COLLECTING ROBERT E. HOWARD

by Don Herron

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2000 issue of Firsts, the Book Collector's Magazine - it's still worth picking up for the many photos of rare Howard books, as well as for the detailed first-edition checklist included with the article.

 

Before you contemplate collecting first editions of the prolific Texas pulp writer Robert E. Howard, I believe you ought to pause for a moment, take a calming breath, and check out this cautionary scene:

“. . .with a burst of fury that left a heap of mangled corpses along the gunwales, Conan was over the rail and on the deck of the Tigress. In an instant he was the center of a hurricane of stabbing spears and lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel . . . littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood. Invulnerable in his armor, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled corpses at his feet until his enemies gave back panting in rage and fear.”

This moment from “Queen of the Black Coast,” typical of many such moments among the exploits of Howard’s famous barbarian hero, is not offered to affront the squeamish, or merely to warn away readers whose preferences tend toward more sedate fare. No, what you have just read may serve as a metaphor.

Think of the Robert E. Howard books as you think of the mighty Conan. In the 1970s they rushed out into the world in incredible numbers, faster than barbarians board pirate sloops. “The Howard boom” set publishing records, as one paperback house picked up entire runs of his titles as soon as another let them lapse. Half of Howard’s firsts appeared in this single decade, from paperback originals to deluxe hardcover editions, with saddle-stapled booklets from fan publishers seeking the same audience as luxurious letterpress presentations on fine papers. The headlong rush clubbed down most of the people I knew at the time who thought they could be Howard completists. And if you stood up to the onslaught, the armor of the early Howard firsts was hard to pierce.

If you consider yourself a likely candidate for that roistering pirate-crew of potential Howard collectors -- checkbooks drawn, surrounding those firsts, going in for the kill -- I suggest you get ready to fall back from time to time, panting in rage and fear. It’s nice to dream, but several Howard firsts appeared in editions of only 200 copies, or far less. Over one hundred genuine first editions have seen print. Today exactly 6 copies of his first book are known with certainty to exist, with half of these in library holdings. You might make a few terrific acquisitions, but the complete firsts are going to be standing against the mast for a long, long time, laughing in your face.

This violent eruption of books surged page by page off the Underwood in Howard’s room in a frame house in central Texas. Born January 22, 1906, Robert Ervin Howard was the only child of a general practitioner. The family moved around the region frequently before settling in Cross Plains in 1919. With his father often away on calls, the boy was left in the company of his mother, whose readings aloud of poetry and myth undoubtedly directed her son’s interest toward literature. Howard also recalled yarns spun by their black cook, and ghastly tales told by his grandmother:  “No Negro ghost story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature was hers. . . .”

A protean talent gestated, waiting for the right place in which to loose his imagination. That venue proved to be the pulp periodical Weird Tales, devoted to stories of horror and the fantastic. Today only H. P. Lovecraft has a greater name association with that legendary magazine. In a letter, Howard once told Lovecraft that he had written his first story in 1921 at age fifteen, aimed at the pulp Adventure, and then had spent “three years of writing without selling a blasted line.” Weird Tales appeared on the newsstands in 1923. In 1924 Howard sold three short stories, and two more in 1925, including “Wolfshead,” the first of many tales that would be featured on the cover. But it took two more years before he sold another word. “I don’t like to think about those two years,” the young author admitted.

Howard worked occasional odd jobs -- soda jerk, surveyor’s assistant -- while continuing to work on his fiction. He also wrote literally hundreds of poems in this period. With his natural bardic bent, it is reported that Howard learned “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” after merely two readings. He had a great passion for reading aloud, and is said to have shouted out his stories as he typed them. Howard’s finest passages rise to the level of prose poetry, and I have always liked the unobtrusive use of poetical devices in such lines as “Conan’s low laugh was merciless as the ring of steel.”

To keep his father happy, Howard enrolled in a bookkeeping course at nearby Howard Payne College, but before he finished in 1927 he had begun to sell to Weird Tales again, and would never work at another occupation. He only had nine more years to live.

In his writings one sees a colossal march of the races of man. The rise of Celtic and Aryan peoples from the mists of prehistory was an obsessive interest, and he portrayed the history of the Picts over many ages. The critic Ben Indick, in an early mailing of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, noted how in recent times the essential folkloric tradition has been vitiated, but “Howard found an element basic to whatever makes folklore tick.” Indeed, Howard in his red tales of iron-thewed heroes pitted against fantastic foes seems at his best almost a primitive, only a degree or two removed from the skald standing before a roaring campfire with enchantment on the tip of his tongue. His most famous stories, now known as Sword & Sorcery, have that same sort of incantatory power, as his heroes face malefic sorcerers and demons which have crawled up from some dark chamber of hell.

 

The first of his major series characters to appear in the pages of Weird Tales was the dour Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane, who debuted August 1928 in “Red Shadows” and had seven stories see print. King Kull of prehistoric Valusia appeared in August 1929 with the powerful “The Shadow Kingdom.” Kull returned in two more tales, and one of these, “Kings in the Night,” also introduced Howard’s next protagonist: the doomed Bran Mak Morn, leader of the Caledonian Picts, ranged against the Roman invasion of northern Britain. Bran also had only three appearances in Weird Tales. Today the adventures of these three heroes fill a book apiece. Howard’s inherent grasp of saga took him well beyond the strict commercial needs of his marketplace, so that he wrote tale after tale of each character, many of these mood pieces unlikely to place with the plot-oriented needs of pulp editors. He wrote stories in which his series heroes are mentioned only in passing. He even wrote poems about Kull, Kane and the Pictish battle against Rome’s legions. Many stories Howard let lapse into fragments. He felt that if a tale lost momentum it was easier to abandon it and start another than to struggle on. However, the effect of these fragments – especially in his tales set in prehistoric eras – adds immeasurably to the whole, as if a scrap of legend in the Kull cycle somehow survives into our time, as have the few pieces of poetry by Sappho.

 

Intuitively, Howard knew how heroic fantasy should work. In terms of precedence and accomplishment, he is the American master, dying the year before The Hobbit, the first novel by the British master J. R. R. Tolkien, would see print. Of course, Howard was not writing with the deliberation of Tolkien, nor was he creating his imaginary worlds on the side while holding down a secure job. Howard was a fulltime pulp writer typing at white heat.         

To earn a living, Howard tried to crack other markets, but as Glenn Lord, for many years the agent for the Howard estate, once noted, “despite extensive efforts, Weird Tales remained Howard’s sole market prior to 1929.” He wrote the short novel Skull-Face, a take-off on Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, but was unable to place it anywhere except in Weird Tales. His initial break out of the fantasy and horror genre came with boxing tales, a sport he loved. By 1933 he was able to hire Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent. Against the severe economic backdrop of the Great Depression, Howard triumphed with a volcanic production level. Half of all his completed stories were rejected out-of-hand by unsympathetic editors. He saw magazine after magazine fold up, with stories he had placed with them left unpublished – and unpaid -- in inventory.

Conan of Cimmeria, a barbarian wandering sword in hand through the lands of the Hyborian Age, came into the pulp pages of Weird Tales in December 1932 with “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Howard also submitted  “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” at the same time, but this now famous story was bounced. By early 1936 a full-length novel and 15 more stories had seen publication, including the series highlight “Beyond the Black River,” in which Howard puts forth his definitive epigram: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

As much as the writing he did for Weird Tales meant to him in expressing his philosophy, that publication was very slow to pay, with low word rates. At age 28 Howard was a reliable professional also able to sell to better paying markets. In 1934 he created the exploits of Breckinridge Elkins of Bear Creek, Nevada for Action Stories, with a story in every issue until the inventory ran out some months after his death. In this series Howard moved a slight notch over from the basic hero myth of folklore into the humorous territory of the American tall tale. Or, as Breckinridge declares in the episode entitled “The Scalp Hunter”: “And right here lemme say that I’m sick and tired of these lies which is being circulated about me terrorizing the town of Grizzly Claw. . . These folks which is going around telling about me knocking the mayor of Grizzly Claw down a flight of steps with a kitchen stove ain’t yet added that the mayor was trying to blast me with a sawed-off shotgun.” The top-shelf pulp Argosy commissioned a similar series of humorous western yarns from Howard about Pike Bearfield, and for Cowboy Stories he outstripped himself with the confused doings of Buckner J. Grimes.

With his rising reputation, Howard began to seek book publication. In summer 1933 Howard submitted a collection of eight weird tales to publisher Denis Archer in London. By early 1934 Archer decided against the idea, and asked instead for a novel for publication by the affiliated firm of Pawling and Ness Ltd.  Howard wrote The Hour of the Dragon, the novel about Conan, but the company went into receivership. Only then did he submit it to Weird Tales.  Next, Howard took his first set of stories featuring Breckinridge Elkins and tied them together into a loose novel by adding a love interest in the person of Glory McGraw. This manuscript was rejected by American firms, but late in June 1936 was sent to an English agent associated with Otis Adelbert Kline. The novel A Gent from Bear Creek found acceptance with Herbert Jenkins in London.  

By that time Howard was dead. On June 11, 1936, with his mother in a terminal coma, Howard made the decision not to outlive her. He walked to his Chevrolet parked next to their home in Cross Plains and put a bullet through his brain. He was 30 years old. His professional writing career barely topped a decade. Not a single book under his name had appeared in his lifetime. And Weird Tales still owed him $1,350, a sum paid eventually to his father, Dr. I. M. Howard, for the now internationally famous series of stories about Conan the barbarian.

Howard’s impulse toward suicide -- his great sense of futility -- occurs again and again in his stories and poems. In a letter to H. P. Lovecraft late in 1930 Howard mused, “When we are dead it is as if we have never lived, therefore, how can we be sure that we live?”

For the collector of first editions, if not for Howard, proof that he lived is abundant – except in the case of A Gent from Bear Creek published by Herbert Jenkins in 1937. I asked Glenn Lord, who is the Howard collector, which title is most difficult to acquire. “Without a doubt, A Gent from Bear Creek,” he replied. “Despite having been published in England in 1937 by a major British publisher, with a ‘Cheap Edition’ released in 1938, this is virtually impossible to find.” Perhaps the books were eaten up in wartime paper drives. The “cheap edition,” which records say was issued in 1938, actually has no known copies. Lord supposes the cheap state may have been the first, with a dustjacket marked down accordingly, or signatures of the first bound in lesser materials, perhaps even paper-covered. Neither he nor anyone he has talked with in some 50 years of Howard collecting has ever seen this “cheap” edition.

The true first of Gent from 1937 is almost as scarce. Six copies are known positively to exist. The copy that went to I. M. Howard is now held in a Robert E. Howard collection by Ranger Junior College in Ranger, Texas. It lacks a dustjacket. The Howard enthusiast and collector Darrell C. Richardson has owned a copy for many years. It too lacks the dustjacket.

Two copies are in libraries in Britain. The British Library copy, London, is shelf number NN27279, stored offsite. L. W. Currey examined this book in 1978, and says it was in fine condition except for the British Library stamp and date-of-receipt stamp – 3 April 1937. You have to file for a reader’s pass to look over this copy, and allow enough time for the book to be brought in. This same procedure applies for the copy held by The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, shelfmark Vts.257.k.16. The dustjacket for the Edinburgh copy has been discarded; the library did not make a policy of retaining dustjackets until the 1950’s, so in 1937 the jacket “was removed before the book was sent for shelving.”  The British Library copy does not bear a dustjacket, either. By institutional policy the library staff routinely removes the dustjackets (or book covers, as they call them) and holds them separately. The book covers are much more difficult to access. I spoke with them and got the impression that it might take weeks of digging to unearth this incredibly rare book cover – if it has not been discarded. Much of their book cover holdings went to the Victoria and Albert Museum a few years ago as “art.” In America, the way in which purist collectors currently demand the original book, in original binding, with the dustwrapper it has always worn, means these institutional covers, flattened, separated by a gulf of decades from the books they once protected, no longer are married to the original copies. I too prefer the American system of keeping a book in its dustwrapper. In Britain you have two jacketless books and possibly one bookless jacket.

The most traveled Gent is the Mel Stein copy. A collector concentrating on Edgar Rice Burroughs and lost race novels, Stein was active in the 1950s and 1960s. His copy has been handled twice in recent years by L. W. Currey, who first acquired it in 1990. “I sold (or traded) it to Eric Kramer (Fantasy Archives, NYC),” Currey reports, “and do not recall the price we agreed upon. He sold it to Roger Luedemann, a NYC collector, date of sale unknown, but probably soon after Eric acquired it. I don’t know the price Eric asked, perhaps $2500 to $3500. This copy was purchased from Roger’s estate by David Aronovitz and me in 1995 and was sold by me in August 1995 to a Canadian private collector for $2250. The Canadian collector still owns it. This copy is easily identifiable as it is an ex-library copy with the ink-stamps of ‘Woolwich Public Libraries.’ Condition is as follows: Binding askew and lightly rubbed and soiled, lacks front free endpaper, three small ink stamps of ‘Woolwich Public Libraries’ on preliminaries and first text leaf, a good, sound copy.” The Mel Stein copy also lacks the dustjacket.

The finest known copy of the Jenkins Gent belongs to Glenn Lord. It is not an ex-library and is the only copy known in dustjacket. Lord bought it some forty years ago from Arkham House publisher August Derleth for $4.00. Inside, written in holograph, is “August Derleth, his book,” but no book dealer would knock a grand or two off the price because of that. Derleth got this copy from G. Ken Chapman, his British agent who handled overseas sales on Arkham titles. In his laconic Texas drawl, Lord told me, “I guess Derleth always thought he could have Chapman find him another, if he wanted it.”

Rumors of other copies float about (perhaps based on movements of the Mel Stein copy). Lord tells me that “supposedly a copy was found about 3 or 4 years ago and sold for $3500.” Another Howard collector tells me he saw the Jenkins first offered online recently for $2000 – but was it a genuine first? Even the most serious collectors have no choice but to fall back on the 732 copies of the first American edition released by Donald M. Grant in 1965, printed offset from the I. M. Howard copy. I suppose Paul Dobish, of Other Worlds Bookstore in Providence, put the bleak prospect for acquiring the true first as well as anyone: “I wouldn’t be surprised if the ‘universe’ of total copies extant was a dozen or less (barring some incredible warehouse type find, of course).” Personally, I wouldn’t guess quite so high as a dozen.

In America, the first Howard books issued from the fan press. LANY Cooperative Publications released The Hyborian Age, Howard’s history of that mythical era between the cataclysmic end of the world known to King Kull and the dim beginnings of recorded history, in 1938. Technically, this fragile all-paper item is more a fanzine than a book, and no great number was made up. The New York fans Donald Wollheim and John Michel prepared the manuscript or mimeographed stencils and Los Angeles fans Forrest J. Ackerman and Russel Hodgkins ran the stencils and handled distribution. I presume most people are content reading the essay as collected in one or another of the Conan volumes.

In a 1943 fanzine Paul Spencer specifically asked why Arkham House had not published an anthology of Howard’s best work. Today the most famous specialty press in the nation, Arkham House was founded in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei because they wanted to rescue the writings of H. P. Lovecraft from the decaying pulp pages of Weird Tales and give them permanence in hardcovers. Soon they began to publish other Weird Tales writers. Fans wanted Robert E. Howard. Spencer recalled talk of a collection at the time of his death, but “Since then, the name of Howard has lapsed into something distressingly resembling obscurity. True, his name is held in veneration by the Old Guard, but compare his fame with that of the less original H. P. Lovecraft!” Spencer added a nice critical opinion: “Nor should the abundance of action and blood-letting be labeled, derisively, ‘blood-and-thunder’; it is an electrifying manifestation of a tremendous lust for excitement, of living life to the hilt, embodied most strikingly in Conan the Cimmerian.”

The next Howard item appeared in 1945. Again, more a fanzine than not, The Garden of Fear nonetheless put his name on the cover of a book. True, after Howard’s story set in prehistory, the rest of the booklet is filled out with stories by other writers, but I doubt that anyone in the last 40 years has bought a copy to read anything but the title story, or simply to add it to a Howard collection. Bill Crawford must have published a ton of these booklets. The wraps may be found in several different colors, priority unknown. The paper is very cheap and usually severely browned. Historically, this title is only a stopgap before the coming flood.

A decade after Howard’s death Arkham House responded to the calls with 3004 copies of the massive omnibus Skull-Face and Others, one of the most attractive books produced in the entire 60 year history of that press. A matching volume of the collected weird novels of William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, had appeared immediately before. Both these books sported the first four-color dustwrappers done by the firm, featuring paintings by the brilliant fantasy artist Hannes Bok. The story selection, most taken from the best of Howard’s Weird Tales writings, was generous and quite impressive. As a tribute volume, the timing was impeccable.

In real life, Skull-Face and Others is where a serious collector begins spending the money. The only major quibble that can be made against the contents is that Derleth, something of a pacifist, severely neglected the slaughter-filled adventures of Conan by including only 5 tales. And in his introduction Derleth stated an argument that I have heard others make, that Howard in his early stories for Weird Tales was a better writer than the hardened pro “who created and exploited the popular Conan.” The fact is, and I say this as a profound admirer of his writing, that at any given moment throughout his professional career Howard could produce irredeemable hackwork side-by-side with a masterpiece. But the argument in favor of early Howard is confuted by looking at Weird Tales for June 1936, which features “Black Canaan,” one of the selections for this “best of” omnibus. Derleth included only one Howard western in Skull-Face, the Buckner J. Grimes riot “A Man-Eating Jeopard,” suggesting it may have been the finest piece of writing Howard ever did. It too originally appeared in June 1936.

Arkham House, having found a market, soon found competitors as well. Martin Greenberg at Gnome Press saw the potential in Conan and was the first to franchise the series. His books were nowhere near as finely made as Derleth’s, but his overall selection of titles was good. The Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon, as edited by John D. Clark, appeared under the title Conan the Conqueror in 1950. Ace Books picked up this title up for mass-market paperback in 1953, but somehow this edition, bound back-to-back with a science fiction novel by Leigh Brackett, didn’t take off. Many have suggested that Howard did not boom at this moment merely because of the cover art, which portrayed Conan as a Roman legionary. Robert E. Howard hated Rome.

Running out of original Howard material after four more Conan volumes, Greenberg hired L. Sprague de Camp to add more stories to “the saga.” But as the decade wore on, Greenberg felt the same crunch Derleth was experiencing at Arkham House – the major publishers had realized that fantasy and science fiction was a potentially lucrative market, and the big boys were moving in on the action. Glenn Lord recalls buying all the Gnome Press Conan titles in the late 50s or early 60s during their “Pick-a-book for $1.20” offer. These small presses were struggling to stay afloat. Most did not.

Arkham House barely made it past mid-decade. In 1953 and 1954 Derleth published one book each year, and none at all in 1955 and 1956. In 1957 Derleth returned with two titles – The Survivor and Others, one of his own books (in which he claimed to have “posthumously collaborated” with Lovecraft – yeah, right) and Always Comes Evening, the first major collection of Howard’s poetry. As Lord reports in The Last Celt, his bibliography of Robert E. Howard, this “book was published by Arkham House for Glenn Lord.” In a word, the edition was subsidized.

Lord had assembled the poems with the idea of publishing the book on his own, and had in hand the cover, which he had commissioned from Frank Utpatel. He had asked Utpatel for something along the lines of the dustjackets he had done for the Arkham House  poetry releases, A Hornbook for Witches (1950) by Leah Bodine Drake, and The Dark Chateau (1951) by Clark Ashton Smith. But he could not find a printer in his area to do the job so that costs would not force the price to more than $3.00 per copy. Derleth offered to front for it, since he could keep the price to that figure. Lord reports that the jacket art is reproduced from a reversed negative – what is white on the dustjacket is black in the original illustration. In his notes on this edition in The Last Celt, he writes that of the 636 copies made, the “Spine lettering is backward on all but approximately 100 copies.” Lord told me recently, “When Arkham House published Always Comes Evening for me, August Derleth decided to have 100 extra copies printed, at which point he found that all earlier copies had been stamped on the spine backwards; thus the only copies with the correct stamping are the 100 that were printed by Derleth’s decision.” I suppose if you wish to be strictly technical, then the 536 copies with the spine lettering done British style may be considered first state.

By such means Derleth weathered a bleak decade. In 1963 he gave us the last Howard title from Arkham House, The Dark Man and Others, in an edition of 2029 copies. This collection of Howard’s horror stories leads off with “Pigeons from Hell,” generally considered one of the scariest pieces of fiction of all time.

The overture to Howard’s popular success is Almuric, a darker, more violent – i.e. Howardian -- version of the interplanetary adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs, such as John Carter of Mars. No doubt the format was suggested to Howard by his agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, who had made a career on the side as a Burroughs imitator himself. At this time Don Wollheim at Ace Books was having a successful run with Burroughs paperbacks, and was looking for anything similar. So he picked up the Kline imitations and, in 1964, Almuric. Once more, Howard was in mass-market paperback. 

And in 1965 Donald M. Grant, who would become the major hardback publisher of Howard’s works, released his first Howard title, the photo-offset edition of A Gent from Bear Creek. A second collection of Breckinridge Elkins stories, The Pride of Bear Creek, appeared from Grant in 1966 in an edition of 812 copies.

The defining moment that put Howard permanently on the cultural map came in 1966. L. Sprague de Camp, who had been hired to add to the Conan series, was in a legal battle to wrest the property from Martin Greenberg. Gnome Press was on its last legs and de Camp felt sure the Conan character was too valuable to sit idle. He took the concept for an even longer series of books to paperback editor Larry Shaw at Lancer. Shaw agreed to the idea, and made the crucial decision to hire artist Frank Frazetta to paint the covers. Frazetta began his paperback career with covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs titles from Ace, and Shaw sensed his work would suit Conan. For the first time, potential readers were greeted by books whose violent atmospheric covers equaled the content of Howard’s fiction. The pairing of Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta was one of the perfect matches in the history of publishing.

Conan the Adventurer was the first Howard title to appear from Lancer, in 1966. Conan the Warrior and Conan the Usurper followed in 1967.  To check on first edition status, you need to match the publication number (#73-526 in the case of Adventurer) and the correct year of publication – these books rapidly went into several printings. Preoccupied with the Conan property, de Camp suggested in this period that the I. M. Howard heirs might hire Glenn Lord to agent other Howard material. Next to the Frazetta covers luring in huge numbers of new readers, this factor seems to have been the most crucial in leading to the Howard boom: the young author had left many more writings than just Conan, and Lord eased this material into book after book. Lancer issued King Kull in 1967 and the horror collection Wolfshead in 1968. The next year Dell published Bran Mak Morn with a Frazetta cover exceptional even by his standards.

Glenn Lord issued a small collection of Howard’s prose poems as Etchings in Ivory in 1968. An exquisite little book in dark golden wraps, done in an edition of 268 copies. The firsts collector, however, needs to beware the pirate edition! To the casual observer the piracy looks pretty much identical, but obviously was not meant to pass as the genuine article. The easy identifier: on Lord’s edition Robert E. Howard’s name on the cover is in all upper case; on the piracy it appears in upper and lower cases. I asked Lord if he ever learned who did this very fine piracy. He has a main suspect -- a friend of his -- but says this person has never copped a plea.

Perhaps because of its quality, or because of the association with Lord himself, Etchings in Ivory has always been high-ticket. Lord notes that he did actually sell out the edition for only $1.25 a copy. But the publisher and Howard fan Chuck Miller shares my perspective: “never a common thing” is how he sums it up. The 18 issues of the fanzine The Howard Collector which Lord published from 1961 to 1973 have much the same attraction. (As Chuck Miller told me, “Just try to find The Howard Collector, up to number 9 or so. That stuff will set you back.”) Most of us in the Howard arena have great regard for the job Lord did in bringing his writings to an international reputation. “It was, I suppose, somewhat due to my efforts,” Lord writes, “and somewhat due to the period of time this all occurred in. Had I not come on the scene when I did, many of the things that did occur would have been impossible to duplicate, given the fact that many of the people that were helpful are no longer alive.”

In 1968 Donald M. Grant returned to the Howardian landscape with 896 first edition copies of Red Shadows, the collected Solomon Kane stories and poems, illustrated with moody paintings by Jeff Jones. The big problem with this book is that Grant took it upon himself to edit Howard’s text, mostly for reasons of what today would be called political correctness. I side with the purists who want to read Howard’s fiction as Howard wrote it, not as Grant, or John D. Clark, or de Camp have chosen to change it. Here you have a pretty book with completely corrupt texts, so be warned.

 

During the 70s Grant would do numerous editions, both firsts and hardback reprints of paperback originals. Leading the march was a second collection of Howard’s poetry, Singers in the Shadows, in an edition of 549 copies. Next came 1091 copies of Red Blades of Black Cathay; Lord notes in The Last Celt that the binding for the majority of this edition was carmine cloth, but “some were bound in a much lighter red.” The following Grant release, Echoes from an Iron Harp, a third poetry book, has a similar variant. On his own Grant shelves, Paul Dobish finds “at least three different shades of red cloths” used for the 1079 copies of Iron Harp. The most beautiful production is the 1973 edition of The Sowers of the Thunder, a collection of historical adventures set during The Crusades, profusely illustrated with drawings from the sketchbooks of artist Roy Krenkel. This first had 2509 copies, as Grant grew more confident of the market. The deluxe series of Conan books Grant began in 1974 pale beside Sowers.

But just as Arkham House faced competition when opportunists realized a market had come into being, so other presses started up to tap the Howard collectors. Fictioneer Books did only one Howard first, 1100 copies of the western The Vultures in 1973, but Ted Dikty at FAX Collector’s Editions published several titles. And topping Grant for production values was another poetry collection, Night Images, from Morningstar Press -- with a deluxe edition of 250 copies numbered 1-250 and a trade edition of 750 copies numbered 251-1000. Unnumbered copies of Night Images have been reported, as well.

The titles the late Roy Squires printed on letterpress from handset types are high points of the book-making art for the Howard collector. Slim volumes in wraps, collecting only one or a few poems, the Squires booklets start with Black Dawn in 1972. Lord reports 234 numbered and 7 unnumbered copies on this item, and 217 numbered and 6 unnumbered copies for The Road to Rome. A Song of the Naked Lands had 230 numbered and 6 unnumbered copies, The Gold and the Grey 218 numbered copies, and Altars and Jesters 218 copies. The final Squires item, Up, John Kane! And Other Poems from 1977, had 353 numbered copies – the Howard fan and collector Paul Herman notes that copies 1 through 297 feature a dark blue cover, while copies 298 through 353 wear a bisque cover. Some 50 copies of all these booklets were assembled by Squires in a traycase under the title Poems by Robert E. Howard. (Lord, by the way, got the exact figures for unnumbered copies from Squires. Terence McVicker, inheritor of the Squires business, reports that Squires left “very few written records. . . usually the only copies he didn’t number, were those that had ‘flaws’ or he wasn’t terribly pleased with. He printed extra sheets, for those copies that might be damaged in transit, but not often complete sewn ones.” We may presume 6 or so unnumbered copies for all Squires items.)

As the explosive force from the Howard boom began to widen, we see the re-entry of the genuine fan press. Chuck Miller says he numbered his first ever publication, “trying to be like Squires.” The booklet Valley of the Lost came out in June or July of 1975, 777 numbered copies signed by the artist, Miller’s pal Bot Roda, “who could draw pretty good” (more recently Roda did storyboards for the film Gettysburg). Miller’s next booklet, The Grey God Passes, was ready for the World Fantasy Convention that October; he figures he “must have done two or three thousand of those things – Phil Seuling used to take them a hundred at a time.”

Dennis McHaney produced the fanzine The Howard Review in this period, and he too released a booklet in 1975: Rhymes of Death. Officially the run consisted of 600 numbered copies, but fellow Howard collector and bibliographer David Gentzel tells me that in his fan magazines McHaney once reported an additional 268 unnumbered copies, and on another occasion gave the figure as 274. McHaney’s other booklet that year, Two Against Tyre, consisted of 900 unnumbered copies, and 600 numbered copies on deluxe paper.

George T. Hamilton published yet another Howard fanzine, Cross Plains. He too jumped into the booklet action in 1975 with 263 copies of Verses in Ebony, co-published with Dale Brown. Lord informs me that Hamilton did a sample mock-up of 50 copies, using poems from the Roy Squires chapbooks and other places, instead of the poems used in the real edition; the mock-up features a color dustjacket whereas the actual release wears a black & white wrapper. Dale Brown has reported that 20 of these advance copies were distributed. Subsequently, Hamilton released a matched set of seven Howard items done in heavy card covers, with dustwrappers by artist Steve Fabian. Chuck Miller feels “the tough one” for the collector is The Bicentennial Tribute to Robert E. Howard from 1976 – with only 194 copies done. Of course, this booklet is secondary material, not a genuine Howard first. The six firsts are Blades for France (300 copies), Shadow of the Hun (318 copies), Isle of Pirate’s Doom (302 copies), The King’s Service (310 copies), The Shadow of the Beast (280 copies), and Spears of Clontarf (152 copies).

Jonathan Bacon issued Fantasy Crossroads, another fanzine with much Howard content. At one point he commissioned other writers to finish, chapter by chapter as a round robin, and at novel length, a fragment of a story left by Howard. Twelve of the 17 total chapters – by Michael Moorcock, Marion Zimmer Bradley, A. E. Van Vogt and others – appeared in his fanzine. Only recently has the full text of Ghor, Kin-Slayer seen print from Necronomicon Press. In the midst of the Howard boom, Bacon published 1000 numbered copies of Runes of Ahrh-Eih-Eche, the first collection of letters from the Texas fantasist, and 450 copies of another poetry collection, The Grim Land and Others.

The true boom, of course, occurred as Howard hit the paperback racks like a volcano erupting. Zebra Books released a run of Howard titles with wraparound covers by Jeff Jones. Several of these were firsts. In one instance, the collection of boxing stories The Iron Man, Donald M. Grant saw his hardback edition beaten into print by the Zebra paperback, which he mentions in an interview in Fantasy Crossroads #10/11. The hardback was scheduled to come out first, but “Zebra had made arrangements with the agents, with Glenn Lord and Kirby McCauley, to bring out a paperback edition, and they were in urgent need for Howard property. So what I did was allow them to use the page repros in advance. You’ll notice the typeset is just the same for the two books. Well, they went to press at the same time, but it takes longer to produce a casebound book. There’s a lot more involved. They hammer out the paperbacks. It was probably done on a Cameron Belt Press. From start to finish it’s a day or two or some ridiculously small length of time.” Still, Grant notes, “a paperback edition, to me, is different from a casebound first edition. First in paper, first in cloth.” Similarly, the FAX hardback of Swords of Shahrazar was beaten into print by the British paperback from Orbit.

Locus, the newspaper of the science fiction field, reported late in 1976 that Berkley paid “a reported $300,000” for reprint rights to15 Howard titles, which ranked as “the largest sale of fantasy work so far” in publishing history. The record has been surpassed since, but indicates the importance of Howard in opening the marketplace for the genre. The Berkley set was unified by covers painted by Ken Kelley, who had studied under Frazetta, and includes several true firsts. Likewise, when Ace Books picked up a run of Howard books, a couple of firsts appeared. Bantam did a run. Howard paperbacks were legion.

In the 80s a perceived “slump” occurred in the release of Howard titles, which lasted until about 1994. Of course in this period Howard was making great inroads into European translation. The Nouvelles Editions Oswald in France released over 30 titles in handsome trade paperbacks. In 1988 the NEO edition of Poems of War and Death – a re-titling of Always Comes Evening in a bilingual text – saw print in both trade paper and as a deluxe limited edition of 500 copies, which sold for the equivalent of $100 retail. New editions of Robert E. Howard have appeared in almost every European market, most recently in Croatia and the Czech Republic.

On the homefront the fan press endeavored to fill the void. Another poetry collection, The Ghost Ocean, saw print from Gibbelins Gazette Publications in 1982  -- 50 hardcover copies and 310 copies in trade paper. Bob Price at Cryptic Publications, best known for his Lovecraftian fanzine Crypt of Cthulhu, did several booklets that decade. Bran Mak Morn: A Play and Others started the run in1983. David Gentzel says the edition was 400 copies, with a further 25 numbered copies signed by Glenn Lord, Bob Price and artist Stephen Fabian. Two-Fisted Detective Stories ran to 500 copies plus a numbered edition of 50 copies signed by Price and Fabian, plus 26 lettered and 20 presentation copies. With subsequent booklets, Price dispensed with the signed states. (More fun-loving than most, in 1986 he also released a fanzine called Lurid Confessions #1, containing all REH material. You might flip a coin and call it a genuine first edition chapbook, but then Price may suddenly do another issue with other contents and make it into a real fanzine. Recently Price has been editing REH Fight Magazine for Necronomicon Press – a fanzine, not a new series of firsts, depending on how you see it.)

Thomas Kovacs at Dark Carneval published Writer of the Dark in 1986, another poetry collection. Paul Herman informs me as of early 2000 there were 500 sets of pages, with 200 bound in a reddish orange paper with a rat design, and 120 more in an undecorated tan paper (“after he lost the first cover design”). Another “80 were lost in a flood,” with 100 more as yet unbound, but intended to appear as hardcovers. Kovacs also issued 80 copies of the solo poem Spears of Clontarf as a preprint, in “at least two color of covers,” gray and ivory. Among other Kovacs items are The Rhyme of the Three Slayers from 1983 in 250 signed and numbered copies (though David Gentzel notes, “this is barely a ‘book,’ consisting of a single folded sheet”). Neolithic Love Song from 1987 again was a single sheet, folded, in 36 signed and numbered copies. The Return of the Seafarer from 1988 was limited to 25 copies, and Kovacs also apparently did 2 copies of the doggerel Wolfsdung.

A professional, but equally odd, publication is The Last Cat Book, illustrated by Peter Kruper, in which Howard’s essay “The Beast from the Abyss” becomes a kind of an anti-cat book, as an antidote to the cat book craze of the mid-80s. By the end of the decade, though, Howard was seeing a comeback, first with the handsome paperback Cthulhu from Baen Books, followed by yet another poetry collection, Shadows of Dreams from Don Grant.

In 1989 for the 100th mailing of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, three quite limited editions saw print. The Gibbelins Gazette crew issued Howard’s long poem The Ballad of King Geraint for the first time in 70 wraps copies, with roughly half distributed in the mailing to hardcore Howard fans. They also announced 300 copies for later distribution in hardback. While no one would argue about Ballad being a true first, you have to be generous with Charles Hoffman’s Desire and Other Poems. It contains five poems published nowhere else, but is merely photocopied, and Hoffman also put the title and number of his regular REHupa zine -- Adequate Adventure Stories #4 – on the cover. Since Hoffman is one of the best Howard critics, most collectors give his “first” the benefit of the doubt. Finally, Rusty Burke, author of the recent REH: A Short Biography, presented No Refuge, containing the text of a letter from Howard to Lovecraft circa December 1930, in 30 numbered copies.

As the 90s began, more of Howard’s letters appeared from Necronomicon Press, and Grant published Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, his autobiographical novel. A new series of mass market paperbacks were published by Baen Books, particularly notable because they sought to restore Howard’s texts by referring to either typescripts or initial pulp appearances. Three of these new editions are true firsts, and the others are worth seeking for the improved texts.

In 1992 Wayne Stolte, working with a hand press, made 20 copies of Flight, containing two Howard poems previously unpublished in book form. Never for sale, Stolte only traded against copies of rare Howard materials. The collector Paul Herman says, “It is a work of art. Japanese hand-laid endpapers, oversized binding, needleblock REH figure on the jacket, all hand-assembled. Cost him something like $30 apiece for materials. I consider it one of my more special pieces, but it is a damn small print run.” Another somewhat personal Howard first is A Man-Eating Jeopard, a photocopy of original story, sold only at the Robert E. Howard house in 625 4th Street, Cross Plains, Texas, as a fundraiser. The Howard home is now a National Literary Landmark. Herman lists two different covers so far, one beige, the other brown.

Very recent editions of note include a textually improved collection of The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane from Wandering Star in London. Released in 1998 in an edition of 1050 signed and numbered copies, profusely illustrated by artist Gary Gianni, this book comes with a folder holding six separate color plates as well as a CD of the three poems about Solomon Kane set to music. In 1999 Paul Herman published The Complete Yellow Jacket as a booklet, collecting the humorous items and one poem the young author wrote for The Yellow Jacket, the school paper of Howard Payne University. The limitation is 100 copies, but one copy was destroyed during printing. An additional 8 lettered presentation copies were done on Turkish Marbled Paper. While Herman concedes the material “is not that good,” he uses acid-free papers throughout to preserve the historical document.

The latest, and yes, among the greatest Howard firsts is The Ultimate Triumph from Wandering Star. A collection of Howard’s stories and letters on the subject of barbarism, using unexpurgated texts, this production harks back to the deluxe The Sowers of the Thunder with its wealth of illustration from Krenkel’s sketchbooks. Only here you have some 140 pieces of art taken from the files of Frank Frazetta – what better first to bring Robert E. Howard into the year 2000? This edition comes in three states: 2300 trade hardcover copies for $40; 1500 numbered copies with extra color plates, in slipcase, for $80; and 100 copies bound in kid leather for around $425.

 

If you do not wish to stop here, then you might look for first variants. For example, the 1979 Bantam paperback of Wolfshead drops one of the stories used in the Lancer edition, and replaces the introduction by Howard with one by Robert Bloch. Technically, that makes a new first. Offhand, I can think of more than a dozen examples of this kind of Howard variant. And how about the verse broadside Candles, done by Michael Horvat at the Curmudgeon Press? Paul Herman tells me 45 copies in envelope were made, but “supposedly all but 3 to 5 were accidentally destroyed prior to distribution, blowing out of the boat as it was going across a lake to the post office.” Horvat says he found the poem on a sheet of paper folded into a set of Robert H. Barlow’s amateur magazine Dragon-fly, hand-bound and inscribed by Barlow, who was a correspondent of Howard and Lovecraft. The bound volume is in the files of The Fossils, an association devoted to the amateur journalism movement. Glenn Lord has expressed doubt about this poem being by Howard. Nonetheless, it has been reprinted twice in the fan press. First by Charles Garvin in a run of 50 copies in 1979, and later another 50 copies done by Lord himself. Barely over 100 copies total on that title, with less than 5 genuine firsts. Who feels lucky?

 

The Black Reaper from 1995 brings up a related topic. Yet another Howard poetry collection, but issued by a comic book publisher with illustrations by comic book artists  (though not in panel format) – halfway between book and comic book. The volume of comic adaptations of Howard is as vast a sea as any, if you need more Howardiana to collect. But I trust you know that the average collector will have to wade through hell to even see a copy of the Jenkins A Gent from Bear Creek in person. For someone who wrote barely more than a decade, Howard left the collecting community a monumental opportunity, a hobby to last a lifetime, and never be finished.

 

In 1931 Robert E. Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft to say, “. . .most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies. . . . I am never, in these dreams of ancient times, a civilized man. Always I am the barbarian, the skin-clad, tousle-haired, light-eyed wild man, armed with a rude axe or sword. . . .” His vivid dreams of barbarism, embodied in over a hundred first editions, seem to me as powerful today as when they first rolled off the Underwood in a small frame house in Cross Plains, Texas.

 

 

(As usual, the above version is what I sent in, vs. whatever changes were wrought by the editors at Firsts. Plus I have corrected one glaring mistake that eased into the magazine appearance. Worth noting is that at least two more copies of the ultra-rare A Gent from Bear Creek have turned up, one located by REH fan Leo Grin via a source in South Africa, who saved it from a discard bin the day before the contents of that bin were headed to the dump (!). Leo bought this jacketless copy and has donated it to the REH Museum in Cross Plains, Texas. A second copy, with the defining condition of having restored endpapers (and no dustjacket), recently was offered on eBay. Which brings us all the way up to eight known copies, with rumors of one or two more. . . .)

 

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