OtherEric

And a couple later ones which were printed right on the books

To clarify what I mean by color marks (using US books to demonstrate or it would be colour, of course). This was added after printing, I believe:

I need to slightly disagree with your assessment of the newsagent, I'm afraid. It could be "if I don't get the 8s and 9s returned within a certain window, I don't get credit". And there were definitely other ways of figuring out what went back a given week than seeing if the next issue was out... the colored marks at the top of pages, for example. Particularly with imports like these, the dates and issue numbers might be even less relevant. It's also complicated by the constantly drifting cover dates of comics, which used to be as much as four months before reality.

Wow. You have a much better reason for grabbing your copy than I did... mine was simply "Somebody's selling a decent looking copy with dust jacket for under $200? I gotta get me some of that!" The Outsiders and others is out of my range and Beyond the Wall of Sleep will require a lot of careful planning; but the next three (Marginalia, Something About Cats and Other Pieces, and The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces) are all doable... and those first five are, to me the most interesting, because they are (other than the first) the only ones that feature the first publication of fiction by Lovecraft. The Shuttered Room is, in fact, the last publication ever to feature any previously unpublished fiction by Lovecraft that I am aware of. Also, thank you for the correction on Medusa's Coil. I should have checked my copy rather than relying on the internet.

I'm actually reading it right now; but just little bits mixed in with other stuff, like some Woolrich stories in ARGOSY and the Taschen EC history. I'm trying to go through it cover-to-cover; but I've read the first four stories before so maybe I should just jump ahead to the essays. Medusa's Coil is of at least slight interest because even in 1944 Derleth found the ending too racist and edited it.

The X almost certainly means unreturnable; the IW/Super books didn't use normal distribution channels and were not, as far as I know, returnable in the US.

What an amazing copy of that particular book to own! Since you posted the back cover ad, I figure I might as well jump in with this one advertising your book: This is from Marginalia, the last book advertised on The Eye and the Finger. Arkham's 8th book, although it looks like all four books from 1944 came out around the same time going by the ads. This is the third Lovecraft collection from Arkham. with 2035 copies printed. It is, as the ad suggests, a bit of a "loose ends" book. The cover is by Virgil Finlay, taken from the illustration for "The Shunned House" in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales. It features the first appearance of the story "The Transition of Juan Romero", as well as some fragments that had only been published in fanzines or amateur magazines previously. It also has a number of essays by or about Lovecraft, marking in many ways the beginning of scholarship about Lovecraft. My copy is price clipped but I still got a crazy good deal on the book:

The only Golden Amazon story I've got... I have the impression the four stories written as Thornton Ayre were something of a prototype for the eventual series, but I really don't know. Not my copy of the magazine, I didn't feel like digging it out so I snagged a scan online:

And, fresh in today, a slightly out of date reference book on Arkham House published by Arkham House themselves. I gather there is now an updated 80 years edition, but not from Arkham House themselves:

It's plausible enough; like you say the grouping is such that them all being cycle two books seems slightly implausible. One thing to remember is that we will probably never have a definitive answer; we may be better off just saying that we have a couple theories explaining the distribution than ever picking one over the other.

I would keep the mailers separate, but definitely keep them. I have a few 70's mailers from Marvel comics, separate from the original books. The store owner had already separated them from the books and was ready to throw them out when I asked for a few. They're a neat artifact.

The M. P. Shiel is the last new book released by Arkham House under the Mycroft and Moran imprint. Print run 4000 stated, 4036 actual. They later released a Complete Solar Pons Omnibus. The imprint was later leased to the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, which has used it for a trio of books by Derleth, including The Final Adventures of Solar Pons. Unlike the Arkham House books under the imprint, this has been reprinted.

Arkham House had a subsidiary imprint for weird detective stories, Mycroft & Moran, from the 40's to the 80's. Most of its output was Solar Pons collections, August Derleth's Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I've always had mixed feelings at best about Derleth's efforts to do Lovecraftian stories, but I think he was on much more solid ground with Solar Pons. Their first volume under this imprint, from 1945, was "In Re: Sherlock Holmes", subtitled "The Adventures of Solar Pons". Apparently the title displeased the Doyle estate; reprints of the book from other publishers emphasize the subtitle. The print run on this one was apparently 3,604 copies; although it's stated as 3000 in the back of the book. This is the biggest discrepancy I've seen on an Arkham House publication between the stated in book and the actual number; although they almost never line up exactly:

One thing that needs to be mentioned about this, and in fact most of Arkham House's books: Despite the enormous demand, it has never been reprinted. Other than the introduction by Derleth and Wandrei, the contents all have, over and over and over. But, other than the uniform Lovecraft collections they started doing in the 60's, Arkham doesn't reprint their books. There may be a few other exceptions, and they do let other publishers do editions of some of their stuff. A beautiful copy of a legendary book!

Sounds even better than my idea. If you don't start it yourself, I'll steal the name the next time I get an Arkham House (or subsidiary) book in. But I don't expect any to arrive within the next 12 hours. (Next 24 hours is a different story.)

https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=32185

A quick question for my fellow dwellers in the Pulp forum: Would it be appropriate to create an Arkham House thread? They're not actually pulps, other than the Arkham Sampler, but as a publisher they're so closely tied to the pulps it seems to me like it would fit right in. That, and I would love to see people post their books here some more. Anybody have any thoughts on the subject?

Good luck with this project. I don't have any original art, sadly. I do have almost all of the Famous Forty Oz books in Reilly & Lee editions... and even a couple Reilly & Britton's.

Found in a box while looking for something else entirely. Not one you see that often:

I've only got the last 21 issues; not the full series. It still took some work!

It's not a golden age book, but this one (Image swiped from the GCD):

I'm guessing those are bedsheet issues? Neat books, even with garbage packaging...

Not the pain the #8 is... but still one of the tricky ones. Glad to have a copy, even in filler grade:

And, as promised. Always nice when you make an offer to the seller, going low to meet them in the middle, and they go ahead and take your first offer anyway. Not super high grade, but happy to get a copy... this one is not easy to find. I also have to admit: I'm really looking forward to reading this. "The Man Who Stole Thursday" is one heck of an intriguing title:

I've pretty much completed the runs I want at the moment on the UK books. What I've got is the complete Night Raven, and the complete Alan Davis Captain Britain runs. Those overlap a LOT, and between them cover most of Alan Moore's major work for Marvel UK as well. I only went with the late issues of Mighty World of Marvel, after it became Marvel Super-Heroes, but I've got 377-397 (last issue) complete. It really is a lot of fun!