Paul Herman passed on this helpful tip:

“Hey, I got an email from lulu, they are offering 20% off, just enter HOHOHO at checkout. Good till December 31.”

This means that [redacted]’s [redacted], Frank Coffman’s The Selected Poetry of Robert E. Howard and the REHF’s The Collected Drawings of Robert E. Howard are all available at four-fifths the cover price until January 1, 2010.

In addition, two of Charles R. Saunders’ Sword-and-Sorcery novels, Imaro: The Trail of Bohu and Dossouye are available at Lulu. Dan Clore, Lovecraftian fictioneer and scholar, has his expanded second edition of The Unspeakable and Others for sale at lulu.com, with brand-new illustrations from top-flight Mythos artist, Allen Koszowski. All for twenty percent off. Merry Christmas.

I have seen some complaints about the title of the Howard collection from Penguin Modern Classics, Heroes in the Wind.
It doesn’t seem out of place to me.  Evoking Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” as it may, still, that’s a very Howardian sentiment.
See, for instance “The Wheel of Destiny” on page 410 of The Collected Poetry:

Across the great world’s silent girth
The gras-grown cities rot and rust:
Still are the rulers of the earth —
Men and their worth sink back to dust.

I think Howard would agree with Kansas that all we are is dust in the wind. The book itself is an odd mix of classic Howard and little-known stories, but not a bad introduction to a new readership. It gets no points from me for the cover, though.

Alfonso Frank Frazetta

Word has gone out all over the wire and aether that Alfonso Frank Frazetta, generally called by his family, “Frank Jr.”, broke into the Frank Frazetta Museum in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Wednesday afternoon with the aid of a backhoe and two accomplices. He attempted to remove about ninety paintings insured for twenty million dollars before being apprehended by Pennsylvania State Police. The most up-to-date account can be found at the Pocono Record website.

Frank Jr. is the son of Frank Frazetta, the legendary artist. Last month, as reported by TC, one of Frazetta’s paintings was auctioned to a private collector for one million dollars. At the time, your humble blogger thought it all a bit unusual, and wondered if it was somehow connected to the death of Frank’s wife, Ellie. Ellie Frazetta had been the guiding hand and driving force behind much of Frank Frazetta’s commercial success over the last thirty years. It was Eleanor Frazetta who started the very profitable Frazetta mail-order business and was also the one who pushed the Frazetta Museum project to its final completion.

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Whilst the bicentennial of the nativity of Edgar Allan Poe was amply commemorated here at The Cimmerian, we somehow let the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of his death on October 7 slip right by us. However, J. Kingston Pierce over at The Rap Sheet, one of the premiere crime-fiction blogs, was on the job. In his entry, “What Happened to Edgar?”, Pierce looks at Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by John Evangelist Walsh. The book was Walsh’s third foray into Poe-related historical research and he admits to being fascinated by Poe and his works. Check it out.

Pierce also took a look at the shenanigans surrounding the possession of Poe’s remains, as well as the lavish commemorative celebrations sponsored by the city of Baltimore this year, in “Evermore, Mr. Poe, Evermore.” Our own Steve Tompkins also commented on the nigh-Illiadic struggle over Poe’s remains in this blog post.

Considering the size of Cross Plains in comparison to Baltimore and the relatively recent date of Robert E. Howard’s passing, I would say the organizers of Robert E. Howard Days, and REH fandom in general, have plenty to be proud of.

I enjoyed the rare and original fantasy of [The Ship of Ishtar], and have kept it longer than I should otherwise, for the sake of re-reading certain passages that were highly poetic and imaginative. Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.

— Clark Ashton Smith

Klarkash-Ton, as usual, was right on the money. As one who recognized a kindred genius and spirit in Robert E. Howard long before the majority of his peers, CAS knew magic, poetry and imagination when he beheld it.

My copy of the Paizo edition of The Ship of Ishtar came in the other day. Despite the fact that I own three other imprints of this fantasy classic, I’d been anticipating the delivery of this edition for months. Erik Mona and his crack team of pulp-hounds at Planet Stories have outdone themselves on this project. Going back to the 1949 Borden “Memorial Edition,” they have issued the most complete text in sixty years, included all of the classic Virgil Finlay illustrations from two different editions (something never done before) and allowed Merritt (and CAS and REH and HPL) fan, Tim Powers, to write the introduction.

Powers, a noted author in his own right, was an inspired choice. The man gets Merritt. His introduction, entitled, “On These Strange Seas In This Strange World,” is one of the best analyses and tributes devoted to The Ship of Ishtar that I have read. Here’s one passage:

This novel, like the Ship of Ishtar itself, is timeless — the opposite of timely — and in fact it may not be possible to write a book like this in these present times. Somehow, in the early 1920s, Merritt managed to write a genuinely pagan book, one that simply didn’t deal with, but assumed, the pre-Christian fatalist dualism, with its particular loyalties and indifferent cruelties. A modern writer would not let Kenton deal with slaves and conquered crews the way he does, and would be constantly aware of Freud and political correctness. A modern writer, that is to say, would not be able to unselfconsciously let his story play out naturally, with no placatory gestures toward modern sensibilities.

Exactly. When The Ship of Ishtar hit the stands in 1924 between the covers of Argosy All-Story magazine, nothing like it had ever seen print in American popular culture. Despite being drenched in blood, sex and the supernatural, the American public took to the novel like Islam to the desert. Merrit’s ground-breaking work would eventually go through twenty-plus printings and sell millions before the end of the twentieth century. It would seem almost certain that Robert E. Howard, a long-time and faithful reader of Argosy, was one of those millions of readers.

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Much as I enjoy the work of Robert E. Howard, he does occasionally write in such a rush that he makes a mistake.  One such mistake occurs in “The Hour of the Dragon” when he learns the true nature and origin of Xaltotun.

 “Acheron,” he repeated. “Xaltotun of Acheron — man, are you mad? Acheron has been a myth for more centuries than I can remember.”

 Which raises the question, how many centuries does Conan remember? Obviously Howard meant that Acheron had been a myth for so long no one knew how many centuries ago it was known to be real; instead he gives the impression of a centuries-old Conan, who seems a pretty feisty guy for someone that aged.

Last weekend, Nick Owchar reviewed The Return of the Sorcerer for The LA Times. The book itself is a new “best of” collection featuring the tales of Clark Ashton Smith and is published by Prime Books.

Owchar starts out well enough, noting that the “Weird Tales Circle” does not get near the attention it should from mainstream literary critics. I agree. Umpteen tomes have been published going on about the “Bloomsbury Group,” whilst the inferno of synergistic creativity that blazed around the core members of the “Weird Tales Circle” goes largely unexamined. As Leo Grin stated four years ago, “someday a book combining the lives of all three Weird Tales geniuses — Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith — will have to be written.”

Mr. Owchar proceeds to quote a bit from what sounds like a solid introduction by CAS (and REH and HPL) fan, Gene Wolfe. Owchar calls Smith “an overlooked master of a wholly original vein of horror and hallucinatory science fiction,” while also noting CAS’s endeavors in the fields of poetry as well as the graphic and sculptural arts. Towards the end of his review, he expresses a deep admiration for Smith’s work and a hope that Klarkash-Ton’s oeuvre will soon achieve the recognition it so richly deserves.

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Howard Andrew Jones, fantasy author, editor and the man who gave Harold Lamb to the twenty-first century, just put the news out over the æther that the final two volumes in Bison Books’ “Harold Lamb Library” are available for pre-order and will ship on May Day, 2010. Y’all feast your eyes on these tasty blurbs…

Swords From the Sea:

Vikings, pirates, heroes, rogues, and explorers . . . all have heard the siren call of the sea, and master storyteller Harold Lamb chronicled some of their most daring exploits. This single volume contains all of Lamb’s historical seafaring stories, drawn from rare and fragile pulp magazines. Never before collected, these short stories and novels are a treasure trove of adventure. Best known for his stirring tales of Cossacks and crusaders, Lamb was no stranger to swashbuckling, and his sea stories deliver it in buckets.

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