OtherEric

Panic really is just painfully underrated. A quick glance shows me at least a dozen issues on the bay under $20 with shipping right this minute. So while there's no doubt you got a deal, particularly with the #1 and #2, what you paid doesn't surprise me much Enjoy the books!.

April 1935 Weird Tales, with another revision for Hazel Heald: "Out of the Eons". It's another excellent collaboration, with a brief cameo from Randolph Carter and a particularly disquieting fate even by Lovecraft standards. This happens to be the earliest Weird Tales I've ever found in the wild rather than online; I bought it at KAYO books down in San Fransisco when I was visiting my sister.

And if Robot Man isn’t I might be

July 1934 Weird Tales has "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", by Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price. One of the relatively few collaborations where Lovecraft was credited on original publication. This is the only one of the major Randolph Carter stories I have the original publication of.

One thing that strikes me over and over now that I never realized when I was younger is just how much of Bernie Wrightson's style came from Ingels. Gratz on a great upgrade! And, of course, no need to ask what you're doing with the undercopy...

This issue features "Winged Death", another revision for Hazel Heald.

The July 1933 issue of Weird Tales has two stories by Lovecraft- "The Dreams in the Witch-House" under his own name, and "The Horror in the Museum" with Hazel Heald. This is one of my all-time favorite pulps; in addition to the two Lovecraft stories it has "Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith, making this the only 30's book I know of with three Mythos stories. Plus a Brundage cover and a short story by Robert E. Howard, making this the only pulp that had a Brundage cover and new stories by both Lovecraft and Howard. There are several others with all three creators, but either Lovecraft or Howard just have verse rather than a story or one of the stories is a reprint.

I didn't even think of including that in the shot, but my copy was a dollar bin book as well... and a lot more recently than the other four. I also got a Hulk King-Sized Special with the Steranko cover from the same box at the same time.

I suspect most of us dollar bin connoisseurs have similar success stories over time, even if the actual books vary greatly. It's fun to pull out an extremely skewed example like this occasionally, though. For what it's worth, the Falcon and the Poison Ivy books were both just 'random old books' when I got them, but I knew what I was getting on the Ghost Rider and Werewolf books... they just weren't in very high demand right that instant.

None of these are RECENT dollar bin books... but all four of them were a dollar or less back in the day when I first got them:

Yes, the good paper is the 4th and final print. It's not stated but has WP 9-50 on the copyright page according to ISFDB. The first 3 were done under wartime paper restrictions. I wouldn't automatically call the first 3 editions "brittle paged", though. Cheap, Fragile, and Wartime would all be acceptable, but my 1st isn't particularly brittle. According to ISFDB, the 2nd printing is also mislabeled as a 1st printing, but the publication date is September, not April. Does anybody have a copy of the 2nd edition to verify?

I've got the first and the paper is pretty fragile, that's for sure. Not so bad that I'm scared to read it, but it's not a book I'll loan out. I think the good paper edition is probably more desirable than the 2nd and 3rd printings, not sure how it compares to the first.

Not sure of the exact date, but somewhere around then. It’s just the side, though... the top and bottom aren’t trimmed, although they are a bit tidier than most pulps.

To be fair, it did appear in a lot of Lovecraft collections over that period. But it didn't show up places where somebody not specifically looking for Lovecraft would find it for a surprisingly long time.

I don't think me too posts are generally very useful, but I agree with @Get Marwood & Icompletely on this one... they should label the book to say what it actually is, not what it reprints or what people want it to be or what the cover is a reprint of. Although a note saying what it reprints is completely appropriate.

The October 1932 issue of Wonder Stories features "The Man of Stone", the first of five revisions Lovecraft did for Hazel Heald. The Heald stories are interesting; everybody seems to agree that the actual stories as written are almost entirely by Lovecraft. But she definitely brought something to them at some stage because they're some of the best of the revisions. Oh, and how cool is the Paul cover for the Clark Ashton Smith story?

I think it's not so much that recognition of Lovecraft declined in the 40's and 50's as it was just never that high in the first place until later. There was always a group of dedicated admirers, but he was largely obscure for a very long time. I think the best movies that I've seen are the ones that aren't directly based on his work but draw from his general style. "In the Mouth of Madness" was brilliant. "Ghostbusters", even if it's a comedy, is really extraordinarily Lovecraftian in its underlying story.

Make sure it's not a Girasol reproduction or anything, but if it's authentic $300 for a nice copy definitely sounds reasonable. Weird Tales of that era normally have the side edge trimmed at the printer, and far neater top and bottom edges than most pulps of the era. I think I've only got one issue of WT that was actually trimmed after the fact, it's far rarer than on other titles. The issue has the first publication of "Shambleau" by C. L. Moore, it's not the cover story (I don't think the cover references any specific story in the issue), but it's a classic cover with a classic story inside.

It could have been worse, a few years later de Camp would have edited it into a Conan story...

The October 1931 Weird Tales has "The Strange High House in the Mist" by Lovecraft, a story that doesn't seem to get that strong a reaction either way... it's not generally considered either a highlight or lowlight of Lovecraft's work. It is the earliest Weird Tales I have with a Lovecraft story published under his own name, rather than a revision:

The last issue of Avon Fantasy reader even has the first publication of a story by REH, rather than a reprint:

So could I... albeit very low grade:

My run may be low grade... but it's complete!

Spoiler alert: Flipping through this, I just found it's the first use of the term "spoilers" in the spoiler alert sense. The concept is explained in the "coming next issue" section; most sources point to the article in the next issue as the actual first use of the term in that sense.

Neal Adams, Reed Crandall, Jeff Jones, Steve Ditko, and Gil Kane under that classic Frazetta cover. It's a good issue.