The above photo is well-known to those of us who have read and reread Dark Valley Destiny. In that book, the caption states: “Robert E. Howard, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, Dr. and Mrs. Solomon R. Chambers, Galveston, Texas, probably 1918.” It’s a photo that has always intrigued me, mostly because of the amazing pose REH is caught in, gazing wistfully up at the sky as if daydreaming his first stories, so distracted by the tales floating around in his mind that he can’t bring himself back to reality long enough to pose properly for the photo being taken. Dr. Howard and the Chamberses do their part to make the photo interesting, too, with Isaac standing imperiously and confidently as the nexus of attention while the others almost recoil from the towering man dominating the center of the composition.

Over the years I have been in Howard fandom, I’ve often wondered what the provenance of this photo was. Dark Valley Destiny says:

Late in 1917, Dr. Howard delivered the Chamberses’ new baby, Norris, and thereafter Dr. Chambers became restless. As he had earlier discovered that the active practice of medicine kept him away from home more than he liked, so now he found his duties at the drugstore too confining. After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, he decided to move his family to Galveston, on the Gulf of Mexico, and take up truck farming.

Of course, Dark Valley Destiny also calls the newborn Norris “Robert’s schoolmate,” and then debunks one of REH’s childhood memories by saying that schoolmate Norris didn’t remember it, so Howard probably made it up. But as we just read in the DVD excerpt above: Norris was born in 1917, making him a full eleven years younger than Howard, and so couldn’t possibly have been his schoolmate. Call me wild and crazy, but it’s small wonder he didn’t remember anything about the incident Howard wrote of considering he might not have been born yet when it happened.

Until recent years Dark Valley Destiny was the first and only place this photo was published, albeit severely cropped compared to the raw version above. I suppose de Camp got this and most of his other photos from Glenn Lord, who had been patiently hunting down and securing copies of such photos for decades. The copy above is the one Glenn has in his files, with the names written across the top like that. Glenn in turn must have got a copy from Norris, or from one of the other Chamberses.

In June of 2005, Don Herron and I went to White Settlement, Texas and interviewed Norris Chambers at length (the results of which can now be read in TC V3n10, with a further tantalizing excerpt available in V3n6). During the course of that interview I learned that Norris’ sister’s name was Deoma, which immediately set off alarm bells in my mind, because the name written on the photo above also says “Deoma.” Norris’ Mother’s name was Martha. Hmmmm. (in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of opportunities to say “hmmmm….” in REH scholarship).

When I got home from Texas, I looked up Deoma in the Social Security Death Index, and she is listed under Deoma E. Morgan (according to this genealogical listing on Norris’ website, Lilburn Morgan was her second husband, Lonnie Triplitt was her first). That record tells us that she was born in 1899 and died in 2000 (she was 101 years old!) That would make her around nineteen at the time of the above picture. Hmmmm — come to think of it, the lady (girl?) in that picture has always looked a little young to be the wife of the then fifty-year-old Solomon Chambers (1868-1950).

It appears, then, that de Camp assumed that Deoma Chambers was Mrs. Solomon (Martha) Chambers and wrote his caption accordingly. But now twenty-three years after the fact we finally know that the woman in the picture in not Solomon’s wife but his daughter, and hence Norris’ older sister. Those of you who already own TC V3n10 knew this already, of course — one of the perks of subscribing.

During my interview of Norris in 2005, I asked him whether he had the original of this photo, in the hope that it perhaps had some writing on the back that might pinpoint the date a bit better, or provide any additional information. He said that he didn’t have it and wasn’t sure who did, but he suspected that Deoma’s only daughter Marjorie Leeton — who is 84 years old and still living in Texas, might know where it went off to, along with several other photos Norris recalls were taken with the Howards on that Galveston trip.

Well, I contacted Marjorie, and sure enough she does have the original photo, although there are no others that she is aware of. According to her, the splotches you see on the print reproduced above are there on the original, too, perhaps caused by dripping photo developer or something at the time it was made. And most importantly, on the back of the photo itself is written the names of the subjects along with the following additional information: “Feb 1918 near Alta Loma, Texas.”

Alta Loma is a very small town in the Galveston area — you can read about its history here at the Handbook of Texas Online. Note that in recent years it’s been swallowed up and incorporated into the larger town of Santa Fe. Cimmerian readers have read all about how the Chamberses moved down there to farm and sell fruit door-to-door. Reading the Handbook of Texas entry brings home how difficult a life that must have been during those years.

So that confirms de Camp’s guess (probably a guess Norris gave him) of “probably 1918.” But it brings up another problem with the dating. If, as de Camp states, the Chamberses didn’t move down to Galveston until “after the Armistice of November 11, 1918,” then how could this photo have been taken the previous February, a full nine months before they moved? Doesn’t make sense. Perhaps they went down on a scouting trip of sorts with the Howards in February? Or perhaps de Camp’s information about them moving in November of 1918 was wrong, and they actually moved a year earlier? Norris sounded a bit vague on exactly when they moved down there, and he himself was far too young to have any memories of the years the family spent down south, so it’s possible he misremembered to de Camp. Someday I’d like to spend enough time at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, where the de Camp papers are kept, to get to the bottom of this and many other mysteries.

I’m having Norris make me a scan of the photo, both sides, so I’ll know more information directly, and will report any updates here. It will be interesting to see how much more detail is in the original photo, if any. I dearly wish the other three or four rumored photos had survived — who knows what they would have shown us? A group photo of the entire Howard trio at that age would be wonderful to see. Maybe they are still out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Stranger things have happened — Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet found the photo of REH outside his house with Patch a mere few years ago, at the house of another old lady who knew the Howards in her youth. I’ve got to get Rusty to write up that interview and experience in The Cimmerian, it’s a doozy of a yarn.

Thank God for people like Norris Chambers and Marjorie Leeton, keepers in their own small way of the Howard flame, both via their memories and by way of a most miraculous photograph.

Guest blogger Morgan Holmes offers his own take on the pros and cons of the Lancer series….

MORGAN HOLMES: Leo’s post contrasting the Lancer and Del Rey editions was the latest in an ongoing debate of what is or was the best Robert E. Howard edition. I had been thinking for some time why the Lancer paperbacks had such an impact that later book editions never were able to duplicate.

There were advantages that Conan the Adventurer had in 1966. First was suppression of Sword-and-Sorcery fiction. It was something new to most people in 1966. Sword-and-Sorcery fiction was rare for fifteen years. In the early 1950s, you could still find Robert E. Howard influencing stories in pulps such as Poul Anderson’s “The Virgin of Valkarion” in Planet Stories. The pulps were meant to be cheap entertainment. In the early 1950s a copy of Planet Stories cost $.25, thus within the reach of a young reader. The last pulp science fiction magazines also died in 1955 when the distribution system collapsed. Science fiction was also king in the 1950s, driving fantasy and horror figuratively underground.

The Gnome Press editions of Robert E. Howard started in 1950, but Gnome was a small press. Most of its business was direct mail order or from specialty mail order book dealers. Plus the Gnome Press hardbacks were $3.00-$4.00. In today’s dollars, $3.00 would be $22.65. These books were aimed at older fans wanting the stories in book form. The small print runs would prevent creating many new ones. A teenager would have to save up in order to get a Gnome Press book in the 1950s, provided he knew of them or ever heard of Robert E. Howard.

The baby boom started in 1946 and ended in 1964. That means you had a growing population in their teens — the prime group for buying fantasy fiction. The mass-market paperback had stepped in as the replacement for the pulps as a source of inexpensive fantastic fiction. There was a massive rebirth of Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback in 1963 when it was discovered copyright was not in effect for those stories. Ace Books published wonderfully packaged books with covers by Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta.

Just months before the release of the Lancer Conan was another important event that helped prime the pump. Ace Books discovered a copyright loophole and published The Lord of the Rings with Jack Gaughan covers. Ballantine Books published the authorized editions in 1966 with the psychedelic flamingo covers. Burroughs and Tolkien were major factors in preparing the scene for Howard. Plus you had two of the L. Sprague de Camp edited anthologies, Sword and Sorcery (1963) and The Spell of Seven (1965) that would have introduced some readers to Robert E. Howard for the first time. There were no trade paperback science fiction books, as trade paperbacks were mainly meant for the college market.

The Lancer paperbacks were for the most part sold in drugstores and some grocery stores. You did not have the bookstore chains like you do today. There were regional distributors who supplied paperbacks to the places that sold the books. A regional distributor knew that one place might sell more westerns and mysteries while another might move science fiction paperbacks. In some ways, the Lancer paperbacks may have been available in more places than the average paperback would today. Someone going to the drugstore to get the newest issue of Eerie or Creepy would have stumbled across the now iconic image of Conan as created by Frank Frazetta.

Then there is the question of cost. The first Lancer paperbacks were $.60, going to $.75 and then $.95 in 1968. Sixty cents in 1966 would convert to $3.81 today! That is incredible — science fiction and fantasy paperbacks are $7.99 today. That would convert to $1.25 in 1966. So the Lancer paperbacks were a great deal. More so, the minimum wage in 1966 was $1.25 an hour. That converts to $6.83 an hour today. Western writer and Robert E. Howard fan, James Reasoner, once told me that mass-market paperbacks should cost one hour at the minimum wage. Paperbacks are often an impulse item. The higher the cost, the more a potential buyer has to agonize if that book is worth it. In 1966-67, a teenager working a few hours a week could stop at the local drug store and pick up a Lancer paperback and still have money to pick up the latest 45 record like “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “Ruby Tuesday.”

There were some other factors — horror had made a comeback by the 60s after having a low profile in the 50s. Our theoretical teenage buyer could see the latest Hammer horror flick before picking up Conan the Adventurer. What impact did the Italian sword & sandal movies have, the ones starring Steve Reeves or Gordon Scott, and all those Hercules/Maciste/Samson/Goliath movies?

So, you have an intersection of demographics, cost, distribution, interest, and of course the Frazetta look that combined to create something that will probably never occur again. The nearest you could get today to recreating what the Lancer Conan paperbacks would be to have Leisure Books publish Robert E. Howard at $4.99 (price of their westerns) with distribution to truck stops and grocery stores. Plus you need an artist to create something totally new, and there is only one Frank Frazetta. Why are western paperbacks $4.99 but science fiction and fantasy paperbacks $7.99?

This Sunday night Masterpiece Theatre becomes Monsterpiece Theatre to present a new BBC version of Dracula starring Marc Warren, David Suchet, Sophia Myles, and Stephanie Leonidas. This latest re-imagining is a skimpy 90 minutes long and jettisons Renfield, plus the reviews, while mostly favorable, indicate that the concerns of Stewart Harcourt’s screenplay are as much venereal as arterial. Still, I will be tuning in, in part because of memories of what a big deal the 1973 made-for-television Dan Curtis/Richard Matheson/Jack Palance version was when I was in junior high school, and in part because this blog’s reason for being might have plunked himself down in front of the TV, if we can extrapolate from The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf, which notes the following in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith on October 5, 1923:

I’ve had two cousins visiting me, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. They’d read the International Adventure Library and from what they said, ‘Dracula’ is a humdinger.’ I’m going to order the set right away.

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Cimmerian readers have been well aware of the passing of fantasist David Gemmell (1948-2006). In V3n10 I published an article by Cimmerian blogger Steve Tompkins called “Dog-Brothers,” that went a long way toward demonstrating how simpatico the author of Legend and thirty other fantasy bestsellers was with the work of Robert E. Howard.

Now Steve has contributed to another, longer tribute to Gemmell, this one available online. Head on over to the Black Gate website and read “David Gemmell: An Appreciation” by Tompkins and Wayne McLaurin. Black Gate is currently edited by Howard Jones, a noted Harold Lamb scholar and a good friend of REH as well. Those of you who read the World Fantasy Convention coverage in V3n11 heard all about Jones sticking up for Two-Gun on a WFC panel. Nice to see him also doing his part to honor David Gemmell at Black Gate.

Gary Romeo, a longtime champion of L. Sprague de Camp and a frequent contributor to The Cimmerian, took a bit of umbrage at the last post’s dismissal of the de Camp/Carter pastiches. He sends in the following rebuttal:

Conan the Warrior is not really a good example of a de Camp/Carter pastiche, as it contains all Howard stories: “Red Nails,” “Jewels of Gwahlur,” and “Beyond the Black River.” No doubt old books that feature stories readily available in new volumes will lose value, but I doubt the Karl Edward Wagner edited Berkley Books (without the Ken Kelley foldouts) are doing much better on e-Bay. Although I do believe sellers than sell for 1 cent usually jack up mailing costs to still make a profit, so the sale of the book with mailing cost was probably $3-$4. Not so bad for a twenty-five-year-old, cheaply made paperback.

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that since the de Camp/Carter books (Conan the Buccaneer, Conan of the Isles, etc.) are not available in new editions they might have held their value if not for the Law of Supply and Demand. It is well known that the de Camp-edited Lancer/Ace Conan series sold in the millions, but today there are far too few devotee Conan fans to make such an enormous supply of used books scarce. The Del Rey series appears to be doing well enough, but it is nowhere near the success of the de Camp edited series. By your reasoning the big question is not “who care[s] about getting the de Camp/Carter pastiches?” but “who cares about the new Del Reys?” What is it, maybe less than a 10th of the people who cared about the Lancer/Ace series?

For the record, in the last few weeks Conan the Buccaneer has also sold at auction for a mere 1 cent, and failed to sell when the minimum bid on another copy was 99 cents. Too rich for most speculators, apparently. A copy did sell for a BUY IT NOW price of $1.99, but the whole point of BUY IT NOW is to pay more than something’s worth in order to get it without the hassle of an auction. Conan of the Isles did a bit better, selling a single copy at $2.54 after two bids, while numerous other copies went unsold at any price. For some of those the minimum starting bid was ridiculous: $5, $7. Another copy priced at a minimum bid of 99 cents also failed to sell.

Meanwhile, what about the Berkleys? They typically sell from $1-$3 per paperback copy, while one set of three hardbacks went for over $20. At the paperback level, the price difference between them and the Lancer/Ace Conans is negligible. The Berkley’s have always suffered from the same problem that the Grants did, namely they weren’t complete. Now that a textually restored complete set is available, they too will go the way of the dodo and the Baens, with the Wagner intros perhaps being pulled and preserved in some critical anthology. So will the Grants, and so will the Gnomes (although the Gnomes will maintain collectability due to their being the first complete set of Conan, more or less, in hardback. But people won’t be seeking them out to read, but only to collect).

Unlike many of my Howardian compatriots, I do think Gary has a point about the old Lancers selling better back then. There was something magical going on there. Few would dare argue, for instance, that any Conan art done in the four decades since even comes close to approaching the genius at play in those Frazetta covers. If this new Del Rey set ever gets published in mass market with no modern illos but with the Frazetta paintings used as covers and interior plates, look out! — it would make a big difference, I think.

To give de Camp his due, I also remember the palpable excitement I felt when discovering the Ace Conans in the early 1980s as a ten-year-old. Specifically, I marveled at and reveled in the “saga” that had been assembled, the sense of history and continuity that echoed what I had earlier felt in The Lord of the Rings. At the time, I liked those textual bridges linking the stories together, I loved the map, and while I did notice a qualitative difference between the Howard tales and the filler, it didn’t bother my teenage sense of taste overmuch. As Gary so often points out, that entire vibe was created with great originality and skill by de Camp — it was his brainchild, and it worked.

Gary’s probably right: re-releasing the entire “saga” today with those Frazetta covers (perhaps with the non-Frazetta books merged into the others, or with the old Ken Kelly Berkley covers substituting for the terrible Duillo/Vallejo ones), and with new intros to give the whole works a “bringing back the classics” feel, would likely sell very well, much better than the Del Reys. That series achieved a power that was far greater than the sum of its parts, and while hardcore Howard fans generally can’t bring themselves to dive back into the Lancers and recapture that magical thrill, a new generation of Conan fans and nostalgic old-timers — the guys who adore the films and the comics, for instance, or modern RPG players — would eat it up.

So will it ever happen? I don’t think so, not from a major publisher anyway. Probably the best that can be done is to strike a deal to repackage the de Camp/Carter stories into a separate set of their own, but of course that won’t achieve the effect Gary is pining for. De Camp/Carter without Howard attached isn’t magical at all to the vast majority of fans.

My dream Conan set would be three big meaty hardcovers, text in a large readable font, each with a Frazetta painting on the cover and a second one on the back cover, a very large, redrawn, full-color fold-out map glued onto the boards with little lines and markers showing Conan’s travels, and the stories presented in the order of Conan’s life with no fragments or editorial distractions of any kind aside from a short, evocative introduction — written by ME, ha ha ha. I’ll probably make a single set like that for myself someday just to have around the house and on the shelf.

Farewell and thanks to political columnist Molly Ivins, who was as sharp as a Bowie knife and took to the warpath in print at least as eventfully as Quanah Parker did on horseback. Despite the bruises she left them with, both Bush and Clinton managed grace notes about this great lady, the former calling her ‘a Texas original” yesterday and the latter admitting last year that she was “good when she praised me…and painfully good when she criticized me.”

Ivins once called the Texas Legislature “the best free entertainment in Austin,” which makes me wonder if we should have budgeted our time differently while in that city for the World Fantasy Convention. When I first began reading [redacted]’s work, his humor struck me as Ivins-esque at times, and for some of us who, rightly or wrongly, have been enraged ever since December of 2000, she, like Howard himself, was a reminder of what wondrous beings Texans can be. Hope she and Ann Richards are making inroads on the bourbon together wherever they are.

MARK ADDS: That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever received, Steve. Thank you Molly, for being a wondrous Texan.

LEO ADDS: I wish Ivins all the best in the Hereafter, although to get out of the cheap seats she’ll need to bring all of her rhetorical powers to bear on massaging away the various witticisms she vomited at the Big Guy while here on earth. I wasn’t a fan: her famously funny, semi-Conan-related comment about Governor Schwarzenegger looking “exactly like a condom stuffed with walnuts” was plagiarized from conservative columnist Clive James, while her more substantial plagiarism of former National Review columnist Florence King still rankles. The Bush statement Steve mentions was telling — after calling her a “Texas original” he went on to say: “She was loved by her readers and by her many friends, particularly in Central Texas. I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed. Laura and I send our condolences to Molly Ivins’ family and friends.” That’s far more grace and common decency than Ivins ever granted him, and I wonder if her reputation will long survive the dwindling half-life of the scathing political hatchet jobs for which she is most revered. I wouldn’t bet on it.

Greg Manchess, who came across so personably as both a panelist and an informal conversationalist during the recent World Fantasy Convention in Austin, will do his part and then some to ensure the success of the 2007 Howard Days as Guest of Honor. And yet his selection, through no fault of his, makes me want to recite Ossianic verses or intravenously inject peat whiskey or do something else expressive of Gaelic melancholia. Can’t help recalling the testimonials in Exorcisms and Ecstasies and reflecting what a Guest of Honor to End All Guests of Honor Karl Edward Wagner would have made, especially in advance of his Long Goodbye phase. Gary Romeo might have felt duty-bound to boycott the festivities and establish a rival or schismatic Howard Days, the equivalent of an Avignon papacy, outside a certain former residence in Plano, but most celebrants would have come away with anecdotes to be prized like amulets.

KEW is in no position to serve as Guest of Honor, unless we figure out how to work the Orastes/Valerius/Tarascus/Amalric trick. But with all due respect for the carnosaur-sized footprints the two current frontrunners have left all over Howard studies, he does belong on the Black Circle ballot as much as anyone save Novalyne Price Ellis herself (Leo asked for suggestions, and I can’t believe I spaced; guess I’m an imperfect Wagnerite). I went on and on in the Lion’s Den this past year about Wagner’s credentials as an REH editor and exponent, and will refrain from flogging that dead destrier here. Perhaps the thing to do is to add his name next year; for de Camp to beat KEW into the Black Circle would be a justice-miscarriage of Shub-Niggurathian proportions.

Sorry, Karl. Won’t happen again.

LEO ADDS: I put him on the list. No big deal, anyone who has voted and wants to change their vote before March 1 is welcome to. There’s probably a lot of others we could add to that list, but I figure we might as well wait until someone raises a stink about them.

S.T. Joshi’s article “Bran Mak Morn and History” in Two-Gun Bob: A Centennial Study of Robert E. Howard comes trailing a backstory that originated with the author’s 1996 magnum opus H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. That book more than deserved its Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Awards, but phrases from the pages (502-503) on which Robert E. Howard is introduced as an untutored provincial-turned-pen pal were destined (and designed?) to live in infamy among even the least touchy Howardists: “Fanatical cadre of supporters,” “subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature,” “[Howard’s] views are not of any great substance and profundity,” “Howard’s style is crude, slipshod, and unwieldy.” The artful dismissal-intensifier “does not even begin to approach” is surpassed a page later when Joshi quotes Lovecraft’s “There’s a bird whose basic mentality seems to me just about the good respectable citizen’s. . .” evaluation of REH in a December 14, 1935 letter to Kenneth Sterling and then editorializes “If Howard’s later devotees would adhere to this view, they would make themselves a little less ridiculous in proclaiming vast profundity and originality for his work.” Only a little less ridiculous, mind you — that might qualify as the unkindest cut of all, were there not many cuts yet to come.

In 2001 Howard occasioned what has to be the worst passage in one of Joshi’s very best books, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Here is as good a place as any to mention that when Joshi is writing about those like Campbell or Shirley Jackson or Thomas Ligotti who broadcast on his preferred frequencies and speak to his sensibilities, few genre critics repay reading as much as he does. Otherwise, however, he can be so condemnatory as to suggest a reflexively merciless, possibly infanticidal tribal deity casting the aesthetically or morally misshapen forth into the Outer Darkness. Let’s steel ourselves to gaze upon his expanded inventory of Howardian infractions (page 148 in the Campbell book):

Howard’s prodigious imagination in conceiving the life and actions of primitive peoples is certainly remarkable. It was probably derived from his own fascination with what he perceived to be the freedoms of barbarian life and his implacable hostility to civilization — attitudes fostered by his being the descendant of one of the original settlers of Texas and his lifelong residence in the remote village of Cross Plains. These provocative conceptions are, however, frequently offset by a lamentable crudity of expression and a yielding to the most hackneyed conceptions of pulp fiction: characters who are broad caricatures rather than living beings; lurid bloodletting and melodrama; implausibility of action, especially with regard to supernatural phenomena; and a general slovenliness in diction and plot development. Howard and his work have attracted a small but vocal band of cheerleaders who are determined to give him high rank as a writer and thinker, but it is unlikely that he will ever have as high a standing as, say, his friend H. P. Lovecraft in general literature.

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Check out this morning’s Wall Street Journal for a nice article on Howard by respected political/culture writer John J. Miller. The Cimmerian gets name-checked, and John pits three words of my conservative optimism against a burst of Rusty Burke’s liberal pessimism. Fun for the whole family.

John is National Political Reporter for the National Review, and does a lot of freelance writing for the WSJ and other publications. Last year he wrote a good article about Lovecraft in the same paper, which you can read here, while in 2002 the WSJ published his piece on Christian values in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

As for the National Review, it always has solid pop-culture material — read John’s take on Dungeons & Dragons, his column on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, some thoughts on the ghost stories of Russell Kirk, or browse through his excellent coverage about last year’s Narnia craze:

Back to Narnia

Narnian Order

The Lion King

X-Mas in Narnia

Getting Howard some good press in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers serves as a nice bookend to January’s coverage of him in The Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize winning critic Michael Dirda, and is a fine way to wrap up the REH centennial. Thanks, John.

UPDATE: John also blurbed his article and this website at National Review‘s The Corner, one of the cooler conservative blogs out there. Check it out.

UPDATE #2: Another National Review veteran, S. T. Karnick, offers his own brief exegesis of Howard’s relevance at his personal blog.

On the REH Innercircle e-mail group, Gary Romeo alerts Howard fans to an interview with the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, M. T. Anderson, who mentions that he’s been reading none other than Robert E. Howard and jonesing to write a book centering around barbarian themes. Pretty cool coming from a guy who made his name writing award-winning pop-up books and the like. (Hat tip: Don Herron)