Eldritch Tales (83 page)

‘As for “discoveries” in the supernatural field,’ he wrote, ‘I should be inclined to think that, apart from Lovecraft, the only Arkham authors in whose work you might conceivably be interested are Clark Ashton Smith, of whose work we have published three volumes, and the late Rev. Henry S. Whitehead, whose two collections under our imprint represent almost his entire prose fiction in the field. Should you be interested in seeing any of these volumes, you have only to let me know and I shall see to it that copies of the books are sent to you.’

Despite a pencilled notation on the original letter that indicates that this information was passed on to someone else in Gollancz, doubtless in the editorial department, nothing came of Derleth’s recommendations and it was not until the 1970s that both Smith’s and Whitehead’s books from Arkham House were reprinted in the UK, not by Gollancz, but by Neville Spearman Ltd.

In fact, it seems out of character for Derleth to have been so reserved at putting forward more authors’ names for possible consideration in the British market, as Neville Spearman also went on to publish other well-known Arkham House titles by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, David H. Keller, Fritz Leiber and even Derleth himself.

Meanwhile, following on from the success of the publication of
The Haunter of the Dark & Other Tales of Horror
in 1951, Gollancz decided to issue Lovecraft’s 48,000-word novella
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
as a stand-alone volume later that same year.

It was written over three months in early 1927 but never published during the author’s lifetime. Derleth had retyped Lovecraft’s original handwritten manuscript, as he recalled in the May 1941 issue of
Weird Tales
:

‘The story was written in longhand on the reverse side of letters he had received, some 130 or 140 sheets of all sizes and colors. He didn’t believe in margins or “white space”. Every sheet was crowded from top to bottom, from left edge to right, with his small, cramped handwriting.

‘That was his original draft; you can imagine what happened when he got through revising, words and sentences crossed out or written in, whole paragraphs added, inserts put on the back of the sheet where they got tangled up with the letters from his correspondents, and the inserts rewritten with additional paragraphs to be put in the insert which was to be put in its proper place in the story.

‘Lovecraft’s handwriting was not easy to read under the best of circumstances; he had his own peculiarities of spelling, often used Latin and Greek phrases, and often used coined words of his own. These made the problem of deciphering his complex puzzle-pages even more difficult. All in all, working after my classes at the U., it took me four months to get through the labyrinth.’

For the novella’s first publication, Arkham House had borrowed the typescript prepared years earlier by Derleth from Lovecraft’s literary executor, Robert H. Barlow, and then had it professionally re-typed over a period of two months.

Once again, the press reviews of the Gollancz edition were glowing: The
Manchester Evening Mail
called it a ‘superb spine chiller’, while the
News Chronicle
advised its readers, ‘If you have the least touch of weakness for witchcraft do not miss
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
’.

Even the usually demure
The Lady
, England’s oldest magazine for women, enthused: ‘If you like the grim and uncanny fantasy story, then
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
should not be missed . . . H.P. Lovecraft, a master of the art, whose Haunter of the Dark is well remembered by connoisseurs of terror fiction – and rightly.’

However, despite glowing reviews of the book which, like its predecessor, went rapidly out of print, it would be another fifteen years before Victor Gollancz would publish a further volume of Lovecraft’s fiction.

There is nothing in the files to indicate why there was this long hiatus in the publishing schedule.

Responding to a batch of clippings sent by Gollancz’s Lester Anderson concerning Count Haraszthy (the founder of Sauk City, Wisconsin), a thank-you letter from August Derleth dated July 22, 1963, not only mentions his latest regional novel,
The Shadow in the Glass
(which he disparagingly dismisses as ‘a v. dull, tedious novel’), but also the forthcoming ‘Stephen Grendon’ Arkham House collection,
Mr George and Other Odd Persons
, candidly revealing that the author is really himself. An Arkham House catalogue was also apparently included with the correspondence.

In September 1966, Victor Gollancz reissued
The Haunter of the Dark
while simultaneously publishing
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
at a price of thirty shillings (£1.50 today) per copy. The contents were identical to the 1964 Arkham House edition, which even included ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, published as a stand-alone volume by Gollancz fifteen years earlier.

‘These tales of horror are in the true Gothic tradition,’ enthused Francis Iles in the
Guardian
newspaper, ‘and written in a deliberately Gothic style, full of hinted terrors and unholy stenches. This is something out of the ordinary, a real collector’s piece for connoisseurs of the unusual; and at 448 closely printed pages for 30s, it can also be reckoned a “best buy”.’

For their edition of At the
Mountains of Madness
, Gollancz dealt directly with Arkham House’s New York representatives, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. The contract, dated February 11, 1966, confirms that Gollancz paid an advance of £200.00 for this volume. With home sales of 1,681 copies and colonial sales – known as export sales these days – of 373 copies, the first printing easily earned out.

For their next Lovecraft volume, Gollancz went through Scott Meredith’s London office. In a contract dated January 3, 1967, they paid a smaller advance of £150.00 for the usual British Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada).

Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
was released on June 22 that same year, again at thirty shillings for the hardcover edition. Once more, the contents followed the Arkham House edition, published in 1965.

Although sales were slightly down on the previous Lovecraft collection – 1,500 sold in home and 294 in the colonial markets – the book quickly made back what Gollancz had paid for it.

‘And now, to all intents and purposes, we are completing publication of the works of H.P. Lovecraft,’ trumpeted the dust-jacket flap, which also managed to mis-spell Edgar Allan Poe’s middle name as ‘Allen’. ‘Practically all the stories as yet un-published in England are here . . . rounded out with Lovecraft’s impressive long essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” – an important and much sought-after item.’

However, an astute British reader, P.J. Jeffery of Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, noticed that in Lovecraft’s ground-breaking essay, lines 5 and 7 on page 365 were identical and wrote to the publisher. Having photographed the original Arkham volume for the British edition, Gollancz’s science fiction editor and managing director John Bush contacted Derleth in a letter dated April 17, 1968, and asked how the paragraph should read, so that it could be corrected in any subsequent printing.

Derleth replied three days later: