As this blog becomes more widely known, and I see people mentioning it in their blogs, I wonder what sort of memes (if any) these “virtual” fans of Robert E. Howard will produce. What thought-bombs, flashes of insight, or maybe just bursts of curiosity will be generated by a larger online presence?

I mention this because I was on MySpace today and remembered that I had previously joined the Robert E. Howard MySpace Group and I wanted to see who else was there. You know, in case I knew someone. Aside from Win Scott Eckert, who I only know in passing through Jess Nevins and have never met in person, and my old protégée Greg Thompson, there are thirty nine fans who made the effort to seek out an REH group on Myspace, including the guy who originally thunk up the group. As far as I know, these men and women have never been to Howard Days, never bought an issue of The Dark Man, never read The Dark Barbarian.

How many more people are we missing? I keep thinking that the key is to go through Conan. It’s becoming hard to ignore the amount of REH versus Conan material that is out right now. And when the Wildside push comes through, that section on the fantasy aisle will dwarf Robert Jordan (and thankfully so). I just wonder though, if there’s not more that can be done. But in the meantime, how about this: if you have an online presense of some kind, then you’ve got room for linkage. So, link away. There’s enough stuff out now to build an impressive interconnected net of REH fans. It’s a lot like sifting for gold dust, sure, but every old fan that we connect to has the potential to tell a new fan (or near-fan) about all of the cool REH stuff that’s out there.

It’s a grass roots effort that costs literally nothing except a few keystrokes. And we always have room for more enthusiastic fans.

The June 22 number of the Review has just hit Californian shores, and contains a glowing article on Howard Days by Project Pride correspondent Arlene Stephenson. Cimmerian readers well remember Arlene’s article “The Fire That Spread Around the World” for V3n2 (February 2006), which contained a host of harrowing and uplifting stories from the Cross Plains Fire that didn’t make the front page of the CNN website, or for that matter any of the usual Howardian venues. Here she gives a flavorful small-town spin on the centennial proceedings that accurately captures the mood of the event.

“Censational” Centennial Celebration

by Arlene Stephenson, The Cross Plains Review, June 22, 2006

How does one measure the success of an event? By the number of people in attendance? By the number of volunteers involved in making it happen? By the variety of programs and activities offered? By the geographic scope of states and communities represented? By the comments of those in attendance?

By any of these standards, the recent Robert E. Howard Centennial Days were an outstanding success. Scholars and fans came to Cross Plains to experience a few hours or a few days with other folks having the same interest in one of the greatest pulp fiction writers ever to put words on paper. From the first guest to arrive from Washington D.C. to the last guest from Eastland, a steady stream of visitors filed through the local library and the Howard House Museum. In that body of visitors, one could hear conversations in Swedish and German; exchanges with British and Canadian accents and even the accents from the Carolinas and Maryland were interesting to our Texas ears.

Number wise, some interesting facts came to light. The registration book at the Museum showed that 240 people had registered from 22 states, Washington D.C. and the four countries mentioned above. The Library hosted one panel discussion that drew way beyond a “standing room only” crowd. Librarian Cherry Shults and Board Member James Warlick were extremely impressed with the patience and tolerance of the group as they just kept squeezing closer and closer together to learn what they could about working with Howard manuscripts. And the scholarly crowd was just as impressed with the collection of Howard’s works housed in the library.

Several of the authors in the group donated a variety of new materials to the library. One such donation was about 35 books from the collection of Sprague de Camp. Although most of these are in other languages, they will be invaluable for research as scholars compare Sprague’s work with the more authenticated interpretations of Howard’s writings.

At the Howard House Museum, the gift shop was overflowing with publications of dozens of writers and illustrators featuring Howard’s poetry, boxing stories, Texas humor, artwork, and of course the better-known Conan stories. Project Pride volunteers were kept busy making sales and keeping the shelves stocked. The constant flow of visitors through the Museum kept another group of volunteers welcoming guests and giving guided tours. And yet other volunteers kept the ice water and refreshments flowing at the hospitality center in the pavilion.

Cornelius Kappabani from Germany was heard many times commenting, “This has been such a wonderful weekend in a wonderful little community; thank you so much.”

The Library and Project Pride agree that the Howard Days are definitely the most interesting projects that they sponsor. Each year more and more resources are donated to the library, and thus, more and more out-of-town visitors come to utilize these resources. The reputation of Project Pride and their efforts in maintaining Howard’s home and perpetuating his influence in the world of creative writing just keeps spreading in an ever-widening circle around the world.

Both of the local groups extend a heartfelt message of appreciation to all the volunteers who helped make the weekend so successful and to the community for making all our visitors feel so welcome.

You can find them over at the REHupa Website. Please update your records.

The 1st edition of A Gent From Bear Creek, published by Herbert Jenkins in 1937, is the Holy Grail for Howard Collectors everywhere; very few copies of it are known to exist, and the ones that we do know about would fetch a pretty price, but some lucky Howard-head got one for $15. Seem too good to be true? Probably is, but you can check it out here. Thanks to Danny Street for pointing this out.

Members of Terry Allen’s REH Comics Group have long since learned to dread the semiliterate, borderline solipsistic posts that come from one individual whose nom de harangue used to be something like blunderbusspastprime. He now styles himself simperingflophouse (close enough) and remains impervious to irony or being showered with rotten vegetables and roadkill, so certain is he that his is a unique insight into all things Hyborian and Howardian.

Today he had this to say to Tim Truman, the well-known artist and soon-to-be writer of the Dark Horse Conan comic:

Anyway, i just read his foreword in Weird Works of REH vol 3 and was surprised that he the western writer is such a Howard fan. And i also share his view about teh main cause of Howard’s suicide-over a woman. Ms Price aint as honest in what she write about their relationship now that Howard is so famous. [a whole world of sic]

“His” and “he the western writer” refer to Joe R. Lansdale. I haven’t seen Lansdale’s introduction to Weird Works Volume 3, but I doubt that someone so talented would trot out such an oversimplification. Simperingflophouse, on the other hand, expresses himself in oversimplifications and oxymorons in much the same way as Oscar Wilde was wont to express himself in epigrams. In any event the assertion that Novalyne Done It is all over Howard-dom lately; Jim Keegan did his best to club the embryonic meme to death in a recent issue of Dark Horse’s Conan, and an innercircle post earlier this year condemning Ms. Price as a two-timing gold-digger was immediately shouted down. It’s taken us decades to give the Suicide Due to Terminal Mama’s Boy-ism rush to judgment the heave-ho, and we don’t need it replaced by Suicide Due to Bad Breakup.

For a while now editor/publisher John Betancourt has been quietly preparing his company Wildside Press to move from the online world of print-on-demand into a more traditional business model that will put his books in every major bookstore. As anyone who has published knows, the hurdles in building the proper distribution channels for this are immense.

Well, it looks as if — after some test runs and months of nudging forward — the time has come for the Big Push. Paul Herman, editor of the Wildside Press series of Howard books entitled The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, delivered the scoop on Dennis McHaney’s REH Inner Circle Yahoo! group (hat tip: Don Herron):

I’ve been informed by the gang at Wildside, as they are going to more nationwide distribution of the Weird Works set, they are changing the covers to better fit a “more modern” look…Its my understanding that this is just for the mass distribution paperbacks, so [there will be] changes in size, font, page count, etc.

The new books for brick and mortar stores such as Barnes & Noble will be mass market paperbacks and sport covers by Ken Kelly, while the hardbacks sold off the Wildside website will continue to appear with Fabian covers.

I like the new look. One of the major faults with Wildside Press titles to my mind has always been the design. The worst have been plagued with garish or gaudy colors — shit brown, piss yellow — combined with sans serif fonts that scream out amateur outfit.

They have made strides in correcting this over the past year or two (I especially liked the layout for Gates of Empire), but even then the fonts on the side of the book have been bright yellow or white and sans serif, Arial or some similar font. With this new mass market design, we are finally seeing a look as professional as they come, one that can compete against any other book in the store.

I will say that I see nothing wrong with the Fabian covers. The Kelly one to my mind doesn’t look substantially more polished, especially at that smaller cropped size, and if the Fabian art had been surrounded by a similarly revamped design I think it would look almost as modern.

Incidentally, there are some nice Stephen Fabian Conan prints available here.

After reading Leo’s post on REHupa 200, I got to thinking: Is REHupa on the decline? I for one would hate to see it go. I’m one of those “tweeners” stuck between the old guard of Howard fandom, but older than most of the new generation of Howard fans (but not too much older). I appreciate having a real mailing in my hands to dog-ear and collect, rather than a series of electronic files taking up space on my hard drive. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t like to read anything too long online, it’s hard to read it in bed.

Anyway, I pulled out the REHupa file to see if REHupa is on the way out, and, for once, I’ve got to disagree with Leo. My collection is complete from 173 to the present, and it gets pretty spotty before that hefty mailing, but by looking at the numbers, it appears to me that REHupa is doing just fine. As a matter of fact, I’d say that when Grin, McCollum, and Tompkins were producing their Monster Zines they were artificially increasing the normal page count so that now, when they have cut back their page count or left altogether (McCollum), the mailings have returned to their more “natural” size, 100 to 200 pages.

Even before the Triumvirate of Ziners showed up, there were individuals who would push the page count out of its natural range. Vern Clark, Dennis McHaney, and even Rusty Burke were good at throwing out a mammoth ‘zine more than once in a while. Let’s look at some of these “Old School” mailings:

#88 — 110 pages; #89 — 108 pages; #90 — 128 pages; #91 — 66 pages, #92 — 154 pages. Compare these numbers to the post-triumvirate era (note that Tompkins and Grin are still present, but with a more typical page count): #183 — 174 pages; #184 — 192 pages; #185 — 142 pages; #186 — 197 pages; #187 — 139 pages; and so on to the present, with page counts ranging from 240 down to 100. Looks pretty good to me.

During the triumvirate’s campaign against minac (minimum activity), page counts did indeed soar: #160 — 379 pages; #162 — 339 pages; #173 — 326 pages; and so on. Not only were Tompkins, Grin, and McCollum producing epic ‘zines, Dennis McHaney was sending in 40 page booklets on a regular basis. All of these factors bloated the page counts well beyond their normal range. This has happened before. Look at #96. It had a whopping 308 pages, but if we remove Vern Clark’s 52 page ‘zine, and trim Rusty Burke’s 90 pager down to his more recent levels, we end up with a normal sized mailing. The same is true for the monster mailings that Grin refers to: replace the jumbo ‘zines with normal sized ones and the mailing lands in the 100 – 200 page range. I don’t see the drop in page count as the end of REHupa, but rather as a return to normalcy.

All of the heavy hitters have turned their attentions elsewhere: Grin produces a fine journal; Tompkins writes prolifically for several REH publications; McHaney has produced several books recently; McCollum . . . has dropped off the map; and REHupa quietly continues, waiting for the appearance of the next Vern Clark or Leo Grin to again send its page count soaring.

And the quality of the mailings hasn’t changed that much, either. True, Grin, Tompkins, and McCollum produced some quality, on-topic ‘zines, but there were others in those mailings that produced what I call “fluff”: off-topic or barely on-topic detritus – I’m guilty of this sometimes myself. And it’s the same today: some quality, some crap.

The wait list also fluctuates wildly and is hard to use as any kind of yard stick. There was one person on the wait list for mailing #173, then there were three people for a while. The number was up to eight for mailings 182 and 183; by 186 it was down to zero. No worries, it’s been there before, and as of mailing 194, the wait list has been holding steady at three. If anything, the days of the mammoth ‘zine have increased the average page count for “normal” mailings. In the pre-triumvirate days the average was closer to 100 pages; now, the average is about 150.

The bottom line is this: as long as there are fans who like to hold product in their hands, and as long as there are fans interested in actually printing their fanzines, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association will continue.

The demographics are creakingly in evidence over at REH Inner Circle, where various knights of doleful countenance are bemoaning the absence of anything fast-paced or elephantiasis-free to read, pining for mass market Tros of Samothrace or Elak of Atlantis editions, and decreeing, in the case of one poster, that fantasy had better return to a supposed “original rush of adrenaline and action” PDQ.

The thing is, although midlife crises are part of the package they’re no reason to go into a fugue state or don homemade blinkers in Borders or Barnes & Noble. Twenty-six David Gemmell sword-and-sorcery outings can now be impulse-bought or if need be ordered online in the U.S., all of them starring lethal blademasters or axe-wielders who would carve Elak or Tros like Easter hams. Gemmell’s novels zoom (an alternate ‘szum” spelling is strictly verboten) by faster than the novellas of almost anyone save Howard himself, and although characters like Druss the Legend, Waylander the Slayer, Connavar the Demon Blade, Skilgannon the Damned, and the Jerusalem Man continue (despite the sincerest efforts of their many enemies) from book to book, potential readers can pick up any single novel without needing to worry about whether they’re getting in on the ground floor. Charles Gramlich is the latest in a long line of REHupans to undergo a Gemmellian conversion experience, and when I see the Englishman go unmentioned in they-don’t-write-’em-like-they-used-to keening sessions, or get frozen out at a site that is otherwise a resource-a-rama like Howard Jones’ Swordandsorcery.org, it’s hard not to shake my head and think, none are so blind as they who will not read. Not every work of heroic fantasy trafficking in thrills, chills, and kills has to have originated in a prewar pulp or a 70s paperback with a Frazetta or Jeff Jones cover. Gemmell is more than just a phenomenon—he’s our favorite subgenre’s second wind.

I just got back from playing around with LibraryThing, easily one of the coolest web-based life applications I’ve seen in a long while. It’s a free service (well, for the first couple hundred books, anyway) that lets you build your library in a shared space. Go on, give it a try. It’s ridiculously easy to use. You can, of course, type in “Robert E. Howard” into the search field and see how many REH books come up, incorrectly labeled from Amazon.com, by the way. But don’t worry. Once you add a book to your library, you can correct all of those errors. Best of all, once you’ve got some books in your digital library, you can compare and search for other folks on LibraryThing who share your reading interests.

I really had no trouble navigating the system, and I think I’m going to use it for future blog projects, if not for at least keeping up with my REH stuff. I’ll have to add “Etchings in Ivory” in manually, though. You won’t find that online anywhere. For book-nerds and collectors, this is a must-try thing.

In a centennial year filled with milestones and anniversaries of all kinds, yet another is upon us. In 1972 teenager Tim Marion started REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association. This August the a.p.a. will release its two hundredth mailing. That’s a lot of talk about Robert E. Howard archived between covers.

Official Editor Bill “Indy” Cavalier has been cracking his bullwhip and urging all members to make stellar contributions to the August mailing. From the rumblings I’ve heard, it’s looking to be a whopper. I’ll be interested to see if every member will come through with a ‘zine of some kind, a feat that’s been hard to accomplish for past anniversaries.

REHupa has been in a strange period of flux for the last few years. Any three-decade history contains ups and downs, but when I joined in December of 1999 the Internet had boosted the a.p.a.’s ranks to a full roster of thirty members. In addition, advances in publishing software and printers allowed members to create bigger ‘zines than ever before. During the first few years of the new millennium, the a.p.a. regularly hit 300+ pages per mailing, a staggering figure, led by the Big Three ‘ziners of the era — Rick McCollum (who had been in the a.p.a. more or less since the ’70s, and who often hand-wrote and illustrated ‘zines topping one hundred pages) with his Oh! Acheron, Steve Tompkins with Expecting the Barbarians, and myself with Steel Springs & Whalebone!. Between the three of us, we would often make up half the mailing or more. With many other members frequently hitting the twenty-page mark during that time, the a.p.a. was as exciting as it has ever been, filled to the gills with Howard sercon (a.p.a.-talk for “serious content,” i.e., on-topic REH discussion).

But every golden era must eventually come to an end, something Howard well knew. Rick bowed out of the a.p.a., bedeviled by a series of “real life” problems. Both Steve and I saw our page counts plummet as our energies gradually drifted into other Howardian endeavors. In some ways, this metamorphosis was a good thing — The Cimmerian wouldn’t exist sans my decision to stop producing mega-’zines, nor would this blog — but in another sense it was a drag to see REHupa flying ever lower over the treetops. In the last year or two, our thirty-member roster has sometimes struggled to squeak out a hundred pages between us.

All things considered, the decline of REHupa hasn’t meant a decline of interest in Howard, but rather a healthy redeployment of energies for the new information age we find ourselves in. There was a time not so long ago when REHupa was an essential way station for Howard fans, the only place where an obsessed aficionado could keep up with new revelations, essays, and products. Old mailings were often a bazaar of the bizarre, chock full of want lists, advertisements for small press items, and announcements of new books. Members came to the a.p.a. via little blurbs in The Last Celt, the Lancer/Ace reprints, The Dark Barbarian, and the Marvel comics. To many it was like finding an oasis in the desert — one far more hospitable than Hyboria’s Xuthal. Back in the day, REHupa wasn’t just appreciated but needed. It kept a core interest in Howard’s career intact through times when no one else gave a damn.

Nowadays, REHupa increasingly feels more like a bi-monthly family reunion, or perhaps a private club with wood-paneled walls and aromatic cigars and comfortable chairs. A place to relax and talk Howard, enjoying the company of friends, but in the end a luxury, not a necessity. The necessary part of REHupa has gone public via an assortment of books, magazines, art projects, and websites. Communication between fans now happens instantaneously via e-mail, and need not wait for a bi-monthly mailing or hastily scrawled letters. There’s an Information Superhighway out there now, and more of us are using it exclusively — to the detriment of the mom and pop a.p.a. located downtown.

This transition from paper to pixels wasn’t easy, it’s taken place over a period of at least five years, leaving many bodies and battles lying in its wake. The REH-e-APA website was an early attempt to create an online Howard a.p.a., spearheaded by REHupan and former Dark Man editor Frank Coffman. For several years, REHupans had been debating among ourselves whether to morph the a.p.a. into an online format, but always the majority (myself included) ended up coming down on the side of conservative preservation of the a.p.a.’s status quo. Why argue with thirty years of success? Why potentially destroy a good thing?

I was never a fan of REH-e-APA, because I saw it not as improving Howard studies but cannibalizing it. It created a Darwinian competition for a limited number of people and essays without growing the field at all. When you have an a.p.a. and a journal gobbling up content and starved for more, the last thing you want is yet another venue fighting over the exact same turf. A fair number of people joined REH-e-APA, eager to take advantage of the web, and for awhile it didn’t lack for contributions. But the cost was dear. REHupa began its page count slide as it lost material to REH-e-APA, and The Dark Man entered its Dark Age of years between issues, with the excuse being that no one was submitting content — the very kind of content that was being siphoned away by REH-e-APA. That Frank was the head of both REH-e-APA and The Dark Man, in effect using one of his endeavors to kill the other, was strange in the extreme — taking two semi-thriving concerns and turning them into three anemic ones is not my idea of progress.

Meanwhile, an example of a web idea that filled a need and maximized use of existing technology, that grew the field instead of cannibalizing it, was HowardWorks. It presented very useful data in a full-color, searchable format that no conventionally published document could match. Rather than suck the life out of other concerns, it made it easier for the writers at those places to complete their essays. It supplemented and aided the creation of other venues rather than sapping them of strength. And in doing all of this, it won the Cimmerian Award for Best Website two years running.

At first glance, it might seem that The Cimmerian is a cannibalizing endeavor akin to REH-e-APA, one that has sapped strength from other publications using the mercenary tactic of dangling money in front of writers. But such a viewpoint misses a large part of the realignment of the field that has resulted from The Cimmerian‘s debut in 2004. Increasingly, TC is powered not by old hands but by new guys who nobody had heard of a few years ago, producing essays and articles that never would have been attempted without TC sitting out there as an appealing paying market. These people don’t stay locked into TC, they drift off into other arenas and fill their pages, too. Unlike REH-e-APA, Howard Studies has palpably grown as a result of TC. All of the other stalwarts are still out there: REHupa, The Dark Man, REH:Two-Gun Raconteur, The Howard Review, etc. Each is chugging along at about the same pace they were before TC started printing large amounts of material.

So, if they are collectively printing about the same amount, and TC is now printing hundreds of additional pages, then where is all of this extra material coming from? From the theory, proven many times throughout history, that a rising tide lifts all boats. Just as on a much larger scale a company like Microsoft spawns thousands of smaller companies eager to provide products for Windows, so the steady, paying presence of a mag like TC serves to grow our field. You don’t think that Cimmerian Award winners are spurred to greater heights of effort for having won an award? Or that essayists have produced essays solely because of the knowledge that they’ll get paid for it? Or that other magazines have redoubled their production in an effort to keep up with the Joneses? Or that readers being hit with a new TC every other month are more likely to remain in the Howardian loop, buying other products when they appear and making decisions to attend events like Howard Days? If you don’t think the presence of a self-perpetuating growth engine in the field is a big deal, you’re not a good student of human nature or of history. Momentum is contagious, and success breeds success.

But that leaves the matter of REHupa, which has seen its pagecount drop over the past few years. Where does this Internet and publishing realignment leave that organization?

I read an article a few months back with parallels to this situation. It concerned the very last telegram sent by Western Union. At long last, after decades of winding down, telegrams finally were being phased out of existence — a bittersweet occasion, yet one that also betokened amazing achievement. After all, the lack of telegrams doesn’t mean that communication has lessened, but that it’s far more advanced and successful than before. The key phrase is at the end of the article:

Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse Code, sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore on May 26, 1844, to his partner Alfred Vail to usher in the telegram era that displaced the Pony Express. It read “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”

“If he only knew,” Chayet said of the myriad of choices today, which includes text message on cell phones, the Internet and virtually free long-distance calling rates.

“It definitely was an anachronism,” Noel said. “It’s amazing it survived this long.”

It’s amazing it survived this long.

My guess is that REHupa will quietly hum along for awhile longer, growing more irrelevant in practical terms with each passing year, without quite losing its charm. Eventually, the last of the old-timers will die off or give up on it. When that happens, my generation will give it a quiet burial and move on, having long ago built the next giant step forward, an online/self-publishing arena. It’s an environment destined to accomplish all the goals REHupa was built for and more, a world full of blogs and databases and e-texts, all hyperlinked and podcasted and printed-on-demand. It’s a world that the a.p.a.’s inaugural members in 1972, slaving and cursing over their ditto/mimeo/hectograph machines could only have dreamed up as science fiction. REHupa will be gone. The vast majority of its decades of research, scholarship, camaraderie, and accomplishment will be looted for gems, leaving a mountain of detritus as a footnote to an era, and to a vanished generation of fans.

But the spirit of REHupa, and the shockwaves generated from its existence, will be alive and well. Projects unnumbered will continue to benefit from its pioneering efforts. And — who knows? — maybe some enterprising soul will take on the monumental task of archiving its tens of thousands of pages, allowing them to be pored over by men unborn in 1972 (or 2006 for that matter), men who will wonder what people like Bill Cavalier, Rusty Burke, Glenn Lord, and Don Herron were really like. (I, of course, will be old yet hale, hearty, and worshiped by legions of cultist fans. Kind of like Jubal Harshaw in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but with better chicks.)

To those of us who appreciate history, that silly acronym (Cimmerian readers know we pronounce it “Ray-HOOP-ah”) will forever hold a special place in our hearts, reminding us of a time when we were young and fought the good fight for Howard the hard way. One mailing at a time.

Two hundred mailings. Wow.