[redacted]

Now, just a little over two years later, this news from [redacted], over at The Robert E. Howard Foundation website…

The Robert E. Howard Foundation is pleased to announce The Collected Drawings of Robert E. Howard. This slim, 42-page volume collects all of the known artwork by our favorite Texan. All of the comics and doodles from his letters and all of the Hyborian Age maps have been collected, but that’s not all. Many previously unpublished maps for stories like “Blood of the Gods” and “Wild Water” have been cleaned up and are presented here for the first time. Also, a fantastic discovery was made in Texas last year: Robert E. Howard’s high school text book. On each of the blank pages within that book, a young Howard doodled characters from his favorite stories in Adventure magazine, 11 characters in all. There was also a loose sheet of paper folded in the book with additional drawings. All are collected here. Order today and, depending on which shipping option is chosen, it might just show up in time for Christmas.

The Collected Drawings is an 8.5 x 11, perfect-bound paperback with an introduction by Bill Cavalier. Prepared for publication by yours truly.

This sounds like a cool little package. Apparently, the REHF is going with a paperback edition from lulu.com for this volume, just as they did for the first edition of [redacted]’s [redacted]. What has me really fired up are the maps that will be reproduced. We know that REH drafted rough maps (just like Conan) for several yarns, including The Hour of the Dragon. On top of that, several of the drawings I’ve seen are quite good for an untrained artist. For complete information about this REHF project, see here.

As reported by [redacted], Paradox/CPI is engaged in a trademark dispute with Orion Publishing Group. One of Orion’s imprints is Gollancz, which company was scheduled to release Conan’s Brethren, a collection of Howard’s non-Conan adventure yarns, next month. As just posted by the book’s editor, Stephen Jones, Conan’s Brethren seems to have gotten pulled into the fight as well:

Note: As a result of a threatened lawsuit over trademark infringement, publication was pushed back until 2010. Although the page sheets were printed, only copies of the export trade paperback were bound-up, and these were not commercially distributed.

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I so love having The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard in my collection. After years and years of collecting Howard, I can literally open this book at random and find material I’m not familiar with. An example of this is “Arcadian Days”, found on pages 256 through 258. There’s a typo at the start: “Mape-limbed” is, in context, obviously supposed to be “ape-limbed.” The narrator is a blacksmith, who swears by Zeus and Jove, and meets a woman who is Dion’s — Dionysus? -– own (also referred to as an acolyte of Pan, who is Dionysus’s equivalent), “when the world was wild with Youth.” An interesting poem in many ways, and one I’d never seen before.

Paul Herman just put out the word that Sentiment: An Olio of Rarer Works, the newest publication from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, has been pre-ordered down to very few copies. For those who don’t know much about this volume, here’s a run-down, courtesy of Coming Attractions…

SENTIMENT: AN OLIO OF RARER WORKS – Now available for pre-order!
The REH Foundation Press is proud to present Sentiment: An Olio of Rarer Works. This volume is the Howard collector’s dream, containing those hard-to-find stories from various small press publications from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. No longer will readers have to seek out copies of Pay Day, Lurid Confessions #1, or The Dark Man #2; all of the Howard content in those volumes, and many more, is included here.

Also included are many items seldom seen by collectors. “The Rivals” makes its first appearance outside of a Foundation Newsletter; all three issues of Howard’s amateur press publication, The Right Hook, are presented in their entirety; and many other hard-to-find pieces have finally found a home in Sentiment. For most of these items, this is their first publication in book form. Many of the pieces in this collection are juvenilia.

This massive volume, close to 600 pages, will be printed in hardback with dust jacket, in a limited quantity of 150 copies, each individually numbered. Cover design by Jim Keegan; edited by [redacted].

Sentiment is $53 for REHF Members, $59 for non-members (all prices in US dollars) plus shipping.
(How to become a member? See here.)

Shipping (rates updated as of 10/14/09)
Domestic via USPS Priority, $9
Domestic via USPS Book Rate, $3
Canada via Global Priority, $23
Australia via Global Priority, $33
Europe via Global Priority, $33

Over on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum, [redacted] (at right) let the bulldog out of the bag. Here’s what he had to say…

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The Fall 2009 edition of the Robert E. Howard Foundation Newsletter arrived today and it is a real treat. The cover is taken from an original print of the iconic Robert E. Howard portrait that a relative of Howard’s had recently sent to Patrice Louinet. The contents include pages from the Junto, a sort of small apa or amatuer press association that Howard belonged to, a letter to fellow Weird Tales writer Emil Petaja, two stories by Howard, one of which is rare, all written in his own hand or reproduced from typed manuscripts. The issue also includes the text of Larry Thomas’ speech at the last Howard Days. This is a very nice Howard collector’s item, and those who aren’t getting this should really look into it at the Foundation site.

I just know I’m going to get some outraged emails at 12:01am on September 1 from people irate that they had no adequate warning of my decision to stop selling back issues after August 31, and upset that I’m being such a hardass about my deadline (I’ve already had people vainly ask me to extend the deadline just for them, or let them keep things on layaway for days, weeks, or months, despite my very clear blog post last time about those things). So to be perfectly clear as we come down the home stretch:

August 31, 2009 is the date after which all excess unsold copies of The Cimmerian will be destroyed. If you want any after that, you’ll have to wait for already-sold copies to appear on eBay, or scavenge at the REH Museum in Cross Plains for what copies they might still have.

No, I’m not going to change my mind. No, there will be no extensions or copies held on layaway.

August 31 is the date. Get ’em while you can.

And to be assured of getting your order, your don’t just need to send me an email requesting the issues by the deadline, your money needs to be sitting in my PayPal account by midnight of the night of Aug. 31–Sept. 1, Pacific Time. Any monies sent after that time will be refunded and the orders will go unfilled. And any email conversations that we might have had before the deadline that were ultimately not sealed by a payment will be considered void.

I’ve been overwhelmed with orders the past few weeks and am slowly working through them whenever I get free time, so if you’ve sent in money and I’ve confirmed receipt, don’t worry, you’ll be getting your package soon. Any questions, feel free to ask. If you have been sitting on the fence for the last five years, you have until Monday evening to get in on the action.

I can’t make it any more clear than that.

Donald M. Grant died the other day in Florida. The name might not mean much to those but recently come to Robert E. Howard fandom. To REH fans like myself, who came of age before 1990, Donald M. Grant and the publishing company he founded represented a source of quality hardcovers featuring the fiction of Howard, Harold Lamb, Karl Edward Wagner and others that was unmatched anywhere else.

It took me a few years to realize that some of the Zebra paperbacks that introduced me to Robert E. Howard’s work originated as DMG hardcovers (cut me some slack, I wasn’t even a teenager). Once I did, I tried to get hold of such when I could afford them. Grant’s publishing house printed the first collection of Howard’s verse I ever owned. Donald M. Grant, Publishing, Inc. is still the only English-language publisher to have printed One Who Walked Alone and Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. While I own a beautiful copy of The Road of Azrael published by Mr. Grant, I am sad to say that an edition of the DMG The Sowers of the Thunder, generally considered one of the finest illustrated books to ever showcase the work of Robert E. Howard, eludes me. (Continue reading this post)

August 31 is the date after which all excess unsold copies of The Cimmerian will be destroyed. If you want any after that, you’ll have to wait for already-sold copies to appear on eBay, or scavenge at the REH Museum in Cross Plains for what copies they might still have.

No, I’m not going to change my mind. No, there will be no extensions or copies held on layaway.

August 31 is the date. Get ’em while you can.

Terry McVicker, popular REH bookseller and fan, sends in the following announcement:

CONAN 3 IS COMING!

CROM! Subscribers, friends, and fellow enthusiasts, we’ve all had a very long wait, but after six years the concluding volume of the three-volume Complete Conan will finally appear. Wandering Star Publishers, aided by Book Palace Books in London, will publish Conan 3 this coming December, 2009. I have been assured by the insiders working on this book that the quality standards established in the previous two volumes will be exactingly met, and we will not be disappointed. All the same designers and book builders of the previous volumes are participating once again. At long last we will see the lovely artwork of Gregory Manchess presented in the format he envisioned.

Pre-publication price, good until October 1st, is $205, and given the quality and the cost of materials — which never goes down — this is very, very reasonable. If you are a previous subscriber and would like your matching number, please send me an email with your Subscriber Number. As a thank you to all my patient subscribers, I will pay your shipping. You may pay by credit card via Paypal (I will be happy to send you a Paypal invoice), cheque, or money order.

When Wandering Star had their flyers printed, ₤130 equated to $195. Now that same ₤130 equates to $ 215! When the book is ordered from Wandering Star, their Pounds remain constant but our dollar value changes, so you really don’t know what the final sum will be. As a solution to the foreign exchange variance I’m charging a flat fee of $205.

If you had missed the previous two volumes, and would like to purchase a complete set with matching numbers, the price is $620 including shipping (California residents: please remember to include your 8.75% sales tax).

Terence A. McVicker, Rare Books

1745 W. Kenneth Road

Glendale, California 91201

(818)242-4818

email:mcrarebooks@earthlink.net

This is good news for those of you who have been craving the third volume. I especially like that the production standards are set to equal the first two. Terry is a great dealer and a personal friend of mine, and I heartily recommend dealing with him when ordering this book. It’s cool that those who waited to buy all three at once can now get them from Terry for one flat price, and all the same number to boot.