Eldritch Tales

by H. P. Lovecraft

  But there was still one final glitch to overcome before the collection could go ahead. At 6:00 p.m. on November 22, a frantic Gollancz cable-phoned Derleth:

  LURKER UNARRIVED. PLEASE AIRMAIL ARKHAM HOUSE EDITION IMMEDIATELY.

  Derleth wrote back to John Bush two days later: ‘I was sorry to learn by cable yesterday that the copy of The Lurker at the Threshold I had dispatched almost a month ago had not yet reached you. I sent off another copy by first-class airmail, and this ought to come to hand at about the same time as this letter.’

  Not only did this replacement copy of Lurker arrive at the Gollancz offices on November 27, but the other edition Derleth had dispatched in October was also finally delivered on December 5.

  ‘I’m glad to know that at least one copy of The Lurker at the Threshold turned up!’ Derleth wrote in a letter dated December 2, 1967. ‘Arkham House books are such collector’s items over here that books are frequently stolen from the mails – evidently by postal service personnel who recognize the label on the parcel.’

  At the same time, over and above his usual author’s allowance, Derleth ordered an extra 200 copies of the forthcoming Gollancz collection, because, as he had explained in his letter of November 24: ‘Since it reprints material now out of print with us, we will probably want to order a larger number of copies when publication looms.’ According to a notation, these copies – presumably for re-sale through Arkham House – were apparently invoiced at half the cover price.

  With publication set for May 1968, Gollancz for some reason sent a proof copy to their solicitors, Rubinstein, Nash & Co in London’s Gray’s Inn. In a note dated April 2, the legal firm’s consultant, H.F. Rubinstein, made the pithy observation: ‘This consists of stories previously published – presumably without libel trouble resulting.’

  The book was issued under Derleth’s suggested title of The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror at a price of thirty shillings. The front dust-wrapper flap candidly admitted: ‘When we published H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon we made the claim that we had completed publication of his works. In this we were wrong. We received several letters from members of the public giving us names of stories that were not included in any of our three collections. On investigation, we found that there was a novel, The Lurker at the Threshold, and also two novellae [sic] and five stories outstanding, together with nine stories completed and edited by his friend, publisher and Literary Executor, August Derleth. It is these latter sixteen items that make up the present volume.’

  Apparently, the Gollancz copywriter had got confused (or wasn’t very good at mathematics). The five stories and two ‘novellae’ by Lovecraft said to be in the book were actually six stories: ‘In the Vault’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘Cool Air’, ‘The Terrible Old Man’, ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. The rest of the volume was rounded out with ten of Derleth’s so-called ‘posthumous collaborations’, as the dust-jacket blurb helpfully explained: ‘Among the papers left by Lovecraft, and found after his death, were various outlines for works which he did not live to write . . . the scattered notes were put together by August Derleth whose finished stories evolved from Lovecraft’s suggested plots.’

  No doubt many Lovecraft purists would take exception to that last statement. The second half of the book consisted of ‘Stories by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’: ‘The Survivor’, ‘Wentworth’s Day’, ‘The Peabody Heritage’, ‘The Gable Window’, ‘The Ancestor’, ‘The Shadow Out of Space’, ‘The Lamp of Alhazred’, ‘The Fisherman of Falcon Point’, ‘The Dark Brotherhood’ and ‘The Shuttered Room’.

  After all the problems with obtaining a copy, and John Bush’s assertion to Derleth in his December 7 letter that ‘we shall certainly be including The Lurker at the Threshold’ in the book, that collaborative novel was notably missing from the contents of Gollancz’s new Lovecraft collection!

  Back in his initial letter to Victor Gollancz in May 1950, August Derleth had mentioned that Museum Press had published The Lurker at the Threshold in Britain under both Lovecraft’s and his byline.

  ‘This is, however, decidedly inferior work,’ he added with unusual candour, ‘since 9/10ths of it was written by me from Lovecraft’s notes. Yet it has done well enough for them that, in the face of my refusal to permit their publication of the Lovecraft stories in collection, they have asked for a volume of my own tales in this genre, and this is at present being prepared in ms. by my secretary. (This, too, I hasten to add, is secondary work.)’

  Interestingly, although no such collection of Derleth’s stories ever appeared from Museum Press, they did reprint one other Arkham House title – The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long – in 1950.

  The Lurker at the Threshold, published under both Lovecraft’s and Derleth’s names by Arkham House in 1945, was a slim novel based upon a fragment, ‘The Round Tower’, and other unrelated notes and story ideas discovered amongst Lovecraft’s papers following his death. Taken together, this material reportedly amounted to only around 1,200 words.

  ‘I constructed and wrote The Lurker at the Threshold,’ revealed Derleth later on, ‘which had nowhere been laid out, planned, or plotted by Lovecraft.’

  The book was reputedly reprinted in Argentina in 1946 by Editorial Molino before Museum Press produced their own British edition two years later.

  During the contractual problems about who controlled the British rights to the Lovecraft material, Derleth had complained to Victor Gollancz in his letter of July 3, 1950, that Otis Kline Associates had sold The Lurker at the Threshold to Museum Press through the Pearn, Pollinger & Higham literary agency ‘at a figure which did not inspire me with confidence in either of the firms which undertook to place material’.

  After originally considering including the short novel in The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror, John Bush apparently changed his mind and decided that, as they had done with The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in 1951, the tale was strong enough to stand on its own.

  As a result, The Lurker at the Threshold was issued as a separate hardcover volume in 1968 at twenty-five shillings (£1.25) and reprinted the following year. ‘Lovecraft did not himself finish The Lurker at the Threshold,’ admitted the jacket copy. ‘Notes and plans for the book were left at his death, and enough had been done to indicate the direction of the plot.’

  Eighteen years after he had made his first approach to Victor Gollancz, August Derleth finally had a book of his own published by the yellow-jacketed imprint (albeit in conjunction with his late friend and mentor).

  With the publication of The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales of Horror, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror and The Lurker at the Threshold, Gollancz had finally issued all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in the United Kingdom. Or had they . . . ?

  The publisher was still receiving letters from devout readers who continued to come up with missing titles from Gollancz’s Lovecraft canon.

  One such was R. Denton (Mr) from Folkestone, Kent, who wrote to the publisher in February 1970 to point out that he had read another of Lovecraft’s ‘collaborations’ – ‘Out of the Eons’ by Hazel Heald – in a paperback edition of August Derleth’s anthology The Sleeping and the Dead. ‘Surely, as both your four collections and this anthology have in common August Derleth as editor, there is no excuse for this story’s omission from your collections,’ complained an obviously disgruntled Mr Denton.

  He went on to mention the San Francisco rock band which had adopted Lovecraft’s name, and revealed that the album sleeve notes referred to the author’s poem cycle ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’. ‘Poems?!’ exclaimed Mr Denton. ‘This may, of course, be another one of those commercial “things”, or an attempt to identify H.P. Lovecraft (the author) as the original beat/hippy. Nevertheless, I feel you should investigate, and perhaps you will find it necessary to publish yet a f
ifth collection. I eagerly await your reply.’

  Clearly exasperated, John Bush still took the time to respond: ‘We rather despair of ever being able to publish every story that Lovecraft wrote or had a hand in,’ he acknowledged in a letter dated February 9. ‘However much we believe – in conjunction with information given us by August Derleth – that we have really got every one, we seem to find that there is something we have missed out.’

  Maybe, with this admission, it was time to let some other publisher take up the Lovecraft mantle in Britain . . .

  3: Licence to Chill

  Although Victor Gollancz would reprint new hardcover editions of its first four Lovecraft volumes intermittently during the 1960s and ’70s, the company had purchased English language volume rights throughout the British Commonwealth (excluding Canada) in its initial dealings with Arkham House.

  As a result, they were at liberty to sell paperback rights to the H.P. Lovecraft works in those territories they controlled to another publisher, if they so chose.

  As Gollancz was not producing mass-market softcover books during this period, in July 1962 the publisher signed a five-year contract with Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd, owners of the Panther Books imprint, to publish The Haunter of the Dark and Other Stories (this is the title on the contract) in paperback. Hamilton & Co. paid Gollancz a £200.00 advance against the usual royalty for the sub-rights to this uniquely British Lovecraft collection.

  In February the following year, Panther published The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales of Terror at three shillings and sixpence. While the uncredited cover painting adapted an image of the monster from Hammer Films’ The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), the contents were the same as the 1951 Gollancz volume. The paperback edition sold well, and it was reprinted in 1965. The license was presumably extended for another five years in 1968, before being renewed for apparently a further eight years in 1973.

  Boasting a much classier cover painting, the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was also issued in a single softcover edition by Panther in May 1963. The publisher was obviously doing well with its Lovecraft reprints – so well, in fact, that they went elsewhere for their next Lovecraft volume.

  With all the existing Gollancz material at that time now published in paperback in Britain, Panther apparently decided to put together its own original collection of Lovecraft’s work.

  The result, published in November 1964 and entitled The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, took its title from a 1947 American paperback released by the Avon Book Company (and reissued in the late 1950s and early 1960s in both the US and UK as Cry Horror!). However, because the British rights to some stories were already being held by Gollancz, the contents were significantly different.

  This new compilation contained ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Shunned House’, ‘In the Vault’, ‘Arthur Jermyn’, ‘Cool Air’, ‘The Moon-Bog’, ‘The Nameless City’, ‘The Unnamable’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘The Terrible Old Man’, ‘The Hound’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’.

  Not only did it contain six stories that would appear in the subsequent Gollancz edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, and another from At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror, but the collection also included all six of the remaining Lovecraft stories that John Bush would belatedly gather together in The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror some four years later!

  As a consequence of these differing contents, the Shadow Out of Time volume eventually saw print in Britain in an abridged paperback version.

  In March 1968, Panther Books bought the sub-rights for five years to At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror for an advance of £150.00. In May the following year, Panther also contracted for the Dagon collection, splitting it into two volumes, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales and The Tomb and Other Tales. They paid an advance of £150.00 for each book.

  Both collections appeared in paperback that same year. The six stories that had already been published in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories were dropped, and the remaining contents slightly re-ordered to balance out the two volumes.

  Following Gollancz’s lead, Panther issued the short novel The Lurker at the Threshold as a single volume in 1970. Although both H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth are credited as authors, you would have to look very closely at the cover to spot the latter’s name.

  Also released that same year, for a £300 advance for the rights in a contract dated January 2, 1970, Panther’s edition of The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror contained just the ten ‘posthumous collaborations’ between the two authors that had originally appeared in The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror.

  Across the Atlantic, Ballantine Books had been successfully publishing Lovecraft in paperback in America for a number of years. In the early 1970s, as part of their innovative ‘Adult Fantasy’ imprint edited by Lin Carter, they decided to repackage some of the author’s ‘dream’ stories and other tales into new editions.

  As the ‘Adult Fantasy’ series was also being imported into Britain through a co-publishing deal with Pan Books, this apparently sent alarm bells ringing in the Gollancz offices.

  On July 9, 1971, Giles Gordon wrote to August Derleth in Sauk City: ‘There seems to be a little confusion about the rights situation in our market in some of the Lovecraft stories which we have contracted with you for. We have heard that Ballantine are planning to publish early next year two volumes in our territory under the titles The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Doom That Came to Sarnath.’

  He went on to point out that twenty of the stories Ballantine proposed to include in their two volumes had previously appeared in the Gollancz editions of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales and At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror. ‘Both books which we published in this market holding the exclusive territories from you. Likewise, both books are published in paperback editions here by Panther. They are currently in print in the Panther editions, Panther having sub-contracted for the paperback rights with ourselves.’

  After quoting from the pertinent clause in the contract, Gordon concluded his letter: ‘No doubt you will agree that the two proposed Ballantine volumes would be in clear violation of the rights you have granted us as both their proposed books reproduce in substantial part our two volumes.

  ‘We very much hope you will be able to give us your assurance as soon as possible that the Ballantine editions will not be sold in the exclusive market which you have granted us.’

  What Giles Gordon did not know at the time was that August Derleth had died unexpectedly five days earlier. The man who had almost single-handedly championed the work of his friend H.P. Lovecraft for more than three decades, and who had orchestrated all the dealings between Arkham House and Victor Gollancz, had never fully recovered from gall bladder surgery. He was just 62 years old.

  Despite the death of its co-founder, Arkham House continued, initially under the guidance of Forrest D. Hartmann, an attorney in the Wisconsin firm of Hill, Quale & Hartmann who represented the Estate of August Derleth.

  In a letter dated November 22, 1971, and copied to Gollancz, Hartmann wrote to Don R. Benson at Ballantine Books: ‘I am still staggering under the enormous task presented by the death of August Derleth,’ he began. ‘However, slowly I am getting control of things and this letter is in regard to one of the problems that should have been taken care of months ago.’

  Hartmann included a copy of Giles Gordon’s letter and observed, ‘If the facts are true as stated, it would seem that the Gollancz people have a very legitimate concern.’ He went on to suggest that Ballantine resolve the matter to everyone’s satisfaction and that Benson reply directly to the British publisher.

  ‘Though it is unfortunate that this matter has not been called to your attention earlier,’ concluded Hartmann, ‘it has been very difficult for me to handle some of these matters not being familiar with August Derleth’s agreements and contracts. However, now
that things are better organized, I can assure you of my fullest cooperation in handling any matters such as these.’

  As it turned out, the problem had already been dealt with during the intervening four months. On November 26, Giles Gordon wrote to Forrest Hartmann: ‘It was kind of you to write the letter you did to Ballantine Books, but I am delighted to tell you that some months ago they agreed not to proceed any further with attempting to publish the editions of their two volumes of Lovecraft stories in our exclusive territory.’

  As a result of these discussions, for British collectors of the Pan/Ballantine ‘Adult Fantasy’ series, the two volumes by Lovecraft remained available only in the original American editions.

  The works of H.P. Lovecraft probably enjoyed their biggest commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic during the fantasy boom of the late 1960s and early ’70s, which was initially spurred on by college students discovering J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

  As a result of this renewed interest, not only did Gollancz reprint some of its Lovecraft hardcovers, but the Panther paperbacks of the author’s work went through a number of consecutive printings as well.

  But now there was another problem looming. Because there had not been a previous British edition, Panther could go directly to Arkham House to reprint the 1970 collaborative Lovecraft collection The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (which they split into two volumes in 1975). However, their sub-contracts with Gollancz had been based on five-year licenses. These were starting to run out, and the books were still selling very nicely.

  Since 1965 Panther had been owned by Granada Publishing, who eventually phased out the imprint in the early 1980s, and the paperback publisher soon began requesting extensions of their money-making Lovecraft licenses. According to the original contracts, these could be automatically extended for three-year periods, so long as the paperback sales remained at a minimum of 2,500 copies during the final six months of the agreement.