TO OPEN A CELEBRATION of the centennial of Don Wandrei's birth on April 20, 1908, here's the text of an article written for Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine for October 1999. If you need a quick overview for who Wandrei was and what he did in the world of books, this should clue you in:

Collecting Donald Wandrei

By Don Herron

From the very first Donald Wandrei had the touch that pushes in and holds down on the collecting instinct. His first story sale of "The Red Brain" to the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales achieved instant acclaim, and now is considered a classic in the literature of cosmic dread. The next year his first book, Ecstasy, appeared under the imprint of W. Paul Cook's highly collectable The Recluse Press. A prolific round of writing for the pulps followed. His near-legendary science fiction story, "Colossus," appeared in Astounding in this period, during which Wandrei distinguished himself as one of the most talented members of the group known today as the Lovecraft Circle. When his good friend H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937, Wandrei was instrumental in founding Arkham House with August Derleth to preserve Lovecraft's legacy of fiction and letters — Arkham House, a name to conjure with in the antiquarian trade. And finally, he left behind at his death a treasure trove of first editions, many of these the finest condition copies to come on the market in years, immaculately sheltered from the ravages of time by Donald Wandrei, author, publisher and collector.

Wandrei's impulse to collect and perpetuate his favorite writers perhaps may be traced to a traumatic incident in his youth. Born in 1908 in St. Paul, Minnesota, he once told me that in 1917 at the age of nine his "world crashed down" when the St. Paul Public Library burned. The young reader was returning an armload of about sixteen books when he noticed smoke and finally came upon the scene as firewagons tried to save the building. He recalled that he was going through sixteen to eighteen books a week, using the library cards of his parents and siblings to check out that many at once. Within a decade Wandrei began to write appreciations of his favorite writers. His article "Arthur Machen and The Hill of Dreams" appeared in the Minnesota Quarterly in spring 1926, and led to an exchange of letters with the Welsh mystic. The December 1926 issue of The Overland Monthly ran Wandrei's tribute to the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, "The Emperor of Dreams," placed with the magazine by Smith's mentor George Sterling shortly before his suicide in November of that year.

That era's vogue for books-about-books, best served by the likes of Vincent Starrett and Paul Jordan-Smith, had only a casual practitioner in Wandrei. He was more interested in writing his own poetry, beginning at the age of fifteen under the influence of the decadent 1902 release, The Book of Jade by Park Barnitz, as well as his own fiction, such as "The Red Brain," completed at the age of sixteen. In this story, a mysterious Cosmic Dust sweeps through the universe, obliterating the stars. Only Antares, inhabited by a race of viscous Brains, survives. This last redoubt of universal sentience entrusts its fate to the unique, laboratory-created Red Brain, developed by chemists to combat the approaching doom. At the meeting to decide how best to face their fate the Red Brain towers up in a shifting crimson column. "'I have found an infallible plan! The Red Brain has conquered the Cosmic Dust!'" Minds open for the solution, his fellows form a circle around, as their own Frankenstein hurls forth destructive thought-bolts on their unguarded minds and they become rivers of pitch running down the floor of the Hall of Mist.

"The hope of the universe had lain with the Red Brain."

"And the Red Brain was mad."

Praised for its irony, its nihilistic finality, "The Red Brain" alone might have placed Wandrei in the front ranks of writers of cosmic horror, had he nothing else with which to follow it up. William Hope Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland is the flagship work in this sub-genre, where the traditional vampires and ghosts of supernatural terror are replaced with a stricken look at the possibilities offered by the usually more upbeat genre of science fiction. Wandrei's friends, H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, are the other major writers of these tales, which cover kalpas of time and portray humanity as, at best, an insignificant episode in the cosmos. Lovecraft, in a letter to Smith dated October 17, 1930, defined cosmicism as the "capacity to feel profoundly regarding the cosmos and the disturbing and fascinating quality of the extra-terrestrial and perpetually unknown."

"You have it yourself to a supreme degree," Lovecraft told Smith, "and so have Wandrei and Bernard Dwyer; but I'm hanged if I can carry the list any farther." Lovecraft felt that August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and other members of their circle of writers simply did not understand what it was all about. The forgotten Dwyer did not write any tales of cosmic horror, leaving Lovecraft, Smith and Wandrei a lonely triumvirate in the pulp pages of Weird Tales, Astounding Stories and Wonder Stories.

In 1926 at the age of eighteen Wandrei had hitchhiked east to meet Lovecraft for the first time. During this visit he read all of Lovecraft's as yet unpublished stories in manuscript, and en route home to St. Paul stopped into the Chicago offices of Weird Tales to talk editor Farnsworth Wright into accepting "The Call of Cthulhu," which he had rejected until then. Apparently Wandrei conveyed the brilliance of this cornerstone Lovecraft work to the hesitant Wright. While he was in Providence the helpful Lovecraft suggested that Wandrei get in touch with a new correspondent he had made, another young writer named August Derleth, in Wandrei's neighboring state of Wisconsin.

During that first visit Wandrei also composed several of the poems, including "Valerian: To Clark Ashton Smith," that would appear in his first book. Issued by Lovecraft's good friend W. Paul Cook at The Recluse Press in Athol, Massachusetts in 1928, Ecstasy and Other Poems consisted of 322 copies in deep purple boards with no limitation numbering or signature, issued in a transparent glassine dustcover. The glassine wrapper, even in copies held safe in Wandrei's personal collection, has experienced noticeable aging, and the purple cloth is prone to sunning typical for that color. Still, this edition fared far better than the other book Cook printed that year, Lovecraft's The Shunned House, done in an edition of some 300 copies, none of which were bound or released by the publisher. What would have been Lovecraft's first book had to wait for Lovecraft's protégé Robert Barlow to release some unbound copies in 1936. Later Arkham House bound 100 copies for sale through their catalogs.

Wandrei's second book was another collection of poetry, Dark Odyssey, a 1931 release in an edition of 400 numbered copies under the imprint of the Webb Publishing Company in St. Paul. This book features five illustrations by Howard Wandrei, younger by a year than Donald. Howard Wandrei was something of a genius at pictorial and plastic arts, experimenting in batik, jewelry, line drawing and painting, mostly along the same fantastic themes and moods favored by his brother. Donald Wandrei often credited viewing some new work by Howard for inspiring one of his stories or poems. Clark Ashton Smith once described Howard's illustration of "The Sorcerer's Workshop" as "a mélange of ingenious and provocative abominations," and in 1934 Lovecraft decided that Howard Wandrei "has gone farther in his art than have any of the rest of us in our writing."

In his introduction to the recent Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei, Richard L. Tierney quotes from a letter Wandrei wrote to August Derleth in April 1931 on the subject of Dark Odyssey: "I shall destroy all unsold copies. In case I make a name for myself, as I intend to do, the book will command a large premium, as there will not be more than a hundred copies out, and most of those in the hands of friends who intend keeping them." Wandrei already was well aware of scarcity as a way to up the ante in the collecting community. His first book appearance had been in Broken Mirrors, a 1928 small press item that also featured the first book publication for journalist Harrison Salisbury. This title was done in a total edition of only 82 copies, with 22 lettered and 60 numbered, all copies signed by Wandrei, Salisbury and the three other contributors.

In fact, it is doubtful that Wandrei ever destroyed any copies, and you will find Dark Odyssey offered in the Arkham House catalog for June 1944. The next catalog with publication plans for 1945 lists it as out of print. Presuming all 400 copies found their way out into the world, the book still remains tough to find in prime condition because of the gold foil dustwrapper, similar to the notoriously fragile dustjacket on Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire. Wandrei once told me of an incident in the fifties when he was walking in rural Minnesota and saw an abandoned farmhouse, scheduled for demolition. He went into the desolate structure and found everything a shambles, except for a copy of Dark Odyssey lying neatly on the kitchen table. He took the book with him and mentioned the find to Derleth. A week or so later Derleth told Wandrei of a collector who desperately needed a copy, and he sold that one for $25. Given the odd circumstance under which he found it, he said he regretted letting that particular copy go.

By the thirties Wandrei moved to New York City, where he became an active member of the Lovecraft Circle, and is often referenced in Lovecraft's letters under the title "Melmoth the Wandrei." He became a versatile contributor to the pulp magazines, and soon was joined by his brother Howard, equally quick at the typewriter. Both brothers sold to Weird Tales, and more frequently to science fiction and crime titles, and Howard made a prolific sideline into the spicy pulps. Argosy, Unknown, Black Mask — the sales piled up. Both Wandreis even managed to crack the slick pages of Esquire, a period version of one of today's horror or science fiction writers selling a story to Playboy. (The comparison becomes obvious when you flip through an issue of Esquire with a Wandrei brother story and come across a page adorned by one of Vargas' languorous semi-nude women.) The brothers had one major difference in marketing technique, documented in Esquire for November 1937, which ran a photo of Howard Wandrei. The accompanying blurb noted casually, "I collect pseudonyms." On the contents page for the April 1934 Astounding, for example, may be found "The Atom-Smasher" by Donald Wandrei immediately below "The God Box" by Howard Von Drey.

The pulp milieu Wandrei faced in New York City had its hectic moments. Wandrei told me that once he was typing a new story for Street and Smith as firemen put out a conflagration in the apartment next door. He said he never heard them pounding and yelling, and was amazed when he left to hand-deliver the story and stepped into the middle of the action. Another time the electricity was off during a cold spell in winter. As he worked on a new manuscript he would toss old typescripts of already published stories in a grate to provide some heat, and accidentally burned a just-completed tale, which he then had to quickly rewrite.

In Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), L. Sprague de Camp pointed out that Lovecraft "rather deplored the commercial success that Frank Long and Donald Wandrei had achieved with their stories, being sure that it would make 'cheap magazine hacks' of them…. 'And to think they were once lit'ry guys!' He mourned." Certainly Wandrei considered most of his pulp writing mere pot-boiling, but he, and his brother Howard, knew how to make a fun stew. Giant blobs, weird dooms, the stories are highly entertaining even by today's standards. You can't help but love it when a mysterious ray shoots up out of the ground in a Wandrei story and a scientist goes over to investigate. He looks into the beam and it neatly slices off the top of his head. The rest of his body tumbles right in after. And not everything was written strictly to pay the rent. Clearly, Wandrei's exceptional series of "Sonnets of the Midnight Hours" appearing in Weird Tales in this period inspired Lovecraft to compose his own sonnet sequence, "The Fungi from Yuggoth." Connoisseurs of fantastic poetry debate which cycle is better, Wandrei's or Lovecraft's, to this day.

Many of the stories Donald Wandrei wrote for the pulps compare favorably with his more leisured writing. "Colossus," telling of a jump from this reality into a still greater macrocosmos, is among his most popular stories. In Before the Golden Age (1974), Isaac Asimov explained how the editor at Astounding Stories, F. Orlin Tremaine, introduced what were called "Thought-Variant" stories, dedicated to the creation of new ideas "unlike any that had been seen before in science fiction (or, at least, any that had become clichés.") These "Thought-Variant" tales, Asimov noted, "struck me as science fiction par excellence," and he chose Wandrei's tale for inclusion in his anthology, looking back at the early pulp science fiction era, where "beginning in early 1934, Astounding Stories became the dominating magazine in science fiction." Donald Wandrei, Asimov stated, was "a Tremaine author," and thus one of the most inventive imaginations of that decade.

Before he could pick up his paycheck for "Colossus," though, Wandrei told me that Tremaine wanted to see some sort of "scientific" evidence to back up the idea if a reader picked at it. So, Wandrei roamed through bookstores and the New York Public Library, looking for something that might validate the idea of jumping into a super-universe! Finally, in Scribner's Bookstore he found the closest sort of "proof" he could manage in Sir Arthur Eddington's The Expanding Universe (1933). Wandrei took a quote and scribbled it down on the back of a letter he had in his pocket. Then he rushed over to the Astounding office and transferred the quote onto the title page of the typescript and picked up his check. To Wandrei's dismay, the typesetters thought it was part of the story and used it as a prefatory quote. When Asimov reprinted this story in Before the Golden Age he used even more of the quote, saying it inspired "Colossus," but it didn't. Near the end of his life Wandrei was unhappy about this and still bothered over the original illustration for the story in Astounding, which completely gave away the surprise plot device of the tale.

In 1935 Donald Wandrei took the initiative to sell Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" to Astounding, all of the money going to the near destitute Lovecraft. Wandrei wrote Derleth that Tremaine had asked him for a two-part serial, and he managed to substitute the Lovecraft instead of writing something of his own.

When H. P. Lovecraft died in March 1937, Wandrei and Derleth learned that the teenaged Robert H. Barlow had been named executor of the literary estate and was planning to issue a collection of tales. Wandrei thought this might doom Lovecraft to continued appearances in small print run, typo-laden books such as the Visionary Publishing Company's 1936 edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the only book actually released in Lovecraft's lifetime. Wandrei held Lovecraft's fiction in extremely high regard, and wished to see it appear in durable books from an established publisher, so that Lovecraft could achieve the greater reputation he deserved. If he himself was content to appear in limited editions, Wandrei felt Lovecraft's talent deserved larger exposure.

In Thirty Years of Arkham House (1970), August Derleth recorded that he first heard of Lovecraft's death via a letter from Howard Wandrei in New York. That same day he "wrote Donald Wandrei that something should be done to keep Lovecraft's fine stories in print; he replied that collecting only the stories, as I had considered doing, was not enough — all the work should be collected and eventually published, including the marvelously instructive and entertaining letters." The two friends traveled to Providence to meet with Lovecraft's surviving aunt and recover the rights from Barlow. Wandrei was furious when he found that Barlow had taken all the manuscripts and books, apparently leaving the aunt literally to survive on jars of peanuts. Wandrei and Derleth set out on a crusade against Barlow, eventually bullying him into relinquishing the Lovecraft material to them. Today we know that Lovecraft's aunt was not even close to the prospect of starvation Wandrei imagined, that she actually had a comfortable amount of money but, like her nephew, subsisted on very little. And the assertion of rights to Lovecraft's material, which Derleth enforced for years, seems to have come on the advice of Wandrei's father, a lawyer. Over the decades far too many people have given Derleth all the credit or discredit for everything to do with Arkham House, but Wandrei worked much more behind the scene than most people knew. It will all come out in time. Worth noting here is the fact that Derleth never actually met Lovecraft, and it was Wandrei's friendship with the aunt that gave them the opening to pursue their plans.

Their proposed Lovecraft omnibus, The Outsider and Others, was rejected by Scribners, Doubleday, and Simon and Schuster. Ironically, Wandrei and Derleth realized they might have to go the route intended by Barlow and self-publish the book themselves, but if so, they planned for the largest edition they could afford. An August 30, 1939 letter from Wandrei to his new partner discussed naming the imprint for the collection: "Some of his New England coinage might be appropriate: Arkham, Providence House or publications. . . ." Derleth recalled that Wandrei put up some twenty percent of the production costs, he himself mortgaged his home, and the first Arkham House book was born in a print run of 1,268 copies. Wandrei told me that reading proof on The Outsider was very difficult, as every page or so he would be caught up in the prose and realize what was happening four or five pages later, then have to go back and try again.

Wandrei co-edited The Outsider and Others (1939), the follow-up collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943), and Marginalia (1944), although he enlisted in the wartime army in 1942. He began assembling and editing Lovecraft's letters in this period, as well, and frequently acted as copy editor on many Arkham releases. Derleth is credited as sole editor on Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947), for example, but letters between the partners indicate that Wandrei acted as ghost-editor. But there is no argument on the point that it was Derleth who took the company in broader directions, and made a real business of it. And Derleth certainly knew the book game, nurturing along the compelling Arkham House Collecting Myth, perhaps his greatest accomplishment.

That Arkham House catalog for June 1944 offered as their fifth release Donald Wandrei's first story collection, The Eye and the Finger, for October publication, along with Henry S. Whitehead's Jumbee. The dustjackets on these two titles are especially subject to fading, with the green paper on the Wandrei normally found in more a washed out gray than not. Done in an edition of 1,617 copies, it quickly sold out — a fact once commented upon by the late Roy Squires, a book dealer specializing in science fiction and the Arkham authors. Squires called The Eye and the Finger "one of the most difficult to find of Arkham House fiction titles — it was out of print in 1946."

The Eye and the Finger featured some of the best stories from Wandrei's pulp period, as well as fine mood pieces such as "The Woman at the Window" and "A Fragment of a Dream." Many of Wandrei's stories, by the way, were inspired by particularly horrific dreams he would have. The jacket art is a drawing by Howard Wandrei. My own copy of this title is especially fine, but only because Wandrei sent it to me as a gift from his personal holdings. While the jacket is unfaded, the interior pages show some aging, perhaps based on the quality of paper available during World War II. A nice touch added when he sent it was the fact that Wandrei enclosed this copy in an Arkham House shipping box, addressed to him, with original stamps and cancellations. He covered that box over with exterior wrapping paper to preserve the box itself. I realize that someone out there might think that he just happened to have the Arkham box to hand and put the book into it, but that person does not understand a collector of Wandrei's caliber.

In 1948 Wandrei's novel The Web of Easter Island saw print from Arkham House in an edition of 3,068 copies. His original title had been Dead Titans Waken. This book and its jacket usually suffer browning to the paper, and because of the larger print run was for years one of the easier Arkham titles to acquire, remaining in print for two decades. The action in the novel suggests Lovecraft's Cthulhu cycle, and I especially like a noir episode Wandrei slips in, with doomed lovers on a ship.

Later in the forties Wandrei tried writing for DC comics, in particular the crime title Gang Busters. He spent the early fifties in Hollywood, and carried on a correspondence with his brother Howard during this period, which he projected as seeing into print under the title The Circle of Pyramids. Howard Wandrei died in 1956 from the effects of alcoholism, and soon after Wandrei's mother and sister fell into long-lasting illness, necessitating his constant care until the early seventies.

The 1964 Books from Arkham House lists as coming Wandrei's Poems for Midnight. He told me that one evening in the early sixties he received a phone call from August Derleth in his Place of Hawks in Sauk City. Derleth said that he had thought of a great title, to which Wandrei replied, "Well, Augie, let's hear it." Derleth said, "Poems for Midnight." Wandrei thought that one of the best titles he had heard of, and told Derleth so. Then Derleth told him, "It's yours, if you'll put together a small collection of macabre poetry to go with it." Wandrei did so, because he loved the title, and that's how his Poems for Midnight originated. Issued in a print run of 742 copies, with interior illustrations by Howard Wandrei and jacket art by Arkham regular Frank Utpatel, this book contains the "Sonnets of the Midnight Hours" sequence. The small press runs for Arkham poetry titles have that air of scarcity that has raised the value steadily over the years.

In 1965 the first of five volumes of Lovecraft's selected letters appeared, and so did a second story collection from Wandrei under the title Strange Harvest. Issued in an edition of 2,000 copies, this book was listed as being in limited supply by the April 1974 Arkham announcement; by the November 1974 bulletin it was out of print. The jacket features another drawing by Howard Wandrei, but Don was furious because Frank Utpatel designed the cover and cropped the original, adding the cross-hatched border you see on the printed book. The little figure on the spine with the pair of eyes also is by Utpatel, ineptly trying to match the cover art. Wandrei simply did not consider Utpatel an accomplished enough artist to tamper with his brother's work.

August Derleth died suddenly in 1971. By his own account, Wandrei had little interest in the general affairs of Arkham House and was still under pressure to care for his mother and sister. Yet his longtime friends Frank Belknap Long and Carl Jacobi had books in the pipeline, so Wandrei stepped in to see them through the press. The Rim of the Unknown and Disclosures in Scarlet, issued in 1972, then may be considered final books done under Wandrei's aegis.

The October 1972 stocklist is a nice item for Wandrei collectors to have — Wandrei inscribed a copy of this to the collector Dennis Rickard as "My latest work of fiction." In this booklet he announces the upcoming publication of his own Colossus, The Circle of Pyramids, a collection of Howard Wandrei's fantastic fiction under the title Time Burial, as well as diaries, letters and numerous other tantalizing projects. Of course none had appeared by the time Wandrei severed relations with the firm in May 1973. He entered into a lawsuit to retain the rights to Lovecraft and other material that would drag on for years, punctuated by the issuance of broadsides in very small editions denouncing Arkham House's new management and other people he felt were negative forces in fantasy publishing. I have profound doubts that these essays had any effect on modern fantasy fandom. Life is short, and other things beg for attention. His connection of points ultimately became so byzantine that people I knew who were not initiated by long talks with Wandrei could not follow what he was going on about. Still, these various letter-essays, if you can find them, add an interesting side-category to Wandrei collecting, and the full history of Arkham House cannot be written without taking them into account.

Wandrei died in 1987, and by August 1988 Pepper and Stern had out a catalog titled Selections from the Donald Wandrei Library, listing 358 individual books or lots of books from his collection. Lot #69, for example, offered 154 books by August Derleth, ninety-five of these personally inscribed from one Arkham House co-founder to the other. From his holdings emerged some of the finest condition copies of early Arkham titles that had been seen in years, as well as many other highly collectable books. I heard one collector grousing, when the fine condition copies of Wandrei's first two poetry books hit the market, that now the books would be worth nothing! I concede than some small market dip may have occurred, but more people collect these books than ever before, and I imagine the prices will hold high enough for most checkbooks.

Also in 1988 the prelude to a large-scale Wandrei revival appeared in the form of Collected Poems from Necronomicon Press. A booklet in wraps, it simply is not of great interest to a collector, though the edition does add a few poems not assembled in the earlier and more finely made volumes. Wandrei, valuing scarcity, had perversely withheld most of his and his brother's work from publication for long years. His estate allowed publishers and thus fans access to material that most of them had never seen before. In a way, it was as nice a coup as Arkham House made in 1939 when they began giving Lovecraft to the world at large.

Fedogan and Bremer released Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei the next year. A large, well-made book, attractively packaged, it evokes the feeling of those early Arkham House omnibus volumes. Done in an edition of 1000 copies, Colossus, perhaps not coincidentally, is The Outsider of the Fedogan and Bremer enterprise, the first book from their press. Lately I find that the Fedogan and Bremer line seems more Arkham than Arkham House, if you know what I mean. They are filling a need that Arkham House has let go neglected, and so Colossus already has achieved collectable status and the price that goes with it.

In 1997 Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei saw print from Fedogan and Bremer. Another large collection, with much previously unreprinted and unpublished material, it is a wonderful book. Two thousand copies were made. A spokesman at Fedogan and Bremer tells me that the actual shipments on the various titles are "very, very close to the stated print run, within 50 copies."

In the interim between the two Donald Wandrei titles, among other books Fedogan and Bremer issued was Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei, with a dustjacket bearing the best reproduction to date of a Howard Wandrei drawing. A couple of fans have told me that they are interested in Donald Wandrei, not Howard Wandrei. I try to be patient, but if you are intrigued by one of the brothers, then you need the books of both. The subject matter and style are similar enough, and these new omnibus editions have extensive introductions, which provide information jointly on both Wandreis that we have not known about before now. A particularly nice feature is the use of photographs. Time Burial appeared in a press run of 1500 copies in 1995.

Another Howard Wandrei collection came out in 1996, The Last Pin, a first volume of his collected mystery fiction. Fedogan and Bremer released a trade edition of 1500 copies and a simultaneous limited, slipcased edition of 100 copies signed by the illustrator and editor, with a facsimile Howard Wandrei signature. Laid-in is a receipt for a liquor delivery made to the Wandreis during their New York period (remember the cause of Howard's end). Inside the slipcase with the book is a separate copy of "Sayeth the Lord," an alternate version of the title story.

A second, expanded edition of Colossus has just appeared, with the addition of two previously unpublished stories and a section of photos. Following soon will be a collection of horror stories by Howard Wandrei under the title The Eerie Mr. Murphy. And in time another mystery collection from Howard, Don't Send a Boy, and Donald's collected series of Ivy Frost mysteries, written for Clues Detective, under the title Frost. And waiting for publication are letters and diaries, and, if enough of a manuscript can be found, perhaps even the legendary The Circle of Pyramids. It seems that the titles announced by Wandrei in his last Arkham House stocklist are finally making their way into print.

As an avid Wandrei collector for more than twenty years now, I feel as if I am living in a Golden Age.

IN A LETTER to Firsts for the July/August 2000 (which also happens to house my article "Collecting Robert E. Howard"), I contributed a few more details for book collectors:

Dear Firsts:

I have some information to add to the Fedogan and Bremer section of "Collecting Donald Wandrei" (October 1999). The 1989 edition of Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei, their first book, has a "suppressed state of the first edition dustjacket." For a tentative premiere at the Seattle World Fantasy Convention that year, F&B had drop-shipped from the printer approximately two dozen copies of the book. All was well, until someone asked, "Is this typo supposed to be on the back panel?" When the main shipment of books reached them back at homebase, they stripped the jackets off and did a corrected second state. The first state is marked by the appearance of "and original achievement" in the back cover blurb from Fritz Leiber. The corrected version reads "an original achievement." Currently the book in second state jacket seems to price out around $100 on the o.p. market, but copies in the first state are being offered for $500. In addition to the drop-shipped copies which got out before the error was caught, a few copies of the jacket itself were floating around their launch party at the convention, and could have been wedded to copies of the book bought later. Still, no great number, and thus the disparity in price.

Their edition of Howard Wandrei's Time Burial was supposed to be ready for the Baltimore World Fantasy Convention in 1995. When they realized printing delays would make this impossible, they went to Kinko's and did a promotional chapbook called Three Tales by Howard Wandrei, taken from the book, as a giveaway for convention-goers — some 250-300 copies. And for the 1999 second edition of Colossus, they did a pamphlet with the original ending of the story Farewell to Earth, in blue paper wraps. Some 75 copies, first come, first served, were given to people who ordered the new edition directly from the F&B office.

Cheers,

Don Herron

AND SINCE the coverage in Firsts appeared, a couple more collections by the Wandrei brothers have seen print from Fedogan and Bremer. I'd especially like to recommend the first volume of Don Wandrei's detective stories featuring the deadly I. V. Frost — you'll find an enthusiastic review of Frost in the section of reviews titled "Death Lit" on this website.

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