Robert E. Howard and Materialism

[marioneta]

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.

[Zaharoff]

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?

[Ancient History]

Quote Originally Posted by Zaharoff

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?

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.

[cannibal cop]

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.

[Revenant]

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.

[cannibal cop]

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.)

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

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.

[cannibal cop]

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.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

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.

[cannibal cop]

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?