Paul Herman at The Robert E. Howard Foundation recently sent me the following information concerning the much anticipated Foundation release The Last of the Trunk, which collects most of the remaining unpublished detritus of Howard’s career.

PAUL: The Last of the Trunk is now available for pre-order. Well, as soon as the website is updated, that is, today or tomorrow. Book should ship in November.

Robert E. Howard generated an enormous volume of written works, around 3.5 million words. In his tiny room in his house in Cross Plains, REH kept a trunk to hold all his output that was still awaiting a sale, as well as works that were rejected, unfinished, something he especially wanted to save, or simply copies of early drafts that he would reuse the back of in typing up another story. At the time of his death, that trunk held literally tens of thousands of pages of material, all hand-typed by REH.

In the early 1960s, Glenn Lord obtained the contents of REH’s trunk. He had the duty, pleasure, and challenge of sorting it all out, and to begin sheparding those works into print. Hundreds of stories and poems poured forth, to see print in assorted books, magazines, and fan publications.

Ever since the publication of Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt in 1976, collectors of the works of REH have been aware of, but unable to read, more than a hundred unpublished stories and fragments. A few were published in the intervening years, but not many.

Finally, in this volume, The Last of the Trunk is being revealed. Virtually all the remaining unpublished prose will be included. While this certainly is not his most memorable or impressive work (those works are already in print), it does fill in lots of blank spaces for the scholars and collectors, and perhaps yield a little more understanding of one of the greatest pulp writers.

This will be the largest REHF publication to date, at 672 pages. Hardback with dust jacket by Tom Foster. Edited and with an introduction by Patrice Louinet. Design by Dennis McHaney. Many of the works are incomplete or unfinished. Many of the complete stories are either boxing or high school papers.

A detailed list of the contents:

Blue River Blues; The Battling Sailor; The Drawing Card; The Jinx; The Wildcat and the Star; Fistic Psychology; Untitled (“Huh?” I was so dumbfounded . . .); Fighting Nerves; The Atavist; A Man of Peace; The Weeping Willow; The Right Hook; A Tough Nut to Crack; The Trail of the Snake; The Folly of Conceit; The Fighting Fury; Night Encounter; The Ferocious Ape; The Ghost Behind the Gloves; Misto Dempsey; The Brand of Satan; Incongruity; The Slayer; The Man Who Went Back; Untitled Synopsis (Hunwulf, an American . . .); Untitled (Thure Khan gazed out . . .); Untitled (As he approached . . .); A Room in London (outline); The Shadow in the Well (draft); Fate is the Killer; The Grove of Lovers; The Drifter; The Lion Gate; Untitled (Franey was a fool.); The Ivory Camel; Wolves – and a Sword; Untitled (I’m a man of few words . . .); Untitled Synopsis (First Draft: James Norris . . .); The Dominant Male; The Paradox; Untitled (Mike Costigan, writer and self avowed futilist . . .); The Splendid Brute; Circus Charade; The Influence of the Movies; Untitled (William Aloysius McGraw’s father . . .); A Man and a Brother; Man; Pigskin Scholar; The Recalcitrant; Untitled (“Arrange, Madame, arrange!”); Untitled (“Yessah!” said Mrs. . . .); The Question of the East; In His Own Image; The Punch; The Female of the Species; The Last Man; The Treasure of Henry Morgan; Untitled (The lazy quiet of the mid-summer day . . .); Through the Ages; The White Jade Ring; The Roving Boys on a Sandburg; Westward, Ho!; The Wild Man; What the Deuce?; The Land of Forgotten Ages; The Funniest Bout; The Red Stone; A Unique Hat; Untitled (“A man,” said my friend Larry Aloysius O’Leary . . .); Untitled (. . . that is, the artistry is but a symbol . . .); Untitled (I met him first in the Paradise saloon . . .); Untitled (Maybe it don’t seem like anything interesting . . .); Untitled (So there I was.); Untitled (Trail led through dense jungle . . .); Untitled (Two men were standing in the bazaar at Delhi . . .); Untitled (When Yar Ali Khan crept . . .); Untitled (Who I am it matters little . . .); A Twentieth Century Rip Van Winkle; The Ghosts of Jacksonville; A Boy, a Beehive, and a Chinaman; Mr. Dowser Buys a Car; A Faithful Servant; A South Sea Storm; The Ghost of Bald Rock Ranch; A Fishing Trip; Friends; Ten Minutes on a Street Corner; The Wings of the Bat

The price will be $53 for REHF members, $59 for non-members. Shipping costs will be posted at the website.

Any questions, let me know!

Just an FYI — there was a short bit in a recent Cross Plains Review that noted the library had begun amassing a collection of old issues of the newspaper on microfilm for researchers to use. That’s good news: the more people that hunt through those back issues, the more REH related material we are likely to find.

This was forcefully brought home at the Caddo Peak BBQ at this year’s Howard Days, when some of us got to see a previously unknown photo of Dr. Isaac Howard, by far the youngest we’ve ever seen him, which had been found in a late 1930s issue of the Review which had been stored in a trunk for seventy years.

What other treasures still lurk within those pages? With microfilmed copies at the town library, it should prove easier to find out.

Locus Online just announced the nominees for the 2007 World Fantasy Awards, and The Cimmerian has officially made the cut for the second year in a row. Assuming that the 2007 judges possess similar sensibilities to last year’s august crew, it’s clear that this nomination came about for one reason only: grass roots support from a silent horde of individual Howard fans lurking out there in the dark corners of the field.

You guys.

I’m grateful to every reader who took the time to send in a vote for TC. Not only that, but you guys also helped a few other Howard-related projects get on the ballot:

[redacted]’s biography, Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, was nominated for a “Special Award, Professional.” This comes on the heels of the nomination he received for a Locus Award, as well as the winning of a Centennial Cimmerian Award for the book. In addition, the tome published to coincide with Howard being the theme of the 2006 World Fantasy Convention, Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard (edited by Scott Cupp and Joe Lansdale), is nominated in the Anthology category. That gives us three categories to get shut out in this year. Good jobs all around.

A World Fantasy nomination carries a magical aura with it that tends to sparkle and glimmer around a project for a lifetime and beyond. Whispers. Carcosa. Ash-Tree. Night Shade. Nyctalops. These are names that send us scurrying for our checkbooks each time a new Coming Attractions is posted, and that lure us into logging countless hours of primo fantasy reading decade after decade. Granted, TC will probably never win. Howard continues to rise in the estimation of knowledgeable fantasy enthusiasts, and someday he may become the same kind of World Fantasy darling that Lovecraft and his modern-day ilk are. But by the time the new generation of fans comes of age and infiltrates the field deep enough to make that happen, The Cimmerian will likely be long gone.

Nevertheless, such nominations help legitimize this strange, often lonely passion we share for the work of a long-dead Texan fantasist. Just like articles in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, they serve as useful benchmarks to mark the road toward a new level of maturity in Howard studies. Small, fleeting totems — and yet each provides a little boost to his critical reputation. Over time, they add up.

I’m proud to have such loyal and thoughtful readers, and I hope to keep on delivering REH criticism and scholarship to you for as long as I am able. Thanks, guys.

MARK ADDS: I too would like to thank everyone who wrote in Blood & Thunder and I’d particularly like to thank those of you on the various lists who rallied the troops to make that happen. I’m flattered and touched that the book made it this far. Sarcasm above aside, it IS an honor to be nominated; it makes you more visible within the professional community and it ensures that other like-minded people are aware of your efforts. So, thank you folks, and here’s hoping that the awards banquet will be fruitful for all!

Has anyone ever devised a deadlier zinger about a major author than Oscar Wilde’s “Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty”? Many people, among them some professed cineastes, would also claim that Ingmar Bergman made movies as if it were a painful duty, or at least made movies the watching of which is necessarily a painful duty. After the Swedish director’s death last week just about every obit or tribute online that offered a comments section was gate-crashed by reverse snobbery-afflicted knuckle-walkers and know-nothings who sneered that the Bergman cult was/is an affectation of pseudo-intellectual, popular culture-despising coastal or campus elites — blue-staters, most likely supporters of public television and Volvo drivers. Oh well, in many ways Bergman was the heir of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, so we might say attacks by trolls are part of his Scandinavian heritage.

Jeezis wept, Joe Blog-Reader thinks, is he really going to inflict a post about Ingmar Bergman on us? I can’t help it, having arrived in New York City as a college freshman just in time for the twilight of the pre-videocassette arthouse/repertory cinema era. It didn’t take long before I had ascertained that Fellini and Fassbinder were not for me, but Buñuel, Kurosawa, and especially Bergman were.

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John Haefele just sent me grim tidings from Wisconsin: his friend (and popular Cimmerian contributor) Leon Nielsen has died after a long battle with cancer.

As one of Leon’s editors I’ve been prepared for this news for some time, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Leon (1937-2007) was a Renaissance Man: a Catholic immigrant and Ranger/paratrooper from Denmark who distinguished himself in America’s Special Forces during the Vietnam War, then went on to become a well-known wildlife biologist, as well as a collector and appraiser of rare books. He himself wrote many volumes throughout his life — military training manuals, wildlife treatises and reference works, and of course several popular contributions to collecting and fandom. In our arena his standout efforts included two well-received books from McFarland, Arkham House: A Collector’s Guide (2004) and Robert E. Howard: A Collector’s Descriptive Bibliography (2006) — the appearance of the latter was a highlight of the end of Howard’s Centenary.

In the pages of The Cimmerian Leon was one of my most prized contributors. Beginning with a detailed speculation on the real-life underpinnings of Conan’s fictional homeland, “Asgard, Vanaheim, and Cimmeria” (TC V2n5 — October 2005), he went on to write several notable pieces for TC‘s vaunted Centennial run, including “Pseudo Boom” (TC V3n5 — May 2006) and “Legacy” (TC V3n12 — December 2006). He was also a prolific voice in The Cimmerian‘s letter column, The Lion’s Den, penning numerous missives that were virtually essays in themselves. That he managed to be such a force for good in Howard fandom over the last few years, despite battling cancer and undergoing months of debilitating chemotherapy, makes his achievements all the more impressive and appreciated.

The next time a mollycoddled popinjay like S. T. Joshi spouts off something like, “In my judgment, most REH fans, and even scholars, do not appear to have the breadth of knowledge in general literature to make a sound case for REH’s literary standing” (The Lion’s Den, TC V2n2 — February 2005) one need only point to the memory of Leon Nielsen: a globetrotting scholar and adventurer of the first order, one whose numerous triumphs will long outlive the pale bleating of deskbound mandarins.

Howard ended his memorial to his friend Herbert Klatt with the following, and — given Leon’s youth spent in the cradle of historical Cimmeria — I find it particularly appropriate to use it again here:

What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.

Still, I feel that if there is such a thing as a Hereafter that he will find a place among his fearless ancestors in the high hall of Valhalla and I like to think of him sitting at the right hand of Thor amid the glory of everlasting revel.

Yes, if there is a Hereafter, as Longfellow says,

There from the flowing bowl
Deep drinks the Viking’s soul!
Skoal! To the Northland! Skoal!
Thus the tale ended.

Cimmerian reader Michael Saler has tipped me off to an online excerpt of an interview with Don Webb, a writer from down Texas way and a big fan of both Howard and Lovecraft. His comments about HPL’s writing are especially illuminating. Always nice to see more writers commenting on our favorite author. We’ll politely ignore the fact that Don’s a devotee of the whacked out fringe cult The Temple of Set, bastard stepchild of the equally nutso Church of Satan. (In the interview, Webb mentions seeing The Whole Wide World in LA with Zeena Schreck — daughter of Anton LaVey, founder of the CoS).

On the same website, Cold Print, you can find more interviews of interest with folks like Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman, and Darrell Schweitzer.

For the most part, it’s been great fun watching the Wikipedia “community” have at the long biographical entry I wrote for Robert E. Howard’s Wikipedia page last year. I haven’t agreed with many of the tweaks made, but the mere fact they are being attempted is a sign of how many people out there are Howard fans to some degree. There have been literally hundreds of edits to the page, every one of which is logged here. It’s fun to browse through this log, select two different versions using the radio buttons at the left, and hit “Compare Selected Versions” to see exactly what was done in each edit.

There have been a few edits that clearly have been controversial. One guy refuses to allow any hint that Lovecraft was influenced in any way by REH, although like the rest of us he grants the opposite equation (that HPL of course influenced REH). Some editors have again and again subtly introduced non-neutral points of view regarding de Camp. One guy deleted my reference to de Camp as a “science fiction grandmaster,” considering it editorializing on my part, although in fact he won the Grandmaster Award and is technically exactly that. Others have tweaked the language surrounding the de Camp passages to defend him, insinuating that the charges of his critics are merely the opinions of a minority rather than the clear consensus in the field. There have been numerous “copy edits” by guys intent on making the prose not only encyclopedically neutral but as dull as possible. The copyright status of various REH stories has been fought over, with Paul Herman’s reasonable assessments challenged by someone who every few months insists on promulgating the lie that:

Since Robert E. Howard died 70 years ago, all his works and characters (including Conan) have now fallen into the public domain and are free for all to use as they wish. No institution may lawfully claim any right to them what-so-ever.

This despite the education he has received from other visitors on the ins-and-outs of current copyright law.

However, all in all my initial posting of text has held up rather well, a bit frayed at the edges but with the core information sitting out there like a rock with the waves of editors crashing against it day after day. I was pleased to note at the WFC that panel moderator Steven Gould had educated himself about Howard in preparation for his panel with Glenn Lord and myself by printing out a copy of the entry. Getting Howard’s entry up to scratch was worth the time invested for sure.

But check out this page, which shows in red type a series of changes instituted by an anonymous, unregistered editor. It makes you wonder who would go so far out of their way to modify REH’s page in this way, and why. Clicking on the IP Address of the vandal in question shows that he also has selectively edited some entries dealing with Islam, tweaking words like “militant” into “terrorist” and so forth. To me his actions seem contradictory: I assume his calling REH a Jew is meant to color our perception of REH in a negative way, whereas his other Wikipedia edits seem to be anti-Muslim. Or perhaps he feels that his bogus revelation of REH’s heritage is a badge of honor. Who knows, and ultimately who cares. Anyone who would harp so incessantly on someone’s ancestry clearly has ugly personal issues that transcend any attempt to rationalize them.

Like most other instances of vandalism to Wikipedia pages, this guy’s was quickly deleted by an observant reader. What’s doubly strange is that this is the second time I’ve seen Howard painted as Jewish this month — readers of the soon-to-ship V4n3 can check out Paul Shovlin’s Contributor’s Blurb to get the lowdown on the other incident I am speaking of, one that confirmed for me that “peer-reviewed” publications are often not what they are cracked up to be. Steve, I’d love to read your opinion of this odd new Jewish Question in Howard studies.

(the image used at the head of this post was taken from an especially apropos article at The Onion, the most famous news-spoofing site on the web.)

In a previous post, I reprinted a well-written article by Cross Plains resident Ginny Hoskins, discussing the recent speech and signing TC blogger [redacted] gave in that town recently. Within the post Steve and I made a few corrections to the article, in the process lamenting the frequent inaccuracies to be found in REH write-ups by journalists.

While in Cross Plains for this year’s Howard Days, Ginny told me that in actuality she had been especially careful to quote Mark exactly and to get all of her facts right, and Mark agrees that any minor errors in the article were due not to reporter negligence but to the all-too-common pitfalls of talking live off the top of one’s head. In light of this, I apologize to Ginny for our somewhat petty fan-geek grumbling about the article, and will be more careful next time when pointing out minor quibbles in such pieces. Sorry Ginny, and many thanks for letting us reprint your REH write-ups.

A few posts ago I mentioned the REH-related interview of fantasist David C. Smith recently posted at the Black Gate website. Now Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones has posted a meaty addendum to that interview at the Black Gate blog. The questions focus heavily on Sword-and-Sorcery, Robert E. Howard and related subjects. There’s even some talk about frequent Cimmerian poetry contributor Dick Tierney. Interesting reading.

Well, a few days ago I finally received my Deluxe edition of The Children of Húrin — arch-collector Doris Salley will be horrified to learn that Amazon mailed it to me with a slight ding in the slipcase, and I kept it. It has taken all of my willpower not to take a week off from work and read it from cover to cover. I have dipped into the Introduction and Appendices, and spot-checked some of my favorite moments from parts of the tale I have read before. It has the feel of a DVD director’s cut, with new passages that are fine in their own right but feel tacked on and a bit superfluous because of how well I know the original. Still, there’s a lot of new material, and I’m really looking forward to getting the time to read this.

If I got my copy, then Steve Tompkins must have got his, which means he’s likely read it several times by now, with a mental highlighter covering the pages in neon notations for use in the new essays already percolating within the supercomputer he calls a brain. I think we can assume he won’t be posting here for the next few days, until the Tolkien fever wears off. Rob is likely in the middle of the horrendous last few weeks of the school year, wrapping up his teaching duties in time to head down to Howard Days. Mark is off at the movies, probably running around the corridors of his new movie theater decked out in zombie makeup and scaring the kids attempting to sneak into the matinée for Twenty-Eight Weeks Later. Which leaves me taking a bit of time away from finishing the June issue of TC to point you to a few things of interest.

Over at Black Gate magazine, there is a new interview with a guy who has been kind of important to some members of the inner circle of Howard fans: writer David C. Smith. A former fantasist who penned a number of Howard pastiches in the late 70s and early 80s, Smith also had a stint in REHupa and is still friends with several members of that organization. In the Black Gate interview, you can read a bit about his career, how he managed to snag the Howard gigs, his writing style that pays homage to Howard’s pulp roots, and more. Check it out.

In other news, frequent Cimmerian contributor Gary Romeo has started a new Yahoo! group called “D is for de Camp.” This is a forum to discuss the work of the late science fiction grandmaster, including his intimate association with Howard publishing. Gary already has a few dozen people posting over there, and is looking for more posters and readers. I imagine a lot of the postings will relate to REH in some way, so put it into your Howardian online reading rotation.

Finally, there’s a few new posts over at REHupa.com, both by Morgan Holmes, who has been away from blogging for awhile but is now back with a vengeance. One post is about the version of the Prose Edda that Howard owned and read, and the other is Part II of his personal history of his involvement with REH fandom.

Not much else going on save for frantic preparations for Howard Days. Every year I try to get ahead of things and every year I end up rushing at the last minute to get everything finished. Still, it’s been worth it — the June TC is shaping up to be a real hot issue, with some great articles that will keep you turning the pages. It’s one of those issues that has a little something for everyone.