New Arrivals

It is funny how I now tend to create the same environment around me wherever I spend much time. Now at least these few shelves at the cabin look very much like my shelves at home crammed with science fiction and mythos related items with the covers of the more striking paperbacks and chapbooks displayed so I can enjoy them at a glance.

As I have mentioned previously on this website, my collecting, as opposed to just accumulating books to read began with H.P. Lovecraft's books and other Arkham House publications. While I did not aspire to first edition copies of The Outsider and Others or Beyond the Walls of Sleep, I did get a lovely The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson (with a Hannes Bok dust jacket) and a copy of Derleth’s Lurker on the Threshold with Oswald Train’s (an early science fiction publisher) bookplate. One thing I now regret is I traded in a number of my original Lovecraft paperbacks as I got hardcovers. Eventually, I collected more widely, expanding to small press science fiction and magazines. But now having a lot of books I find I enjoy collecting paperbacks, a less pricey and bulky segment of the publishing industry. And while I had been looking at some UK science fiction editions, my latest purchases as often happens, brought me back to Howard yet again.

A couple of years ago I had the chance to spend $300 on the Arkham House edition of The Mask of Cthulhu with a beautiful dust jacket by Richard Taylor. I passed and now I love my Consul edition (1961) with a sadly unattributed cover.

I really enjoy Darrell Schweitzer’s mythos tales as well as his essays and the anthologies he puts together. I could not resist this Starmount Press book Discovering H.P. Lovecraft (1987) with a cover depicting Randolph Carter as the wizard Zkauba of the planet Yaddith, (Through the Gates of the Silver Key). Cover by Richard Huber. Also appeared as Essays Lovecraftian.

Brian Lumley seems to get some criticism in the Mythos community, I suspect because much of his work is seen as more closely related to August Derleth’s additions to the mythos than the Lovecraft canon. While I think his Titus Crow adventures continued too long and morphed into more action-adventure stories than mythos tales, he has contributed a lot of solid work. I hope to look at his stories more closely in the future. Cover by Les Edwards, New English Library, 1995.

I cannot resist a Derleth anthology with a cover featuring wolves with coral snakes for tongues, thanks to Don Punchatz. This collection includes “The Man Who Collected Poe” by Robert Bloch, a story I had not read before and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” by H.P. Lovecraft. I had not realized there was a connection between these tales before but I  hope to provide more detail regarding this in my next post. 

And my shelves always have room for another Bradbury, cover and interior illustrations by the incomparable Joseph Mugnaini.

Full wraparound cover.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?226697