OtherEric

May 1951. It's one of the bigger than a digest, smaller than a pulp issues like the Jan and Mar 51 issues on the previous page.

I don't disagree, but I must admit I would be very hard pressed to pick even half a dozen New Trend issues that I wouldn't call classics.

On the wall of a sandwich shop in SF. I always forget there was a band that named themselves after Lovecraft:

That looks stunning for a 7.5!

You'll need to make an appointment, but they're pretty good about scheduling them. And it's very worth the effort... In addition to the Lovecraft items, I've gotten PKD's first published story in Planet Stories, Merry-Go-Round in Oz 1st with dust jacket, and Ace Double D-15 Junkie, and tons of other pulps, vintage paperbacks, and underground comix. PM me if you need contact info for them.

And here, as a final coda, are the last two volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters, published by Arkham House in 1976. It took them over a decade to release all 5 books, they started in 1965. I only have the last two volumes so far. And while 1959 represents the end of Lovecraft's fiction, the Letters actually are a larger body of work than all his fiction put together by a very large amount. Even the selected letters only cover a fraction of his surviving correspondence, which is itself a fraction of what he wrote. Various other collections of his letters are still being released. I've had fun posting my collection of vintage Lovecraft books here, while it's not as impressive a set as some others here have it's a pretty nice batch for six years work... I got the June 1936 Astounding back in July 2015. And I started grabbing stuff at just the right time, prices are going crazy on a lot of the items here. Hopefully I'll have some more items to post in a couple weeks... I'm making my first trip to KAYO books in San Fransisco in two years next week, and about 10 of the items I've shown originally came from them. My thanks to everybody who has been liking my posts and saying they appreciated them!

Would normally throw this in the Pound you to a Pulp thread, but since it's something of a follow-up to the covers above, I'll stick it here. In today:

I'm prepared to agree with that in the general case, actually.

As promised, I've got a couple later items I wanted to include even if we're past what I consider the cutoff for truly vintage Lovecraft. The first is this, the May 1960 issue of Fantastic, reprinting "The Challenge From Beyond", or at least Lovecraft's share of it. I think this is the last time one of the major pulp/ pulp digests tried to present anything by Lovecraft as "lost"; and they make a point of the story having never been published in a professional magazine before. But it also presents a fairly long essay by Sam Moskowitz, which despite the title actually discusses Lovecraft's impact on Science Fiction as distinct from Weird Fiction. We've firmly passed into the era where Lovecraft is the subject of scholarship rather than just trying to locate and present the stories.

All things must pass, and with today's entry we reach the end of what I consider my vintage Lovecraft collection. I'll have a couple more items over the next couple days as a sort of coda, but today we reach the last new Lovecraft story... or, actually, stories. The Shuttered Room, published by Arkham House in 1959, with the last previously unpublished Lovecraft stories. Somewhat surprisingly, there is actually a lot of new material in this volume, even disregarding the two "Posthumous Collaborations" by Derleth. There are three stories getting their first professional publication: "The Alchemist", "Poetry and the Gods" (with Anna Helen Crofts); and "The Street". Next, there are four pieces of juvenilia published for the first time ever- "The Little Glass Bottle", "The Secret Cave, or John Lee's Adventure", "The Mystery of the Grave-Yard", and "The Mysterious Ship". They're mostly interesting as curios, but Lovecraft could write better at age 8 than I probably could now. Finally, there's the highlight of the book... "Old Bugs". It's a minor, early work of Lovecraft's, but it's fully a Lovecraft story. And it's the last one we'll ever get.

That was my thought when I grabbed this one. Same book, it's a stitched together scan followed by just the front and back covers. Once I found out Frazetta had done this cover I had to find a copy. Just arrived today and I'm happy for a book I risked grabbing cheap:

Welcome to the pulp side! The Astounding is Heinlein’s first cover story if I recall correctly.

And now for one I debated including... July 1954 Weird Tales, with the "Posthumous Collaboration" with August Derleth, "The Survivor". I ultimately decided to post this one for a few reasons. The Derleth stories like this deserve at least a mention in any look at Lovecraft's work, even if only to reject them. It's the last time Lovecraft showed up in the original run of Weird Tales, the next to last issue of the series. And from what I've been able to find out, this one is actually slightly more deserving of the collaboration label than most of the others, being based on an outline and notes left by Lovecraft rather than just Derleth throwing a paragraph or two from one of Lovecraft's letters into an otherwise completely original story.

Awesome! Do you have the Buster Crabbe #5 and Weird Science-Fantasy #29 as well?

Avon Fantasy Reader 18 from March 1952, which reprints "Out of the Eons", a reprint of a revision Lovecraft did for Hazel Heald. This is the last issue of the title, it also features a new story from Robert E. Howard.

Avon Science Fiction Reader 3 from January 1952, with a reprint of "In the Walls of Eryx" by Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling. This is the last issue of the title.

Awesome pick-up, Raze! Glad you finally scored a copy before they stopped being merely difficult and became impossible. For what it's worth, I spent more than 2x on my copy than my next most expensive book.

December 1951 Famous Fantastic Mysteries, with a reprint of "The Outsider" featuring a very nice Bok illustration:

Avon Fantasy Reader 17 from November 1951, with a reprint of "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", co-written with E. Hoffmann Price:

My uneducated guess would be double digits, but I have no basis other than age and the fact it doesn’t seem to be either famously common or rare compared to other books of the era, despite its fame.

November 1951 Weird Tales, with a reprint of "Dagon".

Just a few Famous Fantastic Mysteries covers, prompted by a comment made on one of them by @Surfing Alienover in the Lovecraft thread. I think these three covers make a nice bit of a matched set, personally:

March 1951 Famous Fantastic Mysteries, with a reprint of "The Music of Erich Zann". They were playing with an odd format at this time, slightly larger than a digest but smaller than a pulp, with no illustrations. The pulps were, in retrospect, starting to be on their way out around this time, although they hung around a few more years.

Beagle boys? And I’m not positive where Ludwig von Drake first appeared, comics or animation.

Fantastic Novels from January 1941, with a reprint of "The Cats Of Ulthar". Included are the Bok illustrations for the story.