by Lin Carter
The readers were probably puzzled at this inconsequential, unpolished little tale, which read so unlike the last few stories they had seen from Lovecraft’s hand. There may even have been a few suspicions of a fraud; as it eventually came out, however, the story was genuinely the work of Lovecraft. Only—it was not a story at all, but a lengthy excerpt from one of Lovecraft’s letters, describing a fantastic dream.
While Farnsworth Wright was struggling along with Weird Tales, Derleth and Wandrei were moving towards a momentous event, the publication of the very first book to bear the imprint of Arkham House. They selected “the nearest, most widely-known printer who could do a complete operation,” the Collegiate Press of the George W. Banta Company of Menasha, Wisconsin. His plant was a trifle over a hundred miles northeast of Derleth’s home town of Sauk City, which he was shortly to put on the map. For the jacket designer, they selected the distinguished and popular magazine illustrator and gallery artist, Virgil Finlay, whose work had appeared for so many years in Weird Tales that he was an intrinsic part of the magazine in the minds of the fans.
The Outsider and Others was a whale of a book; they packed thirty-six of Lovecraft’s stories into it, and his famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” plus an introduction. The text ran to five hundred and sixty-six pages of type, and rather small type at that. (For The Outsider, they used a linotype Caslon typeface, although later books under the Arkham House imprint generally employed a Garamond face. The paper selected was White Winnebago Eggshell, which continued to be used throughout the history of the House; the binding was Bancroft Arrestox black natural finish, soon to be replaced with Holliston Black Novelex. Once the format was established, Arkham House books did not vary through the years; today the House still employs the same printer and uses the same typeface, paper and binding, which lends a remarkable air of continuity to its publications.)
Derleth and Wandrei began running large ads in Weird Tales, soliciting advance prepaid orders, using for incentive a reduced price. Copies ordered before publication cost only $3.50; copies ordered subsequent to publication would cost $5.00. In the last days of 1939, the books arrived at Derleth’s home and shipments began.
Orders trickled in with astonishing slowness, considering the high regard Weird Tales readers had for Lovecraft, and the foofaraw resulting from his untimely demise. And depressingly small orders they were. Only 1,268 copies were bound in all, according to Derleth, and the fans were so dishearteningly uneager to purchase the volume that it took four solid years to sell out. The reader reaction to the birth of Arkham House must have been a genuine blow to Derleth and Wandrei, especially to Derleth, who had sunk a considerable sum in the venture and would have been in serious financial trouble if he failed to recoup his expenses. He has recorded that, by publication time, a mere one hundred and fifty advance orders had come trickling in; nor did post-publication orders exactly flood the local mails, despite good publicity and generous notice given the launching of the new venture in Publishers’ Weekly and other trade media.
Hindsight usually gives an amusing perspective to events: Derleth recalls that some purchasers complained loudly over the price (and $3.50, for a book of such size and wordage, was a remarkably decent price even by the standards of 1939). Doubtless such parsimonious souls winced in horror years later, when copies of The Outsider and Others became scarce and much sought-after, often commanding prices many times the decent sum asked by Derleth and Wandrei in the beginning. Derleth laughingly remembers one would-be purchaser who wrote him a vituperative letter after publication, when Derleth returned his check for $3.50, explaining the post-publication price was $5.00. This particular gentleman, clutching his purse with an iron grip, stoutly swore he would never pay so inflated a price... yet ten years later, according to another letter, he felt fortunate to have found a copy on sale at only $25.00!
The rarity and value of The Outsider continued to climb steadily, until by now it has become one of the most sought-after collectors’ items in the history of fantasy. Copies regularly go for $100 and even for $150; indeed, a recent article by collector-bookdealer Gerry de la Ree claims that by 1971, copies of The Outsider command prices such as $175—and even prices as high as $250 are not unheard of. Many the impecunious collector and bibliophile have yearned for a time machine, if only to go back to 1939 and buy a dozen or so copies of The Outsider at pre-publication prices, and then return to the present time, in which the lot would be worth several thousand dollars.
***
1* Derleth had turned, at least in part, from weird fiction to the writing of regional mainstream fiction, and he recalled that at the time of Lovecraft’s death he was midway through the first draft of one of his most distinguished novels, Wind Over Wisconsin. His publishers were the famous firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons, who became celebrated as the publishers of Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. At an astonishingly youthful age, Derleth had already passed beyond the meagre accomplishments Lovecraft had achieved.
13. The House in the Pines
Discouraging as the slow sales of the first Arkham House book were, Derleth and Wandrei felt committed to the task of preserving the best work of their friend and mentor in the dignity of hardcovers, and so persevered. They had discovered an interesting fact: there were just possibly enough enthusiasts of the macabre in the forty-eight states to make a small publishing program pay for itself (in time, anyway), so long as press runs were limited to something less than fifteen hundred copies and prices were held back to $3.50 a copy or less. It way possible to run a small publishing house on mail orders alone.
So they began, in a small, cautious way, to experiment. Two years after The Outsider launched the House, Derleth assembled a smaller book, a collection of his own supernatural fiction entitled Someone in the Dark, and they published it in a printing of 1,415 copies, priced at a mere $2.00 per copy. The following year, 1942, the partners put together a splendid first collection of Clark Ashton Smith’s best fantasies and horror tales called Out of Space and Time. The book was a random sampling of Smith’s work, covering the spectrum of his fiction, and included a few tales from each of his major story series, those of Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, and Poseidonis, as well as some of his unaligned supernatural tales and a few pieces of his peculiar science fiction. The jacket was designed by the young Hannes Bok, a weird artist of extraordinary gifts whose talents had been brought to the attention of Farnsworth Wright by a then-teenaged, enthusiastic fan named Ray Bradbury. (Bok rapidly had come to rival even Virgil Finlay in the esteem of Weird Tales readership, as we shall shortly see.)
In the beginning, at least, the new Arkham House was on shaky financial footing. The first printing and binding bills had been paid for through cash supplied by Donald Wandrei and through funds lifted from a large bank loan Derleth had secured in order to build his home. It was to be some years before The Outsider paid for itself, but Derleth paid back the loan through his own personal income from his writing. And in time he built his house, a gracious two-story wooden frame building set well back from the road and nestled under old pines on a country road some miles outside of Sauk City. The house had a thatched roof, a fieldstone chimney, and was paneled throughout in knotty pine; Derleth’s office-cum-study was a long, low, slant-ceilinged room on the second floor, lined with his collection of Smith’s sculptures, with a huge stone fireplace and French doors that opened to a vista of thick green pines and rolling prairie. He called his new home Place of Hawks, because of a hawk nest discovered when the contractors were clearing the land.
The big, cool, shady house in the pines was, in effect, Arkham House itself. Books were at first stockpiled in the finished basement, where Derleth kept his excellent collection of mystery and horror fiction; in time a special outbuilding had to be constructed to serve as the Arkham House warehouse. No one, back at the beginning, could have foreseen that the House would grow to such proportions as to require its own warehouse; the venture had first been proposed merely to
preserve Lovecraft’s work in book form. But very soon, as we have seen, this limitation was wisely abandoned and the scope of Arkham House widened broadly.
The experiment of widening their first conception of the purpose of Arkham House to include not just Lovecraft’s work alone, but the work of a broad range of the more popular contributors to Weird Tales was a happy one. The originator of the idea was neither Derleth nor Wandrei, as it happened, but William C. Weber, then an editor at Scribner’s, who had been handling Derleth’s own work. Derleth apparently had submitted the manuscript of Someone in the Dark to Scribner’s (as was and is customary, his contracts with Scribner’s doubtless contained a clause to the effect that they were to have first refusal of his next book-length manuscript). Weber suggested the collection might best be published under the Arkham House colophon, since a small publishing house specializing in, and identified with horror fiction could probably do better at the task of reaching the right readership than could a large, unspecialized publisher like the big New York firm.
Over the years from that day to this, Derleth has frequently been accused—by innuendo, at least—of running Arkham House as “The August Derleth Vanity Press”; it is a pleasure to help scotch this allegation by explaining where the idea of the first non-Lovecraft book to be published by the House originated. Derleth himself had considerable qualms over the notion, as he noted in his memoir, Thirty Years of Arkham House (published in 1969).
I had some soul-struggling to do about this proposal; for one thing, I disliked anything that smacked of vanity publication, but it was soon pointed out to me that the difference between sound business and vanity in publishing was the profit motive—and publication of Someone in the Dark did indeed prove profitable in the end, much more so for me than if a New York publisher had done the book, for it was not necessary to share reprint earnings. Publication of this second book had the effect of keeping the Arkham House imprint before the public eye while other Lovecraft books were in preparation.
Shortly after Arkham House published its third book, the Clark Ashton Smith collection, Derleth lost the assistance of his partner and co-founder, Donald Wandrei. The United States had gone to war by this time, and Wandrei had been inducted into the Army, where he would be far too busy for the next four years or so, battling the Axis or whatever, to share in the publishing work. He ended up in the artillery and eventually became a sergeant; thereafter he limited his participation to work on the Lovecraft letters.
With the sales of Out of Space and Time rolling in a bit more briskly, perhaps, than Derleth had dared to hope, the experimental venture had become a pleasurable and demanding and even rewarding business. Derleth had learned by now, from hard facts and figures in his ledger, that $2.00 per book was too low a price for a comfortable ratio between costs and profits and $5.00 was too high a price for most readers—although, even at $5.00, The Outsider sold out to the very last copy. (In time, that is.) Derleth had learned an important fact of life in this kind of small specialty publishing: His books, unlike those issued by the major publishers, had no “season.” They sold slowly, but steadily, all year round; and they kept on selling, year after year, until they sold out to the last copy. Derleth did not have to worry, as did major publishers, about the seasonal competition, the reviewers, the distributors. Nor, so long as he held a tight rein on his publishing schedule, did he have to worry about over-extending himself to the point where he owed more money than was coming in; by limiting his program to a book a year, on the average, and by using a little patience, he managed to keep the House not only in the black, but also in business.
And so, in 1943, after the Smith book was a year old, Derleth published Beyond the Wall of Sleep, a second gleaning of Lovecraftiana which had been edited with Wandrei’s help, even though the latter was now in khaki. BTWOS (as Arkhamophiles refer to it) was even slightly bigger than The Outsider and also sold at $5.00, but this time without the prepublication offer. Derleth had learned by then that if he simply waited long enough, such a book would sell out, and he would have ordered a print run totaling even more copies than were printed of The Outsider if he could have, but the wartime paper shortage was beginning to bite into the publishing business, and restrictions forced him to cut back his order to only 1,217 copies.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep was a mammoth book and represented a well-chosen sampling of what was left of Lovecraft. It covered the range of his work from some of his all-but-unknown marginalia, such as “Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity,” and his Commonplace Book, wherein he jotted down a lengthy compilation of unused story-ideas (which Derleth was, years later, to plunder for his “posthumus collaborations”), to a deliciously tongue-in-cheek spoof of serious bibliographical writing called “History and Chronology of the Necronomicon.” There were also no fewer than twenty-seven tales, including three short novels. These ran the gamut from Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian fiction, such as The Quest of Iranon and The Doom that came to Sarnath, through prose poems, such as Ex Oblivione and What the Moon Brings, to straight horror tales like The Unnamable and The Hound. Also included in that total were some of his revisions, collaborations with Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop. The collection was rounded out with two or three dozen of his poems, including the excellent and evocative Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet sequence. The jacket art was a photograph of some of the weirder and more grotesque of the sculptures Lovecraft’s friend Clark Ashton Smith bad done.
With BTWOS on sale, the following year saw Derleth well in control of the publishing game, at least as far as the genre of the macabre went. He had succeeded in reaching the hard-core readership of Weird Tales, and had begun to cultivate thereamong a cult of devotees who could be counted on to purchase each and every Arkham House title. He also saw quite clearly that library sales and a certain percentage of “general” readers in bookshops could be counted on to squander a few dollars for some good supernatural fiction. A market for the macabre was there, all right, and no other publisher had ever bothered even to try to tap its sales potential. The larger publishing houses went after the big money, the best sellers, and, outside of an occasional anthology, and an even more infrequent original novel of the supernatural, did not think the horror fans worth bothering about. Here, in this neglected area of publishing, Derleth saw his chance. In his memoir on Arkham House he wrote:
Since the general domain of the macabre was so limited, I felt that it would be necessary, if I meant to enter serious publishing, to effect as much of a “corner” of the market as possible. And to that end I signed to contracts the foremost authors on both sides of the Atlantic... modeling our contracts on those I had signed with Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Derleth began cautiously and gradually stepping up his program. In 1944, the House released four books, collections by Donald Wandrei and Henry S. Whitehead, another Smith collection and a third volume of Lovecraft’s odds and ends, aptly entitled Marginalia. In 1945, building his publishing program by small increments, he went up to five titles, including a first collection of Robert Bloch’s stories, a second Derleth collection, an original unpublished novel, Witch House, by Evangeline Walton. In 1946 he published eight books. Arkham House was off and running.
It soon became evident to fans, readers, and collectors that in Arkham House they had a unique and invaluable publishing venture—a publisher who specialized completely in fantastic literature. And, even more rare, a publisher who knew the good stuff from the bad stuff, and whose taste could be trusted.
Gradually, Derleth’s overall conception of the purpose of Arkham House settled into a path from which it never diverged. His selection of books and authors became fairly evenly divided into two major groups. On the one hand, he created hardcover collections of the better work of most of the more popular and gifted authors in the Weird Tales stable, with considerable preference shown for those writers who had been friends and associates of H. P. Lovecraft.
In this area, before Arkham House had rounded out its first full decade w
ith its forty-second publication, Derleth put into hardcover H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Henry S. Whitehead, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Carl Jacobi, and Seabury Quinn—eleven writers closely associated with the history of Weird Tales. (Derleth told me privately that he had very much wished, in those days, to preserve the best early work from WT of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner but could not get them to agree to his terms.)
To these writers, primarily pulp fiction writers, he added a few others who were not so firmly identified with Weird Tales. In particular, he published a fine collection of stories by Fritz Leiber, most of which had first appeared in WTs only main competitor of any quality, John W. Campbell, jr.’s Unknown. Derleth also, in 1946, ventured briefly into the burgeoning field of science fiction, which was then just beginning to come to the attention of the New York publishers, by bringing out an historic first edition of A. E. Van Vogt’s sf classic, Sian, from Campbell’s other magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. Derleth had extensive plans for broadening the scope of Arkham House to include science fiction as well as weird fantasy. He injudiciously announced as forthcoming Fritz Leiber’s novel Gather, Darkness! (also to have been a reprint from Astounding). With other books he planned to get an early comer on the rising popularity of sf; in this aim he was frustrated, however, since the New York publishers got Gather, Darkness! away from him.