Robert E. Howard and Materialism

One of the treasures in my library is an old, used paperback, Cthulhu: the Mythos and Kindred Horrors by Robert E. Howard, edited by David Drake. It includes 'Pigeons from Hell and other mythos related stories. What a find. We need more dusty second-hand bookstores.
 
Most of my R E Howard books are from Donald M Grant, and they are still titles I read and enjoy.
I am aware of Wildside Press, and the series of Howard works they have released, but I have not bought any yet.
Has anyone thoughts about their books?
How well edited? Typos, fonts? Have stores been corrected?
 
Zaharoff said:
Most of my R E Howard books are from Donald M Grant, and they are still titles I read and enjoy.
I am aware of Wildside Press, and the series of Howard works they have released, but I have not bought any yet.
Has anyone thoughts about their books?
How well edited? Typos, fonts? Have stores been corrected?
Click to expand...

The Grant editions were chopped to pieces; many paragraphs were removed, and text altered to avoid some unpleasant 1930s racist language.

The best editions for text and price are the Del Rey paperbacks and the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press editions - the latter are bringing out a paperback edition of the Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard relatively soon.
 
I have one of those Del Rey books, The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. Not really a fan of these oversized paperbacks, but it is a good book, loaded with stories, strikingly illustrated in black and white. Unfortunately I had to race through my copy because it started to come apart about a quarter of the way into it, and proceeded to fall to pieces faster than I could turn the pages.

Now I can't say whether this is due to a general fault in their production methods or I just got a dud copy somehow, but the end result isn't what you could reasonably call a book. It's more like a folder if anything.
 
With few exceptions, paperbacks were not meant to last more than a few readings. Your's sounded like a weak copy in particular. They just don't make them like they used to, but they do make more of them.
 
For the sake of comparison, I still have a bunch of old mass-market paperbacks I've kept with me over the past 30 or so years or longer, like those Aickman and Ligotti paperbacks from the early '90s, Ramsey Campbells and others from the mid-'80s and earlier, that I've gone back to repeatedly,and which are still in fine or at least reasonably good shape.

The mass market is my ideal book format, I think. These books just seem more rugged, somehow, not to mention being more convenient for carrying around. Also, generally much nicer looking, too, with more attractive cover designs and artwork.

(You can't always judge a book by its cover, true, but you can certainly judge the publisher who proudly releases an ugly book.)
 
Personally I find the illustrations in the Del Rey books to be annoyingly frequent. Illustrations for stories that don't rely on the pictures should be very sparse. So I'm reading Wordsworth's Haunter Of The Ring first.
 
In this book, at least, each story is preceded by a small header illustration, but there aren't more than a handful of full-sized pictures scattered throughout. More importantly, the art is solid and highly detailed and looks great, and really complements the writing well. All in all, it's a very attractive volume, especially if you haven't already seen most of these stories.

But I would recommend paying a little extra for a hardcover, if there is one.
 
Some of the Del Rey books have lots of little pictures at the sides and those annoy me far more. I once tried to read Gaiman's fully illustrated Stardust because I like Charles Vess but I just couldn't get into the story with all these pictures bombarding me. The illustrated version of Clive Barker's Abarat looks much the same but it's a little more tempting because Barker is doing all the pictures himself, but I'd probably go for the text by itself now.
 
Nothing like that in this book, but that could be because it was originally published by someone else. I think it's a reprint.

Now that I think about it, I have an old Del Rey Lovecraft paperback still in near-perfect shape, I'm pretty sure. What happened, guys?
 
cannibal cop said:
But I would recommend paying a little extra for a hardcover, if there is one.
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The hardcover editions of the Del Rey paperbacks were published by Wandering Star - very nice, but also really expensive (hundreds of dollars) limited editions. And some of the texts were corrected when the Del Rey paperbacks were published.

The non-Conan stories are available from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press as a series of attractive hardbacks, but again, limited edition so not all are readily available.
 
Interesting that Robert E. Howard didn't seem to have any particular belief system, neither religious/spiritual nor materialistic. And did not push or pretend to understand more than he really did, forthright admitting to be of a simple barbarian mindset. And thus, allowing his particular artistic perspective absolutely free reins to fully do what he did.

Last night I read an interesting and little known tale (at least to a novice like me) called "The Cairn on the Headland". It does not belong in any of his well known series. But it is one of his reincarnation tales, that start in the present and slip over into memories of a past life. It features some wonderful and effective weird descriptions. At its core is a struggle of the "light" and "good" of Christianity against the "dark" powers of the North; the Irish fighting the Vikings.

I find it hard to believe that Howard was actually an active follower of meek Christianity. Does anyone know if he was raised and indoctrinated that way? I always pictured him as pagan. But him stating emphatically that he did not adhere to any belief system (at least admitting as much to Lovecraft, whom he trusted and respected), the Christian standpoint in "The Cairn on the Headland", although possibly detached, was perhaps taken temporarily, simply because this story needed it to click.
 
I also read "The Horror from the Mound", a worthwhile story, which is very similar in structure and seems like a previous training piece for "The Cairn on the Headland". But a little more generic, not quite as original in vision. A vampire tale.
 
I read two tales I found very atypical in style for Howard.

"People of the Black Coast" is a lost race story, featuring highly intelligent giant crab-monsters, and has a retiring reflectiveness that reminds me of Lovecraft.

"The Haunter of the Ring" is a modern tale of reincarnation and karma, and the angst of a man having to repay for the sins of his great grandfather. It is written with a seemingly serious inner spiritual conviction and pathos, bordering on realism, that I have not met in Howard before.
 
Ancient History said:
Zaharoff said:
Most of my R E Howard books are from Donald M Grant, and they are still titles I read and enjoy.
I am aware of Wildside Press, and the series of Howard works they have released, but I have not bought any yet.
Has anyone thoughts about their books?
How well edited? Typos, fonts? Have stores been corrected?
Click to expand...

The Grant editions were chopped to pieces; many paragraphs were removed, and text altered to avoid some unpleasant 1930s racist language.
Click to expand...

I have the hardcover Wildside Press editions of William Hope Hodsgon's The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates; the most immediate copies I could find, at the time I collected Hodgson. These are decent looking, except for some odd typography with the title and author name set in bold print at the bottom of each page, which is distracting.

But does anyone know if the Wildside texts of Hodgson have been meddled with, chopped or censored? That would sadden me, because it means I have to start looking again for other editions. That is just the way I am, I prefer to read the complete texts. Because that text must be the truth, at least from this particular author's perspective. I don't like to be told arbitrarily by some smug publisher or politician what is right and wrong and acceptable. No thank you, I go to the great philosophers and scientists, and life, and find that out for myself.

From what I remember, Hodgson did not mention race in particular in his books. But there are other things contemporary publishers would find unacceptable, and will want to remove. Concerning gender, for example. In The Night Land the relationship between the man and woman is sometimes rugged, not equalized, or feminist as by today's officially set standards; I have the Night Shade Books edition of this, which appears to be literary serious in its approach, so therefore I trust the text is sound.

Looking at other authors, ... Roald Dahl ..., I understand that his children's books have recently been re-written and gender neutralized, "mother" and "father" having been removed from his family constellations. So there are various points in old and stuffy books that can be changed and made fresh by editors, improved to suit everyone, depending on the latest ideals and agendas.
 
I was dismayed to find out (a couple of years after I'd read it) that the Wordsworth collection Haunter Of The Ring was apparently censored, there is no note of this at all and I guess maybe they used the Donald M. Grant books as source texts without knowing they were not complete? I've never heard of Wordsworth doing this with other books.
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
I was dismayed to find out (a couple of years after I'd read it) that the Wordsworth collection Haunter Of The Ring was apparently censored, there is no note of this at all and I guess maybe they used the Donald M. Grant books as source texts without knowing they were not complete? I've never heard of Wordsworth doing this with other books.
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I have the Wordsworth collection The Right Hand of Doom. It was also censored. Del Rey seems to be the only available edition of Howard that is not censored; if one tolerates that almost every page has an illustration.
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
I've never heard of Wordsworth doing this with other books.
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They did this with Stokers "Lair of the White worm & The Lady of the Shroud" as well. After the introduction text there is a publishers note stating:

While some of the views displayed in this book, particularly on racial issues, are regarded as unacceptable today, it is important that the reader should bear in mind that the stories reflect the attitudes of their times. However, even after taking this factor into consideration, we have amended certain words that we feel would give particular offence.

On top of that the White Worm is abridged, so it's worthless anyhow.
 
Robert Adam Gilmour said:
I was dismayed to find out (a couple of years after I'd read it) that the Wordsworth collection Haunter Of The Ring was apparently censored, ...
Click to expand...

I read the whole Gollancz collection The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition, from cover to cover, and then found out that it was censored! I hope I will find time eventually to re-read most of the stories in a true edition.
 
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