Part 1

ARKHAM HOUSE: THE FIRST 20 YEARS 1939-1959

A History and Bibliography

prepared by August Derleth

ARKHAM HOUSE: Publishers Sauk City, Wisconsin 1959

Though it was not immediately foreseen, Arkham House had its inception in the death of Howard Phillips Lovecraft on March 15, 1937. The first word of Lovecraft’s death came in a letter from the late Howard Wandrei, then in New York, a letter I read on my way into the marshes below Sauk City, where I had intended to spend an afternoon reading Thoreau’s _Journal_. Instead, I sat at a railroad trestle beside the brook and considered ways and means of putting together Lovecraft’s best works and bringing them out in book form.

I was under no illusions about the difficulty of persuading a New York publisher to bring out such a collection, for, in the broadest sense, Lovecraft was relatively obscure, he wrote in a vein for which there has never been too large an audience, and all his previous submissions of book manuscripts to publishers like Putnam, Knopf and others had been futile--though it should be said in favor of the publishers and their readers that Lovecraft, certain of their failure, customarily submitted dog-eared, hardly legible manuscripts, which were certainly enough to discourage all but the most hardy reader.

Once back at my typewriter later that afternoon, I wrote Donald Wandrei that something should be done to keep Lovecraft’s work in print; he replied that collecting only the stories, as I had thought to do, was not enough--all the work should be collected and eventually published, including the marvellously instructive and entertaining letters. I lost no further time in collecting and arranging the stories, which were put into typescript by my then secretary, Alice Conger, and immediately submitted to Charles Scribner’s Sons. Scribner’s were at that time my own publishers, and, while sympathetic to the project and cognizant of the literary value of Lovecraft’s fiction, rejected the manuscript because the cost of producing so bulky a book, combined with the public’s then sturdy resistance to buying short story collections and the comparative obscurity of H. P. Lovecraft as a writer, made the project financially prohibitive. Simon & Schuster, to whom the manuscript was next submitted, likewise rejected, for similar reasons.

It was at this point that the idea of publishing the omnibus under an imprint of our own occurred to me and took hold. I wrote again to Donald Wandrei, setting forth my plan. Both of us were impecunious writers--and how rare is the writer who is not!--but I was at that time building a home for which a local bank had advanced a considerable loan (not, however, without four times the amount of the loan in collateral, as is the invariable custom of banks), and it occurred to me that there was one manifest course open to a would-be publisher--to advertise for advance prepaid orders, and to pay off the printer from the sum of my loan. To this, Donald Wandrei added what small sum he could scrape together at that time, at great personal sacrifice; and, with the full co-operation of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Mrs. Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, and Robert H. Barlow, the project took shape.

There was never any question about the name of our publishing house. _Arkham House_ suggested itself at once, since it was Lovecraft’s own well-known, widely-used place-name for legend-haunted Salem, Massachusetts, in his remarkable fiction; it seemed to us that this was fitting and that Lovecraft himself would have approved it enthusiastically. And, once the project had been decided upon, there was never any question about the printer chosen to do it--we turned at once to the nearest, most widely-known printer--the George Banta Company of Menasha, Wisconsin, whose plant was only a hundred miles distant.

But by this time two years had elapsed since Lovecraft’s death, and by the time initial announcements of the work appeared in _Weird Tales_, offering prepaid advance-ordered copies of _The Outsider and Others_--a title selected because it had been once mentioned by Lovecraft himself as a possible title for a collection of his work, and because Lovecraft was in a very real sense, as well as in his own concept of himself, an outsider in the twentieth century--the book was being made ready for publication, Donald Wandrei was reading proof, and labels were being printed for shipment of copies. Advance-ordered, prepaid copies of the book were offered at $3.50 the copy, in contrast to the published price of $5.00 for the omnibus, of which 1,268 copies were delivered to me in late 1939.

Incredible as it may seem to today’s ardent searchers for that first Lovecraft collection, orders at $3.50 the copy came in very slowly. By publication, only 150 prepaid orders had come in. To the sum thus collected, Donald Wandrei added $400.00; the remainder of the not small sum was lifted, much to the horror of the local bankers, from my loan (though it was soon replaced--not out of earnings from sales, but out of my personal income from various writing projects). The book did not lack publicity; our venture was given generous space in the _Publishers’ Weekly_ and other trade media, though it was so thoroughly ignored locally that even today, after two decades, not one in fifty persons in Sauk City and the area of the village could identify Arkham House if asked to do so by an outsider.

_The Outsider and Others_ sold with discouraging slowness. Nevertheless, it seemed to me, judging by the enthusiasm shown by buyers, that there might be a market for small editions of books in the general field of fantasy, perhaps with emphasis on the macabre or science-fiction. To that end, I prepared early in 1941 a slender collection of my own best stories in the genre and submitted them, according to my contractual obligations, to Charles Scribner’s Sons. Up to this time there had been no thought of publishing through Arkham House the work of anyone but H. P. Lovecraft; it remained for William C. Weber of Scribner’s to suggest that my collection, _Someone in the Dark_, ought properly to be published under the Arkham House imprint, since a specialized house could very probably do better with such a book than could Scribner’s.

After much soul-searching, I took Weber’s advice, and brought out _Someone in the Dark_ at $2.00 the copy. This had the additional effect of keeping the Arkham House imprint before the public eye while other Lovecraft works were in preparation. When the initial costs of the second Arkham House book were met before those of _The Outsider and Others_, I began to explore the possibility of publishing further books in the field. Despite the fact that because of his induction into the U. S. Army, where he served four years, Donald Wandrei was forced to sever all but the most cursory connection with Arkham House in 1942, that year saw publication of the third Arkham House title, Clark Ashton Smith’s _Out of Space and Time_, at $3.00 the copy.

The three-dollar price seemed to be the most satisfactory one; the publishers could honestly show that $2.00 was too little, and readers had complained that $5.00 was too much for a book in 1939--though some of those same plaintiffs, having refused _The Outsider and Others_ at $5.00, paid $25.00 and $35.00 for it ten years later, even $50.00 and $65.00. Yet the $5.00 price had to be maintained for the omnibus collections, and in 1943 the second Lovecraft omnibus, _Beyond the Wall of Sleep_, was published in an edition limited by wartime restrictions to but 1,217 copies.

The first quartet of books to bear the imprint of Arkham House--published from 1939 to 1944--though getting off to a slow selling start with the initial Lovecraft title, had by the end of 1943 gained such momentum that it was obvious that few if any of these books would be left for sale by the end of 1944. _The Outsider and Others_ took four years to sell out its only printing, and actually, what with overhead and other costs, it took approximately that long to return our initial investment. But by 1944 it was manifest that there was a distinct--if relatively small--market for collections of weird, fantastic, science-fiction short stories, and I determined to publish as many such collections as possible, with emphasis on the hitherto unpublished, but not scorning works long out of print.

Pushing ahead, I commissioned Frank Utpatel, the Wisconsin artist who had done the illustrations for Lovecraft’s _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_ in 1936, to design a house colophon. This made its first appearance in our next book, Donald Wandrei’s _The Eye and the Finger_. In addition to this title, three other Arkham House titles appeared in 1944; they were Henry S. Whitehead’s _Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales_; Clark Ashton Smith’s _Lost Worlds_, and _Marginalia_, by H. P. Lovecraft, with contributions by others. By the end of 1945, the Arkham House list had been augmented by the addition of my own Something Near; Robert Bloch’s _The Opener of the Way_; the first Arkham House fantasy novel, Evangeline Walton’s _Witch House_; J. Sheridan LeFanu’s _Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories_; and _The Lurker at the Threshold_, a novel suggested in notes and fragments written by Lovecraft, finished by myself.

The year 1945 was also the year in which Arkham House introduced two allied imprints--Mycroft & Moran, specializing in off-trail sleuthing tales, the first of which was my own _“In Re: Sherlock Holmes”--The Adventures of Solar Pons_, a collection of pastiches of Sherlock Holmes published at the urging of Vincent Starrett, who wrote the introduction for the volume, and Ellery Queen, who was to write the introduction for the later _The Memoirs of Solar Pons_; and Stanton & Lee, which concentrated on reprints or on collections of comic cartoons, principally those by the late Clare Victor Dwiggins, and which made its bow with Dwig’s _Bill’s Diary_, the Derleth-Dwig juvenile for pixilated adults, _Oliver_, _the Wayward Owl_, and a new printing of my Scribner novel, _Evening in Spring_, from the Scribner plates. The Mycroft & Moran imprint came straight out of the Holmes canon--from Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s illustrious brother, and Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London. The house colophon was designed as a deerstalker by Ronald Clyne. Stanton & Lee took rise from the names of two friends, one an employee; its colophons were designed by Howard Wandrei--which appeared only in _Evening in Spring_--and by Ronald Clyne.

Publication of the initial LeFanu collection, of stories long out of print in America, marked the beginning of Arkham House’s importation of titles from abroad. Since many of the best writers in the genre were British, it seemed to me necessary to add to our list such names as would bring prestige to the Arkham House imprint. Thus, the year 1946 witnessed publication of four British importations--Algernon Blackwood’s last book of new work, _The Doll and One Other_; A. E. Coppard’s _Fearful Pleasures_; H. Russell Wakefield’s _The Clock Strikes Twelve_, and an omnibus reprint of four novels--William Hope Hodgson’s _The House on the Borderland and Other Novels_; as well as three books by members of the Lovecraft circle of writers who, like him, contributed primarily to _Weird Tales_ in earlier years--Frank Belknap Long’s _The Hounds of Tindalos_; Robert E. Howard’s _Skull-Face and Others_; and Henry S. Whitehead’s _West India Lights_, together with the first Arkham House science-fiction novel, the popular _Astounding Science-Fiction_ serial, _Slan_, by A. E. Van Vogt.

The year 1946 was in a sense a year of publishing instruction. It was not until that year, for example, that I finally learned what the average size of a printing ought to be--not 4,000, which some of our books had run, but 2,000, with occasional printings of up to 3,000. By that year the limited space in my home was being taken up by Arkham House stock, despite the fact that books sold rapidly. The experiences of that year also demonstrated conclusively that a small publishing business like Arkham House could afford very little overhead. Indeed, had it not been for the pouring into Arkham House of $25,000 of personal income from my writing over the first ten years, the House could not have survived. I had come to publishing without any previous experience, other than a limited editorial stint with Fawcett Publications, with which I had been associated briefly in 1930-31; and I had to learn step by step, often painfully, invariably expensively. In 1946, production costs had begun to rise also, still further cutting into any possible profit margin, since the price of Arkham House books remained fixed.

Nevertheless, despite increased costs of publication, Arkham House in 1947 released Lady Cynthia Asquith’s _This Mortal Coil_; Ray Bradbury’s first distinguished collection, _Dark Carnival_ (later revised and issued under the Ballantine imprint as _The October Country_); Carl Jacobi’s _Revelations in Black_; my own anthology of fantastic and macabre poetry, _Dark of the Moon_; Fritz Leiber Jr.’s _Night’s Black Agents_; and, under the Mycroft & Moran imprint, William Hope Hodgson’s _Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder_, a far more comprehensive collection than the British edition of almost forty years before, since it contained three new stories, two never before printed, discovered among Hodgson’s manuscripts by his sister.

In 1948, in addition to the publication of five titles, Arkham House brought out its only illustrated book, Seabury Quinn’s _Roads_, with pictures by Virgil Finlay, and inaugurated the publication of a literary quarterly, _The Arkham Sampler_, devoted to matters fantastic, publishing fiction, poetry, letters, articles, bibliographical data, _et alia_, to sell at $1.00 the copy. This venture, however, was ill-fated; it was begun in a falling market and at a time of greatly increased production costs, and, while the subscription to the first four issues readily met costs, that for the second year, 1949, failed to do so, and the magazine--which was taking an inexcusably large amount of the editor-publisher’s time--was reluctantly discontinued, since Arkham House could not publish it at a loss of both time and money.

The close of the first decade of publishing saw a substantial number of Arkham House titles out of print--_The Outsider and Others_, _Someone in the Dark_, _Out of Space and Time_, _Beyond the Wall of Sleep_, _The Eye and the Finger_, _Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales_, _Lost Worlds_, _Marginalia_, _Something Near_, _The Opener of the Way_, _Slan_, _Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories_--and selling for fantastic prices in the out-of-print shops. Recent titles had doubled in value, and the rare first Arkham House book had been reported as sold at $100.00 for a pristine copy. In addition, adjunctive books prepared by the editor for release under the Rinehart imprint out of New York--anthologies like _Sleep No More_, _Who Knocks?_ and _The Night Side_--were likewise out of print, and others, prepared for Pellegrini & Cudahy, were being reprinted--_The Sleeping and the Dead_, _Strange Ports of Call_, _The Other Side of the Moon_. Most significant of all, by 1950 almost a dozen other small houses had mushroomed into existence to follow the lead of Arkham House, and several major publishing houses were bringing out science-fiction.

Nevertheless, it was evident that the crest of the wave of interest in fantasy had been reached, and that the recession was certain to follow. Arkham House therefore prepared, after but two books in 1949, to hedge the ambitious program announced in that year. A cautious, if predominantly optimistic conservatism prevailed; had it been otherwise, Arkham House would certainly have shared the fate of most of its imitators, which, lacking any real editorial guidance from people widely-read in the field, spewed forth many books of no merit whatsoever, cluttered the market, and succeeded in turning away potential buyers from the field in general.

When, in the mid-fifties, Arkham House began to resume a publishing schedule, production costs were so high that the price range could no longer be held. The entry of competitive publishers in the genre had had one other unhappy effect which directly influenced the decision in regard to prices--whereas, heretofore, between 400 and 600 patrons of Arkham House sent in prepaid orders for each announced title, thus enabling Arkham House to meet printer’s bills within a reasonable time and assure the continuance of a publishing program, such advance-order patrons had now been reduced to between 100 and 200, not enough to give permanence to any program. A disproportionate share of sales was now being made through the trade which, however welcome, meant the introduction of middlemen--wholesalers and retailers--into what had been primarily a publisher-reader mail order operation. This resulted in a vital slashing of potential income in the face of a very high and increasing production cost, so that the old $3.00 price could be held only for collections of verse or very slender collections of stories, while other books had to go to $3.50 and $4.00, and even, in some cases, to $5.00, though the $4.00 price was to become the average.

All Arkham House books--together with those under the Mycroft & Moran and Stanton & Lee imprints--have been printed and bound by the George Banta Company, with the exception of _The Arkham Sampler_, which was produced by the Howe Printing Company of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and _Night’s Yawning Peal_ and _Tales from Underwood_, which were published jointly with Pellegrini & Cudahy of New York, an arrangement which did not work out satisfactorily and was soon terminated. All Arkham House books were printed from type set and broken down after but one printing, except for _The Memoirs of Solar Pons_, which was plated, for use as a selection of The Unicorn Mystery Book Club.

For Arkham House jackets, various artists have been called upon, chiefly, however, Ronald Clyne of New York, and Frank Utpatel of Wisconsin. Among other artists who designed jackets for Arkham House were Frank Wakefield, Howard Wandrei, Virgil Finley, Robert F. Hubbell, George Barrows, Hannes Bok, Audrey Johnson, R. Taylor, and Gary Gore.

During its first twenty years, Arkham House cancelled publication plans for certain books. Among these were J. Sheridan LeFanu’s novel, _The House by the Churchyard_, and the anthology, _The Death Fetch and Other Gothic Tales_, edited by Stephen Grendon, both of which would have proved too costly to bring out, and would, on the basis of interest expressed, have sold far too slowly to warrant publishing. Among these also were the late Henry Kuttner’s _Mimsy Were the Borogoves_ and C. L. Moore’s _Shambleau and Other Tales_, which were announced, but not published because authors and publisher could not agree on contractual terms. Certain other announced titles--A. E. Van Vogt’s _Away and Beyond_ and _The World of Null-A_, and Fritz Leiber Jr.’s _Gather, Darkness!_ and _Conjure Wife_, were released to other publishers who could do more for them.

Arkham House faces the coming years with confidence. Added to the bibliography which is appended, Arkham House hopes and expects to publish, among others, the following books within the coming years:

THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO, by Clark Ashton Smith

INVADERS FROM THE DARK, by Greye La Spina

THE TRAIL OF CTHULHU, by August Derleth

STRAYERS FROM SHEOL, by H. Russell Wakefield

PLEASANT DREAMS, by Robert Bloch

SELECTED LETTERS, by H. P. Lovecraft

THE HORROR FROM THE HILLS, by Frank Belknap Long

THE PURCELL PAPERS, by J. Sheridan LeFanu

MR. GEORGE AND OTHER ODD PERSONS, by Stephen Grendon

TIME BURIAL, by Howard Wandrei

THREE TALES, by Walter de la Mare

RADIANT MAN, by Donald Wandrei

TALES OF SCIENCE AND SORCERY, by Clark Ashton Smith

HALF IN SHADOW, by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

PORTRAITS BY MOONLIGHT, by Carl Jacobi

XELUCHA AND OTHERS, by M. P. Shiel

STRANGE GATEWAYS, by E. Hoffmann Price

LONESOME PLACES, by August Derleth

THE GREEN ROUND, by Arthur Machen

WORSE THINGS WAITING, by Manly Wade Wellman

BLACK MEDICINE, by Arthur J. Burks

COLONEL MARKESAN AND LESS PLEASANT

PEOPLE, by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

COLLECTED POEMS, by Donald Wandrei

THE WIND IN THE CEDARS, by August Derleth

SELECTED POEMS, by Clark Ashton Smith

COLLECTED POEMS, by H. P. Lovecraft

THE WATCHERS OUT OF TIME, by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth

and, under the Mycroft & Moran imprint,

THE REMINISCENCES OF SOLAR PONS, by August Derleth

PRINCE ZALESKI & CUMMINGS KING MONK, by M. P. Shiel

THE CASEBOOK OF SOLAR PONS, by August Derleth

and Stanton & Lee,

EVERETT TRUE, by A. D. Condo

Bibliography

THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS, by H. P. Lovecraft. Collected by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1939. pp. xiv., 553. $5.00. 1,268 copies printed. Contents: _Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Outsider_, by August Derleth & Donald Wandrei / _Dagon_ / _Polaris_ / _Celephais/Hypnos_ / _The Cats of Ulthar_ / _The Strange High House in the Mist_ / _The Statement of Randolph Carter_ / _The Silver Key_ / _Through the Gates of the Silver Key_ / _The Outsider_ / _The Music of Erich Zann_ / _The Rats in the Walls_ / _Cool Air_ / _He_ / _The Horror at Red Hook_ / _The Temple_ / _Arthur Jermyn_ / _The Picture in the House_ / _The Festival_ / _The Terrible Old Man_ / _The Tomb_ / _The Shunned House_ / _In the Vault_ / _Pickman’s Model_ / _The Haunter of the Dark_ / _The Dreams in the Witch-House_ / _The Thing on the Doorstep_ / _The Nameless City_ / _The Lurking Fear_ / _The Call of Cthulhu_ / _The Colour out of Space_ / _The Dunwich Horror_ / _The Whisperer in Darkness_ / _The Shadow over Innsmouth_ / _The Shadow out of Time_ / _At the Mountains of Madness_ / _Supernatural Horror in Literature_.

SOMEONE IN THE DARK, by August Derleth. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1941. pp. 335. $2.00. 1,115 copies printed. Contents: _When the Night and the House Are Still_ / _Glory Hand_ / _Compliments of Spectro_ / _A Gift for Uncle Herman_ / _McGovern’s Obsession_ / _Three Gentlemen in Black_ / _Muggridge’s Aunt_ / _Bramwell’s Guardian_ / _Joliper’s Gift_ / _Altimer’s Amulet_ / _The Shuttered House_ / _The Sheraton Mirror_ / _The Wind from the River_ / _The Telephone in the Library_ / _The Panelled Room_ / _The Return of Hastur_ / _The Sandwin Compact_.

OUT OF SPACE AND TIME, by Clark Ashton Smith. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1942. pp. xii., 370. $3.00. 1,054 copies printed. Contents: _Clark Ashton Smith: Master of Fantasy_, by August Derleth & Donald Wandrei / _The End of the Story_ / _A Rendezvous in Averoigne_ / _A Night in Malnéant_ / _The City of the Singing Flame_ / _The Uncharted Isle_ / _The Second Interment_ / _The Double Shadow_ / _The Chain of Aforgomon_ / _The Dark Eidolon_ / _The Last Hieroglyph_ / _Sadastor_ / _The Death of Ilalotha_ / _The Return of the Sorcerer_ / _The Testament of Athammaus_ / _The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan_ / _Ubbo-Sathla_ / _The Monster of the Prophecy_ / _The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis_ / _From the Crypts of Memory_ / _The Shadows_.