deeply engrained activity of literacy.

So, what killed reading? Maybe it was just the sheer *saturation* of
electronic distractions by the 1950's and 1960's, and it's only gotten
worse, so that reading seems like a very quaint activity to many
adolescents now, something archaic and odd like a symphony orchestra
or a slide rule. I don't think that the average reader of a certain
younger age has much of a template in their head for weird fiction,
save the modern horror movies that much modern pulp fiction emulates
so slavishly, and their expectations would be so frustrated by someone
like Robert Aickman or even Arthur Machen, that they would quickly put
the book down and go back to watching SCREAM VIII on DVD.

So, quite frankly, while I wish Ash Tree, Midnight House, Nightshade,
and the rest all the best with their publications, I've always
considered modern readers of classic weird fiction a select
fraternity. We are a kind of mystery religion, a Theosophical Order of
the Golden Dawn, and I don't really care whether the vast reading
public cares about or can even appreciate what we're so fond of. I
don't want their fast food fiction ideals contaminating the pool,
either. Patrick McGrath will never be on the best seller list, but he
has his following, including some very respected critics, and those
that are really interested will seek this material out.

Gosh, John, I'm kind of flattered by that statement. I usually just
think of myself as an aging obscure crank with internet access, but
here I have one of the best modern proponents of the classic weird
tale saying he agrees with most of my observations. "Thank you
kindly, sir," as they say way down south.

I don't really disagree with your statements about the contents and
presentations for some of the Arkham House titles, but I will take
exception on Derleth's overall contribution to keeping interest in
classic weird fiction going during the dark forties and fifties. Who
would have done it in America at the time, save he? No one in New York
gave a flip about this material, really--certainly not in depth.
Derleth's efforts also provided a wonderful venue for some
up-and-comers, such as Bradbury, Bloch, Brennan, and later Campbell.

And, I think Jessica S. hit the nail on the head: Derleth, whatever
his faults professionally or personally, really, at heart, loved the
same stuff we do. He was still that same kid who was thrilled that
the great Lovecraft was writing him letters, as he traded
correspondence with Blackwood, Shiel, and the like.

I can forgive a man of much else, when he's pure in his affections.

>
> John

;-)

Well, let's politely cross swords on this... Though first let me say
that I *do* agree that Derleth had a sincere love of the genre and
generally meant well. However, (and herein is much of hypothesis
bolstered by a little bit of observable publishing history...)

This is debatable depending upon what time period you're referring to.
Certtainly Bill Crawford cared very deeply about weird fiction and
seemed to have evolved as a publisher quite independently of Arkham.
It's pure conjecture as to whether he would have done more or less had
the material been available. If we look at 1938, just coming out of a
depression, we see Derleth & Wandrei toting around an overlarge book
by an obscure writer that failed to garner intrerest in NY. Thus began
Arkham House in 1939... For the war years, you're quite correct, no
one else (except Bart House & World Publishing) were publishing
Lovecraft. By the end of the war we had two Lovecrafts,, two Smiths,
one Derleth, one Wandrei, a Lefanu, and a Whitehead from Arkham. A
most laudable programme.

I agree that he did, though I suspect Bradbury and Bloch were well on
their way regardless of Arkham. Brennan might well have stayed in the
small press his entire career without Arkham, for all practical
purposes, he did anyway... Campbell would most certainly have acheived
success with or without Inhabitant of the Lake.

Indeed. I just find it unfortunate that certain of Arkahm's efforts
may have served to keep an author from developing a new following
rather than stimulating interest. I can forgive much, (I forgive Bill
Crawford's tendency to bind up books in whatever happened to be handy,
for example) , but I do raise a critical brow at the shoddy
presentation of Metcalfe, the inadequate Blackwood volume, and the
failuure to capitalize on the mainstream popularity of Coppard, (which
could have been easily accomplished by pursuing a wider market).

It's interesting to speculate what might have happened had someone
more savvy than Derleth and less paranoid than Wandrei been at the
helm...

Cheers,

John

> On 28 Aug 2002 20:14:15 -0700, grand_g...@hotmail.com (woolrich)

Two points might ammend the above.
First, we will never know if HPL would've caught on without Arkham. The
REASON he caught on was because of Ballentine editions. Derleth's role in
those was to claim rights to the Lovecraft estate (he had no such legal
claim) & get advances & royalties. He sold film & teleplay rights & kept
the money. Meanwhile Sonja Lovecraft, who never did divorce HPL & had
legal right to the estate, received nothing. She wrote to Derleth asking
about this & he said he was going into debt keeping HPL's name alive. In
fact he was riding the coattails of HPL, & built himself a nice house on
the procedes. That aside, would anyone have noticed HPL without Derleth
claiming monies for himself? I think the answer is a definite yes. Any
agent or estate manager working in Sonja's behalf, but living in New York
instead of Salk City, could've done all Derleth did & a great deal more.
So all Derleth did was save HIMSELF from obscurity by hitching his wagon
to a giant.

Second, the 1939-1955 was a rich time for supernatural literature, &
Arkham was NOT keeping an otherwise moribund genre alive as is commonly
believed. Even the pulps were still very much in full sway throughout most
of the time, & in hardcover we find hundreds & hundreds of titles issued
from major & minor publishing firms in the US, Canada, & England.

Just a quick look through my reading diary, some items just from 1938/9:
Sina Brown's INCA GOLD
Harry Fein THE FLYING CHINAMAN
Virgina Swain THE HOLLOW SKIN
Blackwood THE PROMISE OF AIR
Frank Owen A HUSBAND FOR KUTENAI
Robert Nathan PORTRAIT OF JENNIE
Stephen Vincent Benet TALES BEFORE MIDNIGHT
Clemence Dane AROGANT HISTORY OF WHITE BEN
Elizabeth Gouge THE MIDDLE WINDOW
Ben Hecht THE BOOK OF MIRACLES
Ronald Fraser BIRD UNDER GLASS

Some random 1940s weirds also in hardcover:
Phylls Craddock GATEWAY OF REMEMBRANCE
Louis de Wohl STRANGE DAUGHTER
Harold Lamb GARDEN TO THE EASTWARD
Michael Trevor INCA CITY
Alison Utley A TRAVELER IN TIME
Storm Jameson THEN WE SHALL HEAR SINGING
Margaret Irwin STILL SHE WISHED FOR COMPANY
R.H.Malden NINE GHOSTS
Maurice Sandoz THE MAZE
I. O. Evans GADGET CITY
John Kerr Cross THE OTHER PASSENGER
David Gammon AGAINST THE GOLDEN GODS
Donald Suddaby LOST MEN IN THE GRASS
Raoul Faure MISTER ST. JOHN
Louis Goulding HONEY FOR THE GHOST
Shiel BEST SHORT STORIES
Isak Dineson WINTER TALES
Christopher Morley TROJAN HORSE
Machen TALES OF HORROR & THE SUPERNATURAL
Wise & Fraser GREAT TALES OF H & THE SUPERNATURAL
James Branch Cabell THE WITCH WOMAN
Eric Knight THE FLYING YORKSHIREMAN
Francis Ashton ALAS THAT GREAT CITY

Also from the 1930s/1940s Talbot Mondy, Dennis Wheatly, Sydney Horler,
Thorne Smith, Jack Mann, A. Merritt Sax Rohmer, Ernest Bramah, Sydney
Fowler Wright, Gerald Kersh...ad infinitum.

So rather than keeping a moribund genre alive, Arkham House selected a
sure-thing area of publishing, adding good stuff to a larger pool of good
stuff but certainly not paving the way.

But correct at least for the war years? Not even close. Some have said
when Weird Tales died there was nothing at all but Arkham & Weirdbook. Yet
there was no shortage of hardcover weird even in the 1950s:

David Craigie DARK ATLANTIS
J. E. Gurdon SECRET OF THE SOUTH
Marcel Ayme THE MIRACULOUS BARBER and THE SECOND FACE, etc
Daphne Dumaurier THE BREAK POINT
Edward Liston BOWL OF NIGHT
Rohmr WOLFHEIM, MOON IS RED, etc
Pamela Frankau THE BRIDGE
Nigel Kneal TOMATO CAIN
Wheatley ISLAND WHERE TIME STANDS STILL, KA OF GIFFORD HILARY, etc
J. David Stern EIDOLON
Frederic Oliver DWELLER ON TWO PLANETS
Robert Nathan SO LOVE RETURNS
Mary PHilips THE BEAST IN THE CAVE
Colin Wilson THE OUTSIDER
W.F. Harvey THE ARM OF MRS EGAN
A. Lernet-Holenia COUNT LUNA
Bruce Carter DEADLY DESCENT
Jacquetta Hawks FABLES and PROVIDENCE ISLAND
Maurice Samuel THE DEVIL THAT FAILED
John Dickson Carr THE DEVIL IN VELVET
Isak Dineson LAST TALES
Orel Malet GREEN LEAVES OF SUMMER
Malcolm Ross THE MAN WHO LIVED BACKWARD
Lara Chase VANYA
Paul Gallico TOO MANY GHOST
Oliver Onions BELLS RUNG BACKWARDS
Carl Carmer THE SCREAMING GHOST
Alejo Carpentier THE KINGDOM OF THE WORLD
Leiber GATHER DARKNESS
John Cowper Powys THE INMATES
Villy Sorenson STRANGE STORIES introduced by Angus Wilson
Harry Blamires THE DEVIL'S HUNTING GROUND
Douglas Percy HIDDEN VALLEY
Rosalind Sibold CYNTHIA
Upton Sinclair IT HAPPENED TO DIDIYMUS
Henri Catalan SOEUR ANGELE & THE GHOSTS OF CHAMBORD
Sydney Horler THE DEVIL COMES TO BOLOBYN
Perley Poole Sheehan THE ABYSS OF WONDERS (& other

And in paperback Ballentine & Avon were keeping Lovecraft alive & putting
out so much else not to mention Ace.

How the rumor got started that this stuff vanished for a while I'll never
understand, as there's just never been a year that did not bring forth
many new weird works & reissue many old ones.

-paghat

To amend your amendment... ;-)

(Nice list by the way, though a little light on the British
supernatural thrillers) ;-)

Our points were esssentially the same, during the war Lovecraft was
already receiving publication by Bart House, Armed Services Editions,
and World Publishing. After the war Avon and Ballantine launched
ambitious programs with such as Lovecraft and Merritt.

If we extrapolate Woolrich's question to take in Smith, Derleth,
Wandrei, Whitehead, & Lefanu (the other early Arkham authors) we
probably find similar answers. Whitehead is mentioned frequently in WT
letters by fans long after his death, I think it likely that another
publisher would have eventually grabbed his stories. Derleth seemed to
have no trouble in later years getting publiished, though it's pure
specualtion as too whether or not without hitching up to the Lovecraft
wagon his supernatural work would have been published in comprehensive
collections or like many regional ghost story writers, his weirds
would be sprinkled throughout other collections. Smith (the best
writer of the bunch) presents a more interesting scenario, he really
didn't seem to care one way or another if his prose was in book form
or not and I can't see him flogging collectrions to the mass market.
It's still likely that *someone* would have sought him out.

Lefanu would almost assuredly have been published by another house.
Wandrei would likely have found his way to Ballantine, with mixed-bag
collections like Kuttner.

We can give Derleth & Wandrei credit only for being a bit ahead of the
curve (in the US) mining the pulps for story collections (which
admittedly are always a harder sell than novels. I'd be quick to point
out that Christine Campbell Thomson was mining Weird Tales much
earlier for the NOT AT NIGHT series and Charles Birkin was assembling
single-author collections of weirds for Philip Allan in the 1930's.
The first real collection by a WT author is Hamilton's THEHORROR ON
THE ASTEROID, which predated THE OUTSIDER by three years.

Lastly... Okay, you got me... What are these? I'm familiar with all
the others:

Douglas Percy HIDDEN VALLEY

Cheers,

John

That's what I get for typing in the heat of an idea: even I knew
better than to say there was no major weird fiction coming to press in
the 1940's and 1950's save at Arkham House--although I will note many
more British names in your list than American. It seems as if there
was actually a tremendous interest in weird fiction during WWII from
what I've seen, but I'm not sure how the paper shortages and the like
affected the scheduling.

I know that there were a number of omnibus volumes and reissues coming
out at the height of the war years: TALES OF TERROR (1943) and AND THE
DARKNESS FALLS (1946) (just slightly post-war), Edward Wagenknecht's
SIX NOVELS OF THE SUPERNATURAL (1944), Bennett Cerf's FAMOUS GHOST
STORIES, and even a reissue of my old 1930's favorite Hammett
Dashiell's CREEPS BY NIGHT (1944). ...And, yes, World Publishing did
bring out lots of cheap war paper reprints of old favorites, including
M.R. James and Lovecraft, which now sit yellowing or browning in
darkened corners on my shelves.

Plus, as for the 1950's, I forget one of my favorites, Shirley
Jackson, among many others: THE BIRD'S NEST (1954), THE SUNDIAL
(1959), THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (1959), and numerous short stories,
including the classic "The Summer People" in 1950. I'd guess she did
her best work (save WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN TEH CASTLE) during the
decade and was most productive.

However, there's no disputing that the pulps took a bullet by 1955,
and one of the biggest American fiction markets for genre fiction was
gone. Yes, there were a number of digest publications that followed,
but I can't think of any successful ones for weird fiction.
Occasional weird fiction stories might pop up in FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION, but I can't recall any horror-themed fiction periodical
lasting more than a year or two in the 1950's or early 1960's. There
was a corresponding boom in paperback publishing to offset the loss of
the pulps, but, during, my youth, I spent many hours searching through
vintage paperbacks of the era, only to find that science fiction
outnumbered weird stuff by probably 20 to 1.

So, yes, they were still publishing it in quantity at mainstream
presses, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say it was harder for
many weird fiction authors to get exposure.

*Going back to playing "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century"*

Didn't she spell her name "Sonia"? ...And I though she and Howard
were officially divorced in 1929. She certainly remarried again, and,
in a famous newspaper interview for a Providence paper during the late
1940's, she emphatically declared that she was not Lovecraft's widow.

Legally, either she was a bigamist, or she didn't have any real claim
to the Lovecraft estate. Didn't H.P.L. die intestate? If there were
no will granting her any interest, and if she were really divorced
from Howard, I don't think Derleth owed her a dime as a legal matter.
The morality of the issue may be different.

Douglas C. Percy's 1951 title is about western missionaries who discover
African voodoo & demonic possession is all too real.

Orel Malet (pseud of Lady Auriel Vaughn, who was Welsh) published hers the
same year. It's more of a Thorne Smith style of ghost story, about a chap
who as a psychic researcher/exorcist falls for a poltergeist-haunted lass.

-paggers

The source for the lack of divorce is R. Alain Everts who seems to be the
only one who looked closely at the issue, documentating his finding pretty
well, having corresponded with Sonia when she was in a sorry care
fascility for the impoverished. Of course Randy had (& has) a deep hatred
for Augy & always finds the worst in him, but his research has always
seems to be impeccable even if the editorializing that accompanies it puts
a bad spin on it. In this area though, seems the spin couldn't make it any
worse. At best, Augy knew Sonia was in dire need & did nothing to assist
her; at worst he stole the estate from her & pretended he was not
benifitting by it.

As I understand it, Lovecraft's will stipulated R. H. Barlow as his
literary executor. It was through Barlow that Derleth did his initial
dealings after HPL's death.

Don't think the divorce was quite finalised when Lovecraft died in
1937.

Rick

I don't doubt that he has, although I'd really like to read his
research. Do you recall the title of his article and in which
journal? This sounds like a development that went under my radar, and
it's definitely intriguing to my mind. I'd love to pore over it and be
convinced that his claim's true by some well-done writing and
incorporation of primary sources. Honestly, I get an intellectual
thrill out of those moments.

All of my books are still under wraps at the moment, as I just moved
two weeks back and am awaiting delivery of some new bookcases, so I
can't reference any of my Lovecraft titles. However, if my faulty
memory serves:

--Sonia Greene nee Lovecraft was on record as having remarried in
several of the Lovecraft biographies (and this may be taken cum grano
salis, as I've yet to read Joshi's massive one, which many of those in
the know seem to regard as the best);

--Sonia and Howard stopped residing together in the late 1920's, and
she only was in his presence a handful of times afterward (even if
they weren't divorced, when Howard was alive, he or she either could
have claimed abandonment, maybe even after death for estate claim
purposes, depending on the R.I. law at the time);

--She publicly disclaimed any wish to be considered as his widow;

--If the divorce information wasn't correct in the earlier sources,
they still were only together continuously for less than 4 years as a
married couple, followed by decades of indifference; &

--She made no public claims on his estate following Howard's death in
1937, and, while, admittedly, he had very little estate to speak of at
that time, she didn't file anything of record as his executrix or any
claims against his estate, as you would expect a grieving widow to do.
If I were to play devil's advocate, I might consider that her
interest in her role as widow increased as Lovecraft's posthumous
stock soared. Not that I'm that crude, as, from what I've read, Sonia
always sounded like a very reasonable and fairly likeable woman, and
even Howard had little untoward to say about her afterwards (from the
contents of his COLLECTED LETTERS). If she were in such dire
straights at the end of life, it wouldn't have hurt anyone to provide
some marginal support for her, either.

Legally, I still don't see it, but I'd really like to read that
article by Everts.

*kaff* Magazine *kaff* of Horror* kaff*
*kaff* Badger *kaff* Supernatural Stories*

;-)

Now this is most certainly the case, though I'd be quick to point out
that damn near *anything* in the realm of the fantastic got the SF
label plastered on it (this being the case from the 1950's through the
1970's until those clever publishing sorts decided horror was a genre
rather than an emotional response to something...)

I wonder... A good many of the weird fiction authors of the 1940's
gravitated to television (which then as now paid a whole hell of a lot
more than magazine fiction). Some, like Jane Rice, Cleve Cartmill, and
Nelson Bond drifted into new pursuits. Robert Bloch, Fredric Brown,
and Bradbury kept at it. Kuttner died young and was never exclusively
a weird fiction author, Wyndham was writing a peculiar blend of
SF/Fantasy/Horror as was Leiber... Dennis Wheatley and John Blackburn
flirted with best-seller status... Ted Sturgeon was writing things
like SOME OF YOUR BLOOD, Fred Brown was turning out mystery/horror/sf
by the carload...

As to new authors getting exposure, that's a tough one... It's hard
for for new authors to get exposure *now*. Was it any worse in the
days of our youth? In many ways I think it may have been easier.

You keep ducking, I'll keep a-tossing... ;-)

Cheers,

John

Thanks for the info on Lovecraft's literary estate: so, he didn't die
intestate but had been ill for awhile and saw the inevitable. Wonder
what if anything he provided for Sonia in the will?

I'm still not sure about the finality of the divorce and wish I could
unpack my library tonight. Also, I have at least two online sources
telling me she had remarried. What gives here?

Derleth, to his credit, always maintained a civil relationship with
Barlow and Barlow, in turn, was very cooperative. Wandrei, by contrast,
hated the man with a passion and refused any contact whatsoever.

Dwayne

First a few points on Lovecraft copyrights:

Barlow, while named by Lovecraft as "literary executor", never held a
legally recognized position with the estate. The whole of Lovecraft's
estate, including copyrights, became the property of his aunt, Annie
Gamwell. Gamwell, after initially cooperating with Barlow, hit him with
a cease and desist order and yanked back all rights. She then gave
Derleth and Wandrei the OK to produce THE OUTSIDER and also the right to
sell reprint and first serial rights to Lovecraft's work. Derleth and
Wandrei did just that, and gave all monies collected, including a full
royalty on THE OUTSIDER, directly to Annie Gamwell. They didn't even
take a frigging commission for their work in this matter! EVERY PENNY
WENT TO GAMWELL AND THE ESTATE. Then, when Gamwell died, the estate
passed to Ethel P Morrish and Edna W Lewis. On May 2, 1941, Lewis and
Morrish gave written authorization to Derleth and Wandrei to publish
further editions of Lovecraft and, I quote, "receive royalties, sell
second serial rights, and, if necessary, first serial rights in
connection with such publication."

Where was Sonia when this was happening? Well for one thing she thought
that she and HPL were divorced and didn't find out the truth until
(according to Joshi) "late in life". In the meantime, she remained in
regular contact with Derleth, and mostly friendly contact at that, until
his death. Derleth, it should be noted, also maintained a regular
correspondence with Barlow right up until the latter's death -- after
which he corresponded with Barlow's mother! Yup, a real bastard that
Derleth!

As to the marketability of HPL: Take a look at the files of the
Minnesota and Wisconsin Historical Societies sometime. Or look at some
of the rejection letters I have in my files. Derleth and Wandrei tried
to market HPL all over the place. Story collections, even then, were a
tough sell (note how many of the books in Paghat's list were novels).
There was interest, even in HPL's lifetime, but not enough to get anyone
to take a chance. THE OUTSIDER changed all that. Does anyone really
believe that there would have been a Bart House, or any other "mass
market" edition of Lovecraft, had THE OUTSIDER not shown the way? Nor
did those editions happen without some input from Derleth and Wandrei.
Hell, even before the ink was dry on the presses Derleth and Wandrei
were trying to sell book club rights and Wandrei was trying, without
success, to interest READER'S DIGEST in publishing excerpts from HPL
letters (no, I'm not making this up, and have the correspondence to
prove it).

Are there things that Derleth and Wandrei did that are subject to
criticism? Sure. Are there things that you or I may have done
differently?
You betcha. Is there anyone out there who would mortgage their house to
publish a book by an author that none of the major publishers would
touch? Derleth did. Is there anyone out there who would cut back
drastically on the hours spent on their "real" job to spend years
collecting and transcribing the personal correspondence of a friend and
mentor? Wandrei did just that.

It's easy, looking back, to criticise. But when Derleth and Wandrei
stepped up to the plate in support of their friend HPL, they did so with
little if any hope of financial return. Derleth mortgaged his home and
his future. Wandrei cut back dramatically on his writing and never
regained his prior output, his career slowly withering on the vine. And
for what? Early sales of THE OUTSIDER were bleak and the debt needed to
be serviced. Derleth, two months into it, was ready to remainder the
lot. Wandrei, Thank God, stopped him. Even Frank Long wouldn't buy a
copy! $5 is too much for a book of all reprints, he said. How's that for
friendship? Thank God for Derleth and Wandrei I say. Warts and all, they
still took it upon themselves to do what no one else would dare. We are
all richer for it.

Dwayne -- (venting vociferously)

Excellent point, we *know* that novels have always sold better than
short stories. Now, since I know you've been through the letters,
please comment on the unsubstaniated rumor that one of the main
reasons that no publisher would touch THE OUTSIDER is the sheer size
of the volume.

Absolutely. Dwayne, the handwriting is all over the wall. It might not
have been until a decade later, but I'd be willing to bet that
Lovecraft would have been published, (if not by Ballantine, than by
Gnome, Prime, FPCI, or someone else).

The whole point of my post, I certainly do not believe in demonizing
Derleth, nor do I think he's a candidate for sainthood. The truth is
somewhere in the middle. Wandrei was a great writer and scholar, and
did much good for the field; it's also my opinion that he was mad as a
hatter.

Been there, done that... (three times so far) ;-) (God, I love the
real estate market in Seattle). ;-)

Agreed.
>
>Dwayne -- (venting vociferously)

Cheers,

John

According to Harold Munn it was HPL did the abandoning. Sonia attempted to
keep in touch. Harold told the story of HPL informing him that Sonia was
waiting for him at a train station during a lay-over expecting to spend
some time with him. But as Harold had come by they went for ice cream
instead. Harold knew & adored Sonia, & could not understand Howard's
ungentlemanliness nor his disinterest. He told me & Wilum this in response
to my query, "Is there even a slight possibility Howard attracted gay
friends cuz he was gay?" Harold didn't know, but being himself radically
heterosexual & corresponding with several women in a sexy way always
signing "Tom Cat," it was behond his comprehension that HPL had no sregard
whatsoever for women, & thought nothing of leaving even Sonia waiting &
waiting in a public place for an expected tryst.

If Lovecraft's aunt was acting as his literary executor, it's starting
to look again as if he died intestate.

I wonder if...

[going to check on something]

I'm not sure it is "bashing" to note Derleths flaws & faults, & if indeed
Randy's research is accurate, as it has every probability of being, even
to acknowledge his one life-long fraud in purporting to have legal
authority over the Lovecraft estate becomes merely what the evidence
shows. Your "So where was Sonia" could be regarded Sonia bashing, or could
be regarded a legitimate query. Where Sonia was was in the dark, kept
there intentionally, as were anyone else who might've had an actual legal
claim to the estate. And even if Derleth HAD become legal executor of the
literary estate, which he never became, that would not have constituted
outright ownership profitable exclusively to himself. He knew he was on
thin ice & throughout the history of Arkham during his life he protected
an illigitamate claim. And whether one believes the either unprovable or
unlikely idea that he did only good for HPL's place in history, none of
that legitimizes the complete take-over of an estate he had no legal claim
to. As well to say that if I rob your house, & use the procedes to fund a
business that does good work, then it was hunkydory that I robbed your
house.

Even if Sonia were removed from the picture (& she shouldn't have been) --
if it could have been shown legally that her claim could not be
substantiated -- the owner of these rights would STILL have been living
relatives of HPL, & NOT August Derleth. You may feel that mere distant
cousins or perhaps even someone who hadn't a clue they were even related
to HPL does not deserve the rights that were legally theirs -- just as
when I robbed your house I may not have believed you deserved such
wonderful books that I could put to better use & so took them & kept them
& felt totally justified.

Compare the eventual settlement of the REH estate in behalf of relatives
who could not personally have done much with his estate without executors
& agents & authorly devottees' efforts. So too HPL's legacy should NOT
have been hijacked, & I think Randy has it right in that Derleth would
have HAD to have been perpetually worried that someone, whether Sonia or a
distant cousin or anyone with a far more legitimate legal right to the
estate, could've whipped the rug out of him at any time, & so he
dissimilates in letters to Sonia pretending never to have profitted.

As for the multiple-rejections of a book bigger than most peoples'
mothers' tombs, that is only to be expected. Whittled down to a normal
book size for the 1950s, HPL was salable. At what point would the
salability of Lovecraft sans Derleth be convincing to you? The third
hardcover? The fifth paperback? The hundredth anthology appearance? I
think this goes beyond speculation -- it simply would've happened with or
without Derleth. Or it could've happened with Derleth in a more
above-board manner if he'd finagled to become LEGAL executor of the
literary estate, rather than just pretending outright ownership, & for
subsidiary rights in film, television, & anthologies kept only an agent's
fee rather than all of it. He wanted all of it & well knew he was
stealing. He may have justified itself internally -- you may believe in
those justifications -- but they are justifications for stealing & it
remains theft.

Much of Derleth's history remains unwritten or glossed over quickly by
"official" researchers like Joshi, I suspect, in defference to April, who
doesn't like anything said of certain of Augy's behaviors, some of which
in consequence become matters of gossip instead of academe. Since even
today someone could come out of the woodwork with claims against Arkham
House, Augy's fear may linger to this day. Even if all that could be
located was a third cousin thrice removed, in absence of any other
relative, that person would be owed a considerable sum & would require a
hugely belated accomodation.

I think your heart's in the right place Dwayne, but to believe LEGAL heirs
should've come forward on their own or they deserved not their rights
(when they were intentionally kept in the dark or lied to), really this in
no way justifies Derleth (or Wandrei's) illegitimate claims to the entire
estate. They could've published HPL legally & paid an expected royalty
into the estate; instead, Derleth glommed onto everything & pretended to
have the legal right to do so.

As you note Derleth kept up the correspondence with Sonia, & that
correspondence survives, & his claims to her, pretending that he never
made a dime off her husband at a time when he was selling rights
profitably left & right, can be doublechecked by anyone who disbelieves
Randy's assertions or believes his quotations are somehow out of context.
Now I'm on record disapproving of Randy's overall tone -- but the facts as
he has lays them out are pretty condemnatory without special annotation or
venom, in this one matter at least, whether or not Derleth could be
praised in other matters (I will always praise his regionalist ghost
stories which I regard his best work, at least for my tastes).

If it could shown that Derleth during this continuing correspondence with
Sonia had ever responded to her final-years financial desparation with
even a few hundred dollars now & then as a gift (keeping up the pretence
that nothing was actually owed, while still assisting her) that would
alleviate some small portion of his clear guilt. I would like to believe
he did at least that, but can't recall anyone documenting that it
happened. I've long hoped someone would counter Randy's material with
evidence that Derleth did help her; while I do not believe Randy would
trump up this material (I regard him as one of the BEST researchers for
factuality), I could imagine he MIGHT leave something else out if it were
at least SLIGHTLY favorable because he had/has such personal dislike for
the man. But if other of our "literary historians" feel they must either
respect (or suck up to) April by keeping mum about this stuff, then we are
left with tepid overviews that need ammendment from individuals like Randy
who knows as much or more than any of us (including Joshi) & provides a
much darker portrait. If we blend the tepid & the dark we find that Augy
did evil, & did good, & to attempt an overview that encompasses the whole
wouldn't be bashing.

I find myself in a position not totally unlike Augy's in that I have been
given authority over the literary estate of David Madison, to do with
pretty much as I will. He personally chose Andy Offutt, who had no
interest in the material, so it fell to me. I twice had (small) publishers
for two collections that would be pretty nearly his entire output. But the
project twice fell through. I still expect that someday someone who
remembers David will put these books at least momentarily in print, as the
stories are superb & merit preservation. I expect to make no money off
David's estate except in whatever copies of a limited edition I could
personally sell, which would doubtless be quite a few copies so in fact I
would eventually profit by it. But what if paperback rights DID result?
What if someone wanted to make a film of one of the tales? What if (as I
have already done) additonal tales were written by other hands set in the
world of David's creation? (Realistically this will never happen but
stranger things have.) To me it is clear what would be the result: David's
brother would get the lion's share of the royalties & I would get no more
than any other executor or agent would expect. If I used my initial
devotion to an unprofitable venture to justify keeping unexpected profits,
that'd make me a thief. That's exactly where Augy went astray, & as I
suspect he had a big decent streak nonetheless, I'm sure he suffered for
his crime, both from the guilt of having done it & from the life-long
worry that some relative would put an end to it. He went to his grave
never making it right. That shame is a permanent mark on his actual
history that takes no basher to acknowledge.

I was actually out looking for a text of any Lovecraft will, which I
didn't find, but I did find that there WAS a will of 1912
(http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/copyrights.htm), according to
Joshi, which did name H.P.L.'s aunt Annie Gamwell as his heir.
Admittedly, this will was written long before H.P.L. even contemplated
marriage with Sonia Greene, and her rights under it might still be
ensured by Rhode Island inheritance law. I'm assuming that R.I. would
have jurisdiction--because atheist Howard and Jewish Sonia were
improbably married in an Episcopal church in Providence there and the
marriage recorded in the state of R.I., right? I'd have to confirm the
place of marriage and R.I. marriage law as of the mid-1920's to have a
definite answer.

But, even so, Sonia made no attempt to assert any claims against the
estate while the will would have conceivably have been under probate.
I'm assuming that R.I. would have had a statutory period wherein such
claims must have been filed, rather than letting someone come back 3
decades after the death of the spouse (ex- or not) and trying to
advance such claims there. So, whatever, anyone did for her would
probably have been only out of good will towards her.

As an aside, and for an odd interlude with Mr. Alain Kersch, aka R.
Alain Everts, see this case: Brown University in Providence v. Kirsch,
757 F.2d 124(7th Cir. Wis. 1985). Turns out that there was some kind
of misunderstanding between him and Brown University over solicitation
by Mr. Everts of materials from various Lovecraft friends and
potential heirs (purportedly as a representative for Brown): Wilfred
B. Talman, Ethel Morrish, AND "Sonia Lovecraft Davis." Brown
University filed a replevin action to obtain these items of
"Lovecraftiana" back from Everts that he held in his possession &
posted a warning notice in the BOOKMAN that: "We wish to disclaim
having at any time authorized Mr. Kirsch to solicit or accept
Lovecraft or any other materials in the name of Brown University."
Everts counterfiled for libel against Brown and lost when the whole
thing wound up in federal court. I have no idea who was really in the
right on this one so make no pronouncements about it or judgments
about anyone; the case is public record, so you can read it
yourselves, if you'd like. At any rate, he sounds like a very
interesting human being, and I'd like to hear more about him and his
work.

>
> Dwayne -- (venting vociferously)

Wool-- (not so down on Derleth and finding this discussion to be
enthralling)

Hey, Johnny-O,

I don't wanna go

Look for wills and probates

down in Lovecraft's basement.

Hey Jim-bo,

I don't wanna go

Look for wills and Sonia's files

down in Lovecraft's basement.

There's something down there

Something with tentacles

In Lovecraft's basement.

How strange... I was listening to this song as I read this post.

Insert organ music here.

S!

http://www.oozingbrain.com

home to _Withered Spirits: The Works of Terry Lamsley
and _The Big F Webpage_ (diehards unite!)

I should have known that that hardboiled scribbler with pulp flakes in
his hemoglobin would know an exception to the rule or two: "Down these
mean streets, pulps is his business."

O.K., just wondering: how long did either run and what were their
circulations? They don't seem to be as common in online auctions as
WEIRD TALES or even the allegedly rare STRANGE TALES from the early
1930's. They aren't a regular pulp era item, so I'm not able to find
a publication run for either in my usual sources (like this:
http://www.adventurehouse.com/pulpdata/pulp_title_index.htm#sectA)

I recall a lot of those most commonly found pb's, and, while there
were a few copies of Chambers' THE KING IN YELLOW Ace editions and
some Lovecraft and the like, it seemed that names like Alfred Bester,
Fredrik Pohl, and Clifford D. Simak, plus endless Ace doubles were par
for the course. That's fine if you love sci fi, but I've always been
a horror and hardboiled mystery fan--even when I was 8 or 9 and looked
kind of silly in a trenchcoat and fedora with short pants.

Let's not forget the deans of them all: Richard Matheson and Charles
Beaumont.

As I have read the 3-volume Citadel edition for Bloch's collected
stories, I did notice a strong shift into suspense and more
conventional mystery settings and some science fiction during the
1950's, as his market changed. A few supernatural horror tales did
slip through, but not that many.

Frederic Brown: kind of mix, we have the stuff compiled in HONEYMOON
IN HELL but also plenty of MANHUNT-type materials. Not that I mind
MANHUNT-type materials, really. Guess he's a palpable hit on this.

Bradbury: his DARK CARNIVAL days were long past by the end of the
1950's, though a few extra tales, gathered in THE OCTOBER COUNTRY did
show up. I guess there a few items that showed up in THE ILLUSTRATED
MAN, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and elsewhere ("The Veldt," "Usher II,"
"Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!", "The Crowd") and some
EC comic scripts that qualify. Some of his sci fi's borderline to
weird fiction.

Sturgeon: Off and on including the great "Bright Segment," but more a
sci-fi'er.

"I claim this planet for Earth!"

"B-big D-deal!"

>
>
> Cheers,
>
> John

Hi Jessica,
Sadly, you seem to have misread my post on several levels. In
response to the implication that Derleth had stolen the rights to
Lovecraft, I simply listed the pertinent FACTS of the period 1937-1942,
to wit:

A. Upon Lovecraft's death, his literary rights passed to Annie Gamwell.

B. Upon Gamwell's death, those rights passed to Lewis and Morrish.

C. In 1942, Lewis and Morrish gave Derleth and Wandrei written
permission, not just to publish Lovecraft, but also to sell HPL
materials and to collect money for same.

I did not state that Derleth OWNED HPL, only that he was authorized to
act as he did. Later things get more confusing, but we'll cross that
bridge when we come to it.

"Sonia bashing"? I think not, as a full reading of that paragraph will
prove. Sonia made no claim on HPL rights for the plain and simple reason
that she didn't believe she had any. As far as she knew she was
divorced. In fact, at the time of HPL's death she was already remarried
and living in California. She didn't even know HPL had died until 1945!
This isn't her fault and I never claimed that it was. If the truth is
that the divorce was never finalized (and I believe that is the case --
apparently all HPL had to do was sign the papers, but he never got
around to it), it's also true that Annie Gamwell, Derleth and the Rhode
Island probate courts were as in the dark as Sonia was. That sort of
thing is not that uncommon, especially back in those days when divorce
and illegitimacy carried a strong social stigma. It's also one of the
reasons that States enact statutes of limitations. An example from my
own family history: Knowing what we now know of my Grandfather's true
parentage (which, by the way, HE didn't even know until he was in his
sixties), his sale of the South Dakota family homestead in the late
1920s would have to be judged illegal. It's a little late for redress
however.

Cycling back to Sonia (briefly): The simple fact is that no one knew of
that divorce glitch until Randy dug it up decades later. For a true look
at the relationship between Sonia and Derleth, which did have it's bumpy
patches, one would need to consult their correspondence in the WSHS. I
think I've got copies around here somewhere but I'm too lazy to dig at
the moment.

Now, before moving on to AH itself, a few other comments on Lovecraft
copyrights are in order: Everything that looked so clear in 1942 got
very muddled thereafter. In 1947, WEIRD TALES reassigned their Lovecraft
copyrights to Derleth and Wandrei and, in 1955, they signed a
survivorship agreement. This is where things start to get murky, as at
least some of those reassignments were for stories that had first
appeared in places other than WEIRD TALES. Then, sometime later (in the
late 60s?) the divorce snafu turned up. Yet another potential claimant,
a certain Robert(?) Harral turned up in Rhode Island not long
thereafter. Then, after Derleth died, things got really messy and there
ensued a 13 year long litigation (Wandrei v. Derleth Estate) which is,
to the best of my knowledge, the only time that Lovecraft rights have
been litigated (see my afterword to DON'T DREAM).

Which means? Well, there seem to be three potential claimants to the HPL
"Estate" (which, by the way, is a misnomer since the "HPL Estate", in
legal terms, was closed decades ago and rolled into the "Gamwell
Estate", etc etc): Derleth/Wandrei, Harral (who has the backing of
Joshi and a lot of Lovecraftians), and Sonia's descendants (who have the
backing of Randy and yourself). None is without merit, but, in my humbly
biased opinion, the Derleth/Wandrei argument is the strongest, both
because it does have some documentary support and, more importantly,
because the rival claimants did not challenge in a timely matter.

Please note that the above is only my laymans (one-time law student)
LEGAL opinion. As usual I remain scrupulously neutral as to matters of
Morality. :-)

Now, as to the mainstream rejections of HPL:
One of the rejections did cite length, the others (including proposals
for shorter books, even during Lovecraft's life) simply cited their
inability to sell story collections or material of that "type".
A bizarre irony to all of this was that Derleth and Wandrei might have
been able to mainstream the book had they known how much material was
available (remember, Barlow at this stage had HPL's unpublished
manuscripts). They insisted on a large book at least partly because they
were afraid it would be the only one and they wanted it to be the best
that it could be. Strangely, at least one publisher might have been more
interested in the book had they know of the possibility of several
volumes by the same author. That's actually a good selling point, as it
enables a publisher to build a market for an author, and also to sell
their backlist.

Now to John's comments, if I can remember thm after typing the above:

The point is not that no one would have published Lovecraft eventually,
but rather that it needed to be done right AND done quickly, before all
the unpublished material (including letters) went away. Barlow may have
meant well but he was a 17 year old neophyte with no connection to
professional markets. He was sloppy with the MSS in his possession
(witness the alternate version book that came out last year after
turning up in a trunk in Hawaii) and his vision of Lovecraft publication
was of the Futile and Recluse press variety. HPL would have been further
ghettoized, even beyond being considered, by the mainstreamers, as a
"'pulp writer" [insert sneer here]. The beauty of THE OUTSIDER was that
it gave HPL respectability. It was a large attractive volume that sold
out it's print run, even if it did take five years, and then became a
sought after item in the aftermarket. Arkham showed that it could be
done, and the mainstream publishers noticed. They also had a place to go
(Arkham) where they could acquire secondary rights for their own, later,
volumes of Lovecraft.

You know as well as I do how important that can be to a publisher, or an
editor. A contested or "missing" estate (see Cornell Woolrich and Gerald
Kersh, respectively, in recent years) can really bollocks up a
potentially "important" project. Likewise, an intransigent estate can
lock things up indefinately. Derleth and Wandrei were known to the New
York publishers and were in a perfect posistion to advance Lovecraft's
fame. Sure, with no Arkham House, Gnome or Shasta or someone else might
have published Lovecraft -- but would it have been to the same effect?
Or would Lovecraft have turned up in Timescape pbs now long OP and
selling for $30 or more apiece? Maybe. The one certainty is that one of
Lovecraft's major claims to fame, his correspondance, would have been
all but lost to us, as would a number of his manuscripts.

Finally, John, let me try a baseball analogy on you: Should we discount
the achievements of Babe Ruth simply because we've since seen a Mark
McGuire or a Sammy Sosa? Who cares if he hit 60 homeruns in a single
season? Someone else would have done it eventually.

Sometimes being first does mean something. Being first means showing the
way to others. If some of those coming behind later surpass you, so much
the better. Arkham broke a lot of ground and spawned a lot of copycats.
Some of their actions may be open to debate, as is the case with all of
us. But what remains, when all is said and done, is that they were there
first and they did it right (OK, except for those pesky typos and
corrupt texts :-) ).

One last thought for everyone: I've always been amazed at just how rabid
Lovecraftians, or any other fans, can be about their idols. Lovecraft is
a celebrity and, like all celebrities, his fans want a piece of him;
they want OWNERSHIP. I can't help but think that a lot of the most
active Derleth-haters and Arkham bashers are acting more out of spite
and jealousy than any true sense of righteous indignation. I do NOT, by
the way, include either Jessica or John in this category. There are
others, however, to whom this definately applies.

I'm tired now -- someone else write something.

:-Dwayne

If you peruse Judith Merrill's first three volumes of the Dell series of
year's best f/sf, you will find that SF as John suggested was not yet
narrowly defined, but was a hodgepodge which included much that was
clearly weird fiction. Ballentine also published anthologies that were an
even mix of horror, fantasy, & sf; & they published much that was simply
completely weird. Ace & Avon anthologies from the period (dashed together
by Don Wollheim) are more to the weird & fantasy side than to sf. Most of
it was reprinted from older magazines but not the Judy Merill books, those
were all contemporary tales. She really did anthologize the best of the
era, & just about every author she selected published a lot more than her
sampler. Probably more than any other anthologist she shaped my tastes as
a tiny-tiny reader, though Basil Davenport was a close second, & Don
Wollheim.

It was 1950s tales that reached me first, & I was steeped in these tales
by age ten. It was the decade of Ray Bradbury horrors, of John Wyndham, of
Sarban, of Blish's Demolished Man which I'd categorize as occult
detective. Fritz Leiber was publishing some of his best short stories & a
book that rivals Our Lady of Darkness in greatness THE SINFUL ONES. It was
the decade of Fredric Brown, Theodore Sturgeon, John Collier, William
Golding, Roald Dahl, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, of Robert Sheckley, of
Manly Wade Wellman.

The more I think of it the more the 1950s seems like THE decade of weird
fiction, as the best of Robert Bloch can be found in 1950s periodicals;
Frank Baker's TALK OF THE DEVIL; the recently reissued Nugent Barker's
WRITTEN WITH MY LEFT HAND; Charles Beaumont (ohmigod could anyone be
better than Charles Beaumont. Sure there could be, i.e., Davis Grubb!,
most of his best work from the 1950s). L. P. Hartley's THE WHITE WAND.
Shirley Jackson's COME ALONG WITH ME and HAUNTING OF HILLHOUSE, everything
of hers really. H. F. Heard's THE BLACK FOX. Isaac Singer's SATAN OF
GORAY. Philip K. Dick's COSMIC PUPPETS.

For seedier kinds of horror predicting where it would go into an
increasingly commercial futre, William March's THE BAD SEED is still being
revisited every year by the latest Evil Child books hardly exceeding the
1954 original in effect. Or Wheatley's TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER and KA OF
GIFFORD HILLARY. John Blackburn's SCENT OF NEW MOWN HAY. The first Pan
Book of Horror.

Lingering pulps included not only F&SF which preferred fantasy & the weird
under Anthony Boucher's direction, and IF which included considerable of
the weird, but also BEYOND which included only weird with cool-cool stuff
by Sturgeon, Jerome Bixby, etc.; ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE which
featured a good may ghost stories throughout its history, ditto ALFRED
HITCHCOCKS founded 1956; DREAM WORLD which lasted a scant three issues;
long-running FANTASTIC ADVENTURES which under Ray Palmer definitely
preferred weird & fantasy over s-f; the last reprint issues of FAMOUS
FANTASTIC MYSTERIES; Lester del Rey's shortlived but excellent FANTASY
FICTION MAGAZINE; Ray Palmer's MYSTIC which was a weird fiction magazine
for its first year of issues & afterword became another FATE with the
fiction dropped; Joe Brennan's MACABRE which debuted in 1957; Robert
Arthur's radio tie-in pulp THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLER which featured regular
weird fiction, same authors & types of stories he chose while
ghost-editing Alfred Hitchcock anthologies; another shortlived radio
tie-in pulp TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED; SUPERNATURAL STORIES in England,
mostly by Fanthorp under a bazillion pen names. WEIRD TALES itself ran
until 1954. This is one fuck of a lot of pulp fiction for a decade that
may have sounded but was not through sounding the deathknell of the pulps,
& even as I decided to stop listing them about ten more start springing to
mind (Monster Parade, Phantom, Out of This World, Suspense, A Merritt's
Fantasy Magazine &c &c), & now I'm thinking there were just as many in the
1960s....

--

Before anyone was "left behind" a battle raged for
the soul of one man. Fearmonger, a novel.
http://www.walterlane.com

snip

I'll snip the response to Jessica's post before this all gets more
muddled than Lovecraft's Estate... ;-)

So we are actually in agreement? There *was* even immediately after
Lovecraft's death sufficient interest in mainstream publication of
Lovecraft that it's quite possible a more commercially-sized
collection maay well have been picked up?

This is very admirable, the letters I've read seem to indicate that
the thinking was to create a "memorial edition" containing as much
material as possible. Certainly a laudable ambition, but probably not
commercially viable in the days where 200-page story collections were
considered quite acceptable.

Yep.

The Barlow situation is a wrinkle I'll admit to not having considered.
I'm not sure how much I buy that as a hazard to Lovecraft's eventual
mainstreaming considering that THE SHUNNED HOUSE and THE SHADOW OVER
INNSMOUTH had already been published. I certainly can't claim to know
if the young Barlow would have heeded any advice to shoot for better
markets or not, but what you suggest is certainly plausible enough.

*sighs* Brennan...

Agreed.

Agreed in part. I'm afraid that you're probably right about his
correspondence, but I'm equally confident that even had Arkham House
not existed at all there would have been no shortage of publishers
(likely in NY) that would have realized in short order that here was
an author that merited publication.

I'm certainly not discounting the fine work of either Derleth or
Wandrei, but the appropriate baseball analogy might be that of Cap
Anson garnering 3000 hits. A very impressive feat, but one
accomplished by a player being very good for a long time. It was only
a matter of time until someone else did it.

There are far, far more positives than negatives in Arkham's history.
However, to (again) illuminate the first negative that I brought up,
(the rather poor marketing and presentation of certain books and
authors); it's all the more frustrating when you look at the generally
high level of presentation of Lovecraft, Smith, Wandrei, Derleth,
Howard, Whitehead, Hodgson, that we see a sort of half-assing it on
Metcalfe & Blackwood.

This (and the thread on the 1950's & 1960's) are among the most
interesting discussions we've had in a good little while...

Now let me toss a question your way, as you may have seen
correspondence dealing with this subject... I can't imagine that
Arkham's business plan ever considered keeping titles in print for
twenty years to be an optimum state of affairs. Why did they persist
in the (to my mind) ruinous policy of discouraging aall but a handful
of book dealers from buying product? Why no attempt to go through
regular distribution channels?

I know I do pretty much the same thing, but I'm dealing with much
smaller print runs...

Cheers,

John

>Fact is, even 2,000 copies is a mere blip. If a television program had
>2,000 viewers max; if a singer sold 2,000 CDs; if a newspaper had a
>circulation of 2,000 -- they for all intent & purposes don't exist.

oddly enough, i keep getting all these print ads about CD
I can print as low as 150 copies with inserts....
so basicaly you can do as little as 150 copies - if you sell down 100, you do
more ---
and it's not just really small folks doing this, some national acts are
doing "internet & venue" copies only ----

sr
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------
Don't forget to Delete "Unspam" if you wish to e- mail me.

join the FelixTheCat list at www.yahoogroups.com
.

(Snipped)

(Snipped)

> :-Dwayne

With all due respect to Jessica, Randy Everts, and anyone else
asserting Sonia's claim to Lovecraft's estate, I cannot imagine Sonia
ever making such a claim and thereby calling attention to her
unintentional bigamy. From what I have read about her this would have
been a painful subject she would rather not discuss with anyone, even
at the point of extremity. I cannot see her crawling to Derleth behind
the scenes begging for subsistence on the basis of her own shameful
failure to properly divorce her second husband. Is there a written
(vs. a conjectural) record of her ever broaching the subject of
Lovecraft's royalties with Derleth?

Even if Derleth had known that Sonia and Lovecraft had not legally
divorced, I doubt he would have considered this a legal obstacle to
his own control of Lovecraft's writings. IF Derleth knew of the
divorce debacle and failed to mention it, he may have done so simply
out of concern over Sonia's feelings and the rather poor light it cast
on Lovecraft rather than out of any attempt to wrest control from what
might be perceived as Lovecraft's legitimate heirs.

Jim

Flattered as I should be, The Golden Dawn was certainly *not* Theosophical.

Kind regards,

Theo

woolrich wrote:

(snip)

> >We are a kind of mystery religion, a Theosophical Order of
> the Golden Dawn,

(snip)

In what manner were the Golden Dawners not theosophists? Theosophy is ANY
religious system that embrances the hermetic and the occult believing
enlightenment & connection with a divine realm is possible through study,
meditation, & personal insight, & set up pathways from noviciate to
enlightened being whether that enlightened being is called a Mahatma or
Aleister Crowley. They glommed onto several heavily christianized
kabbalistic ideas, tossed a faux layer of paganism on top of that, then
let everyone make up their own system of hermetic occult malarky. It was
white European theosophy, & many were just as steeped in the equally faux
Eastern theosophy promolgated foremost by Madame Blavatsky -- & note that
A. Crowley gave Blavatsky the title Master of the Temple within his Golden
Dawn system spiritual grades or assentions, & one of Crowley's key
teaching tools was Blavatsky's Voice of the Silence which he reissued from
his own pocket-money to sell to students of the Ordo Templi Orientis (from
which L. Ron Hubbard got his main ideas for Scientology). And Crowley late
in life claimed that the central purpose of his Liber LXXI was to "bring
back Theosophy." He hoped a closer alliance between Blavatskians & other
hermetic remnants might help occult crackpotism regain its former glory,
which between the wars never regained the cache it had in the late
Victorian era.

Let's take Yeats as one of the most famous of the Golden Dawners. He felt
the Order obliged or encouraged him to study Indian myth, Swedenborg,
Boehm, Blavatskian Theosophy, & the Kabbalah. He was involved in the
Esoteric Section of Blavatsky's Theosophical Society in 1889, & a year
later resigned from the Esoteric Section. No one really knows whether or
not he cut off his broader association with Blavatskians after getting
peeved with the Esoteric Section, but he was thereafter more associated
with the Isis Uranian Temple of the Golden Dawn, which took its magikal
motto ""Demon est Deus Inversus" from Blavatsky's crackpot teachings in
The Secret Doctrine. Throughout this period he was pals with Maud Gonne
who seems to have been responsible for his association both with
Blavatskians & Golden Dawners.

Or look at the later Dion Fortune who claimed (a la Madame Blavatsky) to
be in continuous personal communication with higher beings that directed
all her creative & philosophical endeavorings. Fortune at every level
seems to be a carbon copy of Blavatsky, except Fortune wrote the more
polished fantasy tales. Fortune like Blavatsky performed magic tricks at
the drop of a hat, convincing many she had observable occult powers. While
involved with the Golden Dawn she was simultaneously involved in the
Christian Lodge of the Theosophical Society. There was no dissonance
between the two teachings whatsoever, but there certainly was a clash of
her controlling personality & the established bigwigs among the
overlapping groups. When Fortune was squeezed out of the Golden Dawn as a
betrayer of secret rituals, she founded her own version of the Golden Dawn
consisting mainly of individuals disillusioned with the London Chapter of
the Theosophical Society, & G.D. followers of Theodore Moriarity he having
passed away & his students regarded Fortune as inheriting the crown. Their
Society of the Inner Light found no great distinction between Golden Dawn
and Blavatskian teachings. Fortune as much as Blavatsky's theosophists
persist to this day; visit their unintentionally comical website here:
http://www.innerlight.org.uk/

Blavatskians & Golden Dawners shared many of the same texts (including
those of Blavatsky herself notably Isis Unveiled, but also such works as
the Chaldaean Oracles & Hermes Trismegistus so central to G.D. obsessions
& on every Blavatskian's bookshelf as well). Golden Dawners were also
seriously & racistly inspired by the Germanic theosophy of the
Rosicrucians & by the angel lore (clearly theosophic in nature) of
Swedenborg, whose angels resemble gnostic aeons & kabbalistic sephiroth.

Some few may have tried to draw distinctions between G.D. Hermetics & the
pretend-eastern school of Theosophy but the distinction withers when both
use the same texts & share overlapping membership rosters. Golden Dawners
tried to trump up the idea of being a neo-Rennaissance Secret Society
which was all pose, while Blavatskians wanted to win converts among the
masses -- that makes G.D. equivalent of Jesuits & Blavatskians equivalent
of Jehova's witnesses but that doesn't mean either the Jesuits or the
Witnesses aren't christians. The REAL distinction between
Crowly-brownnosers & Blavatsky's brown-nosers is Dawners misunderstood
Judaic lore foremost, & Blavatsky misunderstood the Vedas, but both shared
belief in the christio-hermetic Egyptian tradition, both were fleeing
their own EuroChristian foundation & fleeing it very imperfectly, &
finding themselves & their desires reflected in Gnostic Christian
fragments (since all but a few very strange Jews deplored these
self-loathing christians' misconstrued ideas about classical kabbalism, &
it became easier to embrace the Jesus-oriented Gospel of the Pistis Sophia
-- the Golden Dawn system acknowledged Jesus as Christ, calling him Master
of Masters. Regardie tried to stop the utter Christian tendency but
failed).

Even the division if Indic-yogic-Egyptian vs christiojudaic-Egyptian falls
apart when one looks where Golden Dawners had their own plebian
memberships; the Yorkshire Horus Temple had members in Hindustan. In India
today scholars are still grappling with the western fascination for &
misconceptions about Indian culture & faith. The majority of the modern
scholarship on key Golden Dawn members, Blavatsky followers, & individuals
such as Marie Corelli, coming from Indian universities, where their
spiritual quests are oddly enough often taken seriously, & the more
ridiculous the English writer the more fascination remains in India (where
Corelli is perpetually in print in English & in three Indian languages).

G.D.'s key Isis figure is the same as the aeon Sophia (aka Thelema
according to Crowley & Regardi) or the sephirah Binah (rather than
Chokhmah who was apt to be regarded as male). Golden Dawn giant William
Wynn Westcott drew comparisons between the Sophianic Isis and such wordly
mystics as Madame Blavatsky & Anna Kingsford whom he clearly admired & in
whose systems he found close affinity, though his point making the
comparison to counter a tendency toward profound sexism among Golden
Dawners, Rosicrucians, & Isisian Freemasons which Dr Westcott believed
could destroy the Golden Dawn path of enlightenment.

Finally I would lend as evidence of a certain sameness the influence on
the Golden Dawn of avowed Theosophist G. I. Gurdjieff. I presume it is
through Gurdjieff that the Golden Dawners acknowledged that the so-called
"Secret Chiefs of the Third Order" were identical to Blavatsky's Mahatmas,
but whatever his influences, the systems overlap in every phase, & both
the Blavatskians & the Golden Dawners were theosophists through & through;
both are hermetic, both occult, & share many of the same misreadings of
the same mythologies.

I have a stash of very old Inner Light, Theosophical, & similar "occult
club" magazines & quite like them; they include many outright fantasy
stories often well told, & a number of authors completely unknown outside
Theosophic historian circles (though the overlap with fantasy researchers
is considerable, Kenneth Morris having published the majority of his
fantasies in these sorts of journals). Though I recognize such authors as
crackpots through & through, many of them fleeing from some level of
fundamental christianity, I find their very madnesses or stressed-out
rejection of (or being rejected by) "normal" christians infuses their
writings with something rather fascinating.

I myself had no direct contact with her, but in the early 1970s (exact
dates I don't recall) when I was living in NYC, I knew someone (Jim Freund, if
anyone knows the name) who spoke to her in the nursing home in New Jersey, and
I did not get the impression that she considered herself in a bad way.
It was also at that time that I first heard of Everts, in connection with
the Grill collection, where I was warned to not let him anywhere near the rarer
items left they leave with him. I do not know the accuracy of the charges,
but would probably not want to test them to this day.
Mark Owings

An intriguing comment. When was this? To my knowledge, in Baltimore
starting in 1961 and until the store folded in 1971, and in Washington from
1963 until the owner retired in 1969, there were at least one general book
store that carried multiple copies of each new Arkham title and occasional
older ones. (I bought my copies of DARK OF THE MOON and THE FEASTING DEAD in
the early sixties at George Friend's shop in DC I know -- the rest I am not
sure of now.)
Schilll's in Baltimore bought several copies of whatever Augie announced as
low in stock, though I suspect them of salting away whatever went o.p. for
later markup.
Mark Owings

Up until recent years booksellers could certainly order from Arkham
House, but they always had to deal with their "no discount or you're
cut off" policy and seemed to eschew distributors other than F & SF
Book Co. I started buying Arkhams from Stu Schiff many years ago and
remember when he got the "cease and desist" letter as he was offering
a 10% discount on orders of $25 or more. Back then that was good for
about five or six titles. ;-)

University Bookstore in Seattle carries Arkham (and many other small
presses) and their buyer mentioned what a pain it used to be to get
books from them. (This goes back to the Meng days).

Cheers,

John

Circulations I do not know, but the former was always on a news-stand I
could find and the latter from a mail-order dealer, it being a British
publication.
MOH ran 1963 to 1971, with companion titles STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES and
WEIRD FANTASY TALES being effective doublets during much of that time. The
Badger series (arguably anthologies rather than a magazine) ended in 1967 and
began somewhere in the late 1950s, I think.
Yes, they are really hard to find. The Badgers are not worth paying much
for.
Mark Owings

In article <20020831151900...@mb-bj.aol.com>, otzc...@aol.com
(Otzchiim) wrote:

The disdain for Everts was out of protectiveness toward Derleth -- every
time he found more evidence of evil-doing, apparently including sexual
liasons few could justify, Randy would let the information be known. A
small group of people who wanted to purchase a Chair in memory of Derleth
as a leading regionalist writer (rather than as W.T. figure), they had
already been turned down because it was known throughout academe he liked
young men, sometimes a little too young, & Derleth had left a trail of his
own enemies who lasted long in positions to deprive his memory of honors.
His champions were themselves homophobes, so rather than fighting the
homophobia decided instead that parts of Augy's personality & behavior
should be increasingly hidden. But Augy himself gave very revealing
letters into public-accessible collections, & any researcher who wanted to
make him look less than godly would not have much trouble doing so.

The instant Randy failed to return on time some properly checked out
material, police were sent after him. This was soon thereafter dismissed
as folly on the library's part, but by then the feud was in place, & a few
special-collection librarians & Derlethians who hate Randy enough to
spread false rumors about him. I well know how rumors start -- David
Langford published an apology & retraction after maligning Andre Norton
claiming she was on the rampage trying to destroy my own career (when in
reality she was so kind to me as to write an introduction to one of my
poetry books, & wrote one of her best novelettes specifically for me). She
threatened to sue Langford over it but never did. Despite retractions, the
half-deaf cockeyed fat fantastically ugly & STUPID bitch who told David
Langford these whoppers continued forever after to say it was all true &
that Langford just whimped out. Not even a seed of truth, but the rumor is
eternal. This is what has happened to Randy. Since the Defenders of
Derleth really can't deny the facts of Augy's life without themselves
burning the evidence, all they really have for their side is a willingness
to malign an honest but sometimes angry chap like Randy.

Even if we cant always embrace every aspect of Randy's ATTITUDE toward the
facts, we have him to thank for never being careless with or furtive about
what those facts really were. The sorry side-effect of huge Special
Collections inclusive of very personal revelations is that survivors (&
librarians) frequently do not want the facts revealed in these collections
known by anyone else. Such censorship is actually standard -- for years
certain Twain collections could not be accessed without agreeing neither
to quote nor copy from them because those were the conditions behind the
gift, his widow being fearful that his anti-christian stuff would be
detrimental. So head librarians tend to take it for granted they can
indeed decide which part of a collection can be used in a published essay.
Randy would never stop using the most maligning facts & so he made
enemies. Censorship & secrecy is accepted in academe as fine & proper, but
not accepted by Randy.

Nowadays it might seem silly that Twain's comic criticisms of Christianity
should for years be censored, or evidence of Martin Luther King's sexual
liasons be obvious from Special Collections but never quoted by anyone but
people who didn't like him. But up to the 1970s, probably later than that,
this stuff could be career-busting, reputation-destroying. There's a
library that owns a big batch of my own personal papers including some
letters written during a time I was in a sadomasochistic relationship with
a dyke named Lainy. There have been times I've regretted letting those
letters go in the lot, & if I ever reach a time in life when I'm ashamed
of it, or if I have heirs who are ashamed of it in my behalf, it's too
fucking late. But in this era s/m has become almost a cliche fashion, &
not quite as shocking as Derleth's faggotry may have seemed in 1975, & as
it certainly seemed in the midwest in his lifetime.

The few times I ever looked into any of the "reasons" people had for
maligning Randy, they turned out either to be lying outright, or repeating
gossip from people who were lying outright. He has a way of making some
people dislike him. Personally I like him tremendously. WHen I've
disagreed with him about something (disagreeing with an attitude; one
could never contradict his facts & be in the right) he has been happy to
listen. But if people who are actually doing wrong fuck with him, he gets
mad & stays mad, & feuds develop.

But believe it. Anyone who dislikes Randy is covering up some wrongdoing
of their own. Because the only rational reason to dislike him would be
that he is tempermental & holds grudges if actually abused. He is
otherwise kindness incarnate & I know enough of the ACTUAL reason for
abusive rumors to say categorically that he is trustworthy & honest.

For example, he held a grudge against Sam Moskowitz for claiming as his
own research material by & about William Hope Hodgson that was shared with
him by Randy who had invested years accumulating material Moskowitz was
totally reliant upon. It was Randy's research EXCLUSIVELY but SaM claimed
it as his own. Randy never forgave him. Furthermore, when he found the
final documentation for the exact moment & cause of Hodgson's death, which
Moskowitz had entirely wrong, he put it all in a file & never shared it
with ANYone -- as a kind of vengeance for having been robbed. Now one
could say he overreacted in not even publishing the further research with
his name on it, & is being childish to keep a significant piece of the
puzzle hidden away in his files, depriving all of us over the crimes of
one man, SaM. I sure don't think he should've done that. But the bottom
line is SaM did something extremely wrong & profited by it in reputation &
in cash & couldn't even admit it was every bit of it Randy's research.

In just about every case, Randy has had a BIG reaction that helped no one,
not even himself, over maltreatment & slights that were wrongly imposed on
him. If he'd shrugged a lot of it off & been forgiving by nature, it might
have quickly evaporated, but it is the nature of feuding that one's foe
keeps telling whatever lies they want to tell, having a rat-terrier
attached their own actual crimes & having only lies to defend themselves
with.

But whatever fault of grudge-holding one may observe in Randy's otherwise
decent & gentlemanly personality, I do not believe anyone has EVER been
able to show any factuality underling the rumors that are spread by
champions of Derleth & protectors of HPL-Derlethiana. It's always a matter
of someone honest & angry (Randy) vs those who would either steal or
stymie his superior research.

And it is ourselves who have been harmed by the type of untrue malices
that even you, Mark, have been willing to believe for decades. Because now
Randy has gone on to Sanskrit studies & is not likely ever to publish many
of invaluable histories of dozens of Weird Tales authors he found in their
later years, visited, & interviewed before they were gone from this world.
I would dare say Randy as researcher qualifies as a Great Man, & if not
for his willingness to feud with bastards, more people would know this.