Roughhousing with Slasher in “Beyond the Black River” the other day, I came across this on page 51 of The Conquering Sword of Conan (the Cimmerian is balking at the prospect of the forest demon absconding with Tiberias’ head): “I never liked the fat bastard, but we can’t have Pictish devils making so cursed free with white men’s heads.”

Once the gigantic mirth subsided I started checking the story’s previous appearances. Conan the Warrior has “I never liked the fat fool.” Hans Stefan Santesson’s 1970 anthology The Mighty Swordsmen has “I never liked the fat fool.” Red Nails, the 1977 Berkley volume edited by Karl Edward Wagner, has “I never liked the fat fool.” So does Robert Adams’ 1985 anthology Barbarians. So obviously “fat fool” is from the Weird Tales text, whereas “fat bastard” must have been reinstated by Patrice Louinet from Howard’s final draft. It would be interesting to know what Farnsworth Wright’s SOP was for minor or single-word emendations like this. He couldn’t fax or e-mail Howard, and even telephoning might have busted the WT budget, so presumably he went full speed ahead and changed the wording himself.

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It’s official: the book has left the publisher’s hands and is at the printer even as you are reading this. I’m told that the books will ship the week prior to World Fantasy, so I should get my copies before I leave for the convention.

It’s been a long, difficult project, but thankfully, one that I had a ton of help with. My fellow bloggers Rob, Tompk, and Leo were instrumental in many ways, as were a number of the luminaries in the field of Howard studies. Everyone was very helpful.

Unfortunately, what no one could help with was the actual writing of the book. As in, “blank screen, chapter one, page one…type something!” That, I’m sorry to say, was all me. I decided on the slant of the book; what I wanted to concentrate on, and what I wanted to not concentrate on. I decided how to break up the material into usable chunks. I decided how many of my thesis statements could fit into the book and how best to prove them. In the end, this was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write.

It’s strange, too, because I spent over a year just mired in the details of Robert’s life and work, and the longer and harder I worked at it, the more “through the looking glass” it all felt to me. When I started working on the first draft of the manuscript, in the summer of 2005, I spent a few days at my folks’ house in Sweetwater, Texas, while my wife made a roadtrip with her niece and another high school girl. My parents were great; they let me take over their small home office and happily chatted with me (make that, let me chatter at them) about what I was working on. At one point, though, I was furiously typing a chapter, and I heard my mother come into the room. Without saying a word, she set a sandwich and a glass of water down on the desk beside me and quietly left. I got to the end of the paragraph that I was writing and marveled at the irony of writing about a guy whose mother did that for him when he was working. Then it promptly creeped me out.

Oh, don’t think for a second that I felt “haunted” by Robert’s presence or any of that nonsense. There were many coincidences in the writing of the book, and also a lot of happy accidents. I found many things that I otherwise wouldn’t have come across had I not been writing a biography. In a way, a lot of the credit for how this book was shaped goes to L. Sprague de Camp. Had he not written Dark Valley Destiny, and had I not had such an adverse reaction to it, I might not have had the impetus to enter Howard studies at all.

That’s not to say that every single sentence in DVD is a lie, or bad, or anything like that. Hey, you play around with this stuff for forty years like de Camp did and you’re bound to get a couple of things right. The real problem comes when the stuff that you get right is pretty minor, and the stuff you get wrong is so blunderingly huge, that it makes it hard to throw even passing credit onto the good ideas.

So, this book is, in many ways, a mirror of, and a reaction to, Dark Valley Destiny. I knew that as the first book-length bio to come along after it, I would need to challenge some of its more egregious errors. Many of them I take head-on. Several of them I combat by simply not mentioning them.

I did this in an effort to sort of level the playing field for Howard Studies. With luck, Blood & Thunder will become the one people look at when they need to know something about Howard’s life. It does not, for the record, begin with Robert’s suicide. Now, finally, there’s another book NOT written by de Camp that people can go to for biographical information. With luck, we’ll see many more after that. Howard’s work, his life, his literary influence are certainly large enough to hold up a variety of viewpoints, as we have said many times in the past. Multiple biographies are no different.

If you think you’re excited to read it, you have no idea how it feels to finally have it from around my neck.

If you recall, back in July I introduced Cimmerian readers to Wikipedia, the enormously popular free encyclopedia online, and encouraged fans to improve Howard’s rather weak entry. Well, exactly zero people took me up on the offer, so eventually I decided to improve it myself. The results are now up at Wikipedia for all to see.

I have included citations for the introductory paragraphs, and will try to add more as time permits. Howard’s biography has grown from a single small blurb that basically stated “He wrote a few stories and then killed himself” to a lengthy biography that attempts to touch on all of the major elements of his career. A Legacy section has been added, along with a Critical Appreciation section.

Most important to me, however, are the opening paragraphs which hit the reader as soon as they click on the page. The full scope of his achievement is presented in a few short paragraphs: “famous writer…creator of a literary icon…inventor of Sword-and-Sorcery…ranked with other great classic American authors.” This is the kind of thing that incoming interested parties should be reading, with citations for everything.

Of course, Wikipedia is a collaborative medium, and everyone who wants to can edit or change anything they want. My original entry has already undergone numerous emendations. A Lovecraft fan named Nareek changed “Conan the Cimmerian” to the less accurate “Conan the Barbarian”, giving the rationale that the character has been known by that appellation since 1954 (and even though Howard has been dead since 1936, and even though Wandering Star’s textual restorations make sure to use “Cimmerian”). A de Camp crone has also dove in and changed all of my fairly neutral yet accurate descriptions to pro-de Camp propaganda, using de Camp’s own technique of subtly altering the wordage to benefit Sprague, the same way Wagner’s Berkley introductions were cleansed. Nareek, who although primarily a Lovecraft fan seems to have taken it upon himself to monitor Howard’s page, deleted some of the de Camp-skewed changes, so the fight is on.

Someone else (I’m guessing Mark Finn) added information about the World Fantasy Convention and Mark’s forthcoming biography. It won’t be long now before all of my carefully worded prose will be edited and mangled beyond recognition, some of it an improvement, much of it inaccurate. But that’s the Wikipedia way, and it’s fine by me. If I want my words to remain untouched, I’ll write a book or a personal website. But the important thing is now the REH Wikipedia page has a substantial amount of information on it for people to play with and savor. There’s also a crystal-clear version of the famous REH picture gracing the page, which you can click on for higher-resolution versions.

With luck, people visiting this page to learn about Howard will now leave there being much more informed. So go over, read through the whole works, and if you see something that you think you could improve, click on “edit” and have at it. Maybe read the Wikipedia guidelines first so you aren’t doing more harm than good (i.e. things like including details that are outside of the scope of an encyclopedia, or putting too much of a personal slant on your writing, or listing things that cannot be verified or cited by existing texts.) And if you’re feeling adventurous, create some of the other pages Howard needs there, like a page for your favorite story, or for Howard’s parents, or for his lesser-known friends, or for different editions of books.

I’ve also been seeding Howard into other areas of Wikipedia where I think he deserves to be mentioned. For example, he is now on the list of American autodidacts. He is also listed on the Jack London page as a guy who was influenced by London. The possibilities are almost limitless. I noticed that REH is not listed on the H. P. Lovecraft page in the “influences” section — I don’t want to know what kind of outrage such a move would unleash in Lovecraft-land. In any case, the REH page is now a going concern, nudging him that much higher in the grand scheme of things. Enjoy.

MARK ADDS: Outstanding work, Leo. No, it wasn’t me that added the WFC info, but you will notice my fingerprints on the Sailor Steve Costigan entry.

In February of 1931, Robert E. Howard wrote to Tevis Clyde Smith: “Street & Smith wrote me, wanting to take over the Steve Costigan series for their magazine Sport Stories, which they say is a bi-monthly. I told them I expected that Fight Stories would want to keep Steve, but offered them another prize-ring series instead. I hope they’ll accept.” Thus was born Howard’s other humorous boxing character, Kid Allison.

Street & Smith snatched up three Kid Allison yarns in 1931 and published them in Sport Story Magazine: “College Socks” in the September 25th issue, “Man with the Mystery Mitts” in the October 25th issue, and “The Good Knight” (aka “Kid Galahad”) in the December 25th issue. Besides these three, we know of at least seven others that were not published by Street & Smith. Howard discussed one of these, “Fighting Nerves,” in a ca. April 1932 letter to Tevis Clyde Smith:

Hear ye the tale of “Fighting Nerves”. I wrote this story — a Kid Allison yarn — as a complete novelet for Sport Story. I wrote it, I think, three times, before I sent it off. Back it came with the request to cut out the saloon atmosphere and reduce the length. I re-wrote it and returned it to the same magazine. It came back with the statement that they were all stocked up with fight stories — requested me to keep it several months and return it, with a letter reminding them of it. Not wanting to wait that long if I could help it — a natural desire of a penniless adventurer like myself — I rewrote most of it, changing the names of the characters, and sent it to Fight Stories. Back it came with the request to cut it down in length. I rewrote it and sent it back. Back it came, with the remark that it was acceptable, but that they couldn’t find a place for it just then. I should keep it a month or so, and then they’d like to see it some more. So I sent it to Sport Stories, with a letter reminding them of what they had said. It was returned with no explanation — merely a rejection slip. So I sent it to Fiction House — and back it came with the statement that Fight Stories had been — or was going to be — taken off the stands.

“Fighting Nerves” remains unpublished to this day. It is not alone. “The Drawing Card,” “Fistic Psychology,” “The Jinx,” “The Texas Wildcat,” “A Tough Nut to Crack,” and the untitled story that begins, “Huh? I was so dumbfounded . . .” are all unpublished. As bad as this is, it’s not the only bad news regarding Kid Allison. Of the three Street & Smith published tales mentioned above, only one, “The Good Knight,” has seen mainstream reprinting: once in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard and again in Boxing Stories as “Kid Galahad.” The other two, “Man with the Mystery Mitts” and “College Socks,” have only been reprinted in the pages of Fantasy Crossroads, #s 4/5 and 7, respectively. It’s probably easier to find copies of Sport Story Magazine than these two fanzines from the ’70s. These are the last of the stories published during Howard’s lifetime that have never been reprinted in book-form.

Paul Herman (editor of many Howard books for Wildside Press) has announced that his massive new bibliography on Robert E. Howard will be available shortly. It’s called The Neverending Hunt, and it’s jam-packed with lots of never-before-published information. Paul is the two-time Cimmerian Award winner for Best REH Website, by virtue of HowardWorks — but this book will have much in it that even that colossal site lacks.

For instance, have you ever heard of “Over the Rockies in a Ford?” Of course you haven’t. That’s because it’s a complete, unpublished Howard story that has never seen print anywhere before. If you are a collector of first editions of Howard’s work, you’ll need to order this book.

Have you ever wanted to know exactly how many poems of Howard’s have been found over the years? How about his letters? — just exactly how much exists out there, unpublished and unknown, for you to pine for? Well, wonder no longer — Paul has included not only a Prose Index, but also a Verse Index and a Letters Index, and I guarantee you’ll be astounded at how much Howard stuff remains unpublished and uncollected. We are talking hundreds and hundreds of items for you to add to your collecting lists.

And then there are all the publications that have appeared since Glenn Lord’s standard bio-bibliography appeared as The Last Celt in 1976 (and TLC‘s biblio was only updated up to 1973). Books in English, periodicals, anthologies, chapbooks and products in other unusual formats, plus samplings of books in non-English languages and comics. And just for fun, there are several “best of” lists included to give you an idea of what stories, etc. have garnered the best reputation over the years — perhaps there will be some there you haven’t read and will want to seek out. All of it has been assembled by Paul and pored over by the best Howard scholars and collectors in the business. The result is a 630 page labor of love that no Howard fan can afford to be without.

Collectors take note and beware: whereas a Wildside edition will be coming out early next year, it still isn’t decided yet in what format it will appear, hardcover or trade paper. But regardless of that, Paul is releasing a first edition of the book in a few weeks under his Hermanthis imprint. This edition will be limited to 100 signed and numbered copies (many of which are already spoken for), and it will be a superior grade hardcover. High quality binding, good paper — Paul took the time to look for a printer he really liked. So again, if first edition appearances of Howard stories is your game, you need to act on this now and pre-order.

So how do you do that? Pop Paul an e-mail and give him your info. He’s charging $50 per copy, and as I said, this is a high-grade hardcover, 630+ pages, everything in a small 10pt. font and no illustrations or other padding. Just an enormous volume of the factual information Howard collectors and scholars need to keep on top of the tsunami of REH publishing that has gone on for the last three decades, and that continues through this centennial year. The book is updated through July 2006, so you’re getting the absolute latest information.

Paul says he’s all finished with the proofs, and that the first printing of the book should be available in early October. Attendees of the World Fantasy Convention can expect to see copies there only if he doesn’t sell out in the interim, so if you want one of these superior hardcovers, best pre-order now before it’s too late.

This book is a significant event for the centennial. It’s the result, literally, of twenty-five years of research on Paul’s part, and he’s consulted with people as varied as Patrice Louinet, David Gentzel, Dennis McHaney, and others too numerous to mention. And of course Glenn Lord, the Dean of Howard fandom. All of these guys are noted collectors and scholars in their own right, and with The Neverending Hunt you get the sum total of their bibliographic knowledge at your fingertips. That’s huge, and it’s another way in which this centennial year has exceeded all expectations.

ROB ADDS: This is one of the things that I’ve been waiting for: a complete listing of letters and poems. Plus all the things that have come out since 1973. And I finally get to make a mark on the “Unpublished” list. “Over the Rockies in a Ford” is one of the Bill Smalley stories that Howard wrote early on. The very first story he ever submitted, to Adventure, was “Bill Smalley and the Power of the Human Eye,” which was rejected and is only available in an old issue of The Dark Man.

Up until very recently, collecting the complete Sailor Steve Costigan canon was very hard to do. As late as the year 2000, many of the sailor’s finest adventures were still trapped in the pages of hard to find and costly pulp magazines like Action Stories, Fight Stories, and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine. Even during “The Howard Boom” of the seventies, Costigan fans had to settle for the stray reprints found in fan publications like The Howard Review, Cross Plains, and The Chronicler of Cross Plains. “The Pit of the Serpent,” which appeared in The Book of Robert E. Howard, is practically the only mainstream appearance of a Costigan yarn during those days when it seemed that everything by Howard was being slapped between covers for the Howard-hungry consumer.

Then, in March of 1990, Necronomicon Press began issuing Robert E. Howard’s Fight Magazine. The original plan was to publish ALL of Howard’s boxing material, starting with the Costigan series. But, as is the case with so many Howard publishers, the plan fell through and the series remains incomplete. Fight Magazine #4, from October 1996, was the end of the line. A few attempts have been made to kick start Fight Mag and complete the series, but thus far it hasn’t happened. By the end of the ’90s, it seemed that Costigan was down for the long count.

Then, in November of 2001, Paul Herman applied the smelling salts. Under the Hermanthis label, he published The Complete Action Stories (TCAS). 18 of the 23 stories in TCAS are Breck Elkins tales, but the remaining five are Costigans — hard to find Costigans. Herman spells it out in his introduction: “None of the Action Stories boxing tales have ever seen mainstream reprinting. ‘Blow the Chinks Down!’ and ‘Dark Shanghai’ are being presented here in English for the first time since their original pulp appearance. The remaining three boxing stories have generally only been available in small run chapbook or fanzine publications, and are being presented in paperback here for the first time.” Unfortunately, TCAS itself was a “small run” publication. But it got Costigan off the ropes.

Perhaps based on the quality of the two Hermanthis publications (TCAS and The Complete Yellow Jacket), Herman landed a deal with Wildside Press. The first of Wildside’s REH line was Waterfront Fists and Others: The Collected Fight Stories of Robert E. Howard, published May 2003. This magnificent volume collects all 15 of the Costigan adventures that appeared in Fight Stories and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine, as well as a few other tales of the squared circle. And, a few months later, November 2003, Wildside reissued The Complete Action Stories in hardcovers. With these two volumes in hand, the Costigan Collector has nearly everything. But it’s never that simple in Howard-land.

At the same time that Howard was placing the Costigan yarns in Fight Stories, Farnsworth Wright, of Weird Tales fame, had started up a companion magazine: Oriental Stories, later changed to Magic Carpet Magazine. Here was an opportunity to place more Costigan tales; after all, they were set in “Oriental” ports of call. Using the pseudonym “Patrick Ervin,” and changing the main character from Steve Costigan to Dennis Dorgan, Howard managed to sell one of the Costigan/Dorgan tales, “Alleys of Darkness,” to Wright, with “Sailor Dorgan and the Jade Monkey” announced for the following issue. But the magazine died before that story appeared, and remained unpublished until 1971′s The Howard Collector #14.

Howard converted a pile of Costigan stories into Dorgans: 10 that we know of. True Costigan Crazies can’t call it quits without obtaining The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan, which collects them all. Published by FAX, Zebra, and Ace Books, all with editorial interference, this volume is easily found at most online used booksellers. True fanatics will also want to pick up the University of Nebraska Press’s Boxing Stories. Published under the Bison Books imprint, Chris Gruber, the editor, changed two of the stories back into Costigans: “In High Socity” and “Playing Journalist” were restored to their rightful titles, “Cultured Cauliflowers” and “A New Game for Costigan.” Some of Howard’s best boxing fiction, including several more Costigan yarns, are also presented in this volume.

And we’re still not done. All of the above are easily obtainable from the usual sources. It just wouldn’t be REH if it was that easy. Of the 29 known Sailor Steve stories and fragments, the above books will get you 22. Five of the seven remaining aren’t all that difficult to acquire, and at least they’re all found in the same place: Robert E. Howard’s Fight Magazine #4 from Necronomicon Press. This shows up on eBay fairly regularly and usually sells for less than $30. Fight #4 contains the only appearances of “By the Law of the Shark,” “Flying Knuckles,” and “The Honor of the Ship.” It also contains two Sailor Steve fragments that originally appeared in Dennis McHaney’s The Howard Review #2, under the title “Three Perils of Sailor Costigan.” The remaining two tales, “The Battling Sailor” and “Blue River Blues” were slated for their first ever appearance in Fight Mag #5, which of course was never published. That rounds off the Sailor Steve collection.

Oh yeah, true completists will need the third “Peril” from The Howard Review #2. It isn’t a Sailor Steve fragment — it’s an “Iron” Mike Costigan fragment, Steve’s brother. And, yes, it’s only been published once, in THR #2. That particular issue of THR was published using newspaper — it’s the same size as the TV guides included in many Sunday papers, about 12×10 — and doesn’t age well. Good luck finding one of those.

MARK ADDS: Of course, this doesn’t take into account all of the Kid Allison stories he wrote–ten of them, most of which have never seen print outside of fanzines, and the handful of non-series boxing stories that he wrote like “Weepin’ Willow” and “Crowd-Horror.” Necronomicon Press’ Fight Stories series was supposed to run eight issues and publish ALL of that. It’s a shame they never got around to it, although I’m glad that they at least got to issue #4. The sheer volume of boxing fiction that Robert wrote is enough to make even the most jaded sword and sorcery fan sit up and take notice. When it’s eventually collected, Del Rey/Wandering Star style, it’ll need to be at least two (and more likely three) volumes.

ROB RESPONDS: Of course this doesn’t take those items into account, it’s about Costigan. But I will get to Kid Allison and the rest of boxing stories soon. By the way, of the ten Kid Allison stories, only three have ever been published, fanzine or otherwise, unless you know something I don’t.

MARK REPLIES: Not a dig, just an observation about the boxing stuff in general being hard to find. If I had known about your intention to run through all of the boxing, I would have kept my big mouth shut, as you are more than capable to handle bibliographic info like this and remind me that my collection isn’t NEARLY as impressive as it could be. And no, the three stories and their reprintings are all I have ever known about. Those far-fetched imaginary boxing collections can’t come soon enough for my tastes.

It’s a strange, strained, overly scripted day in lower Manhattan — how could it not be? Complaining that this culture we’re stuck with is given to hype and hucksterism is about as useful as complaining that the ocean is wet, so instead I’ll mention that the sky is a high-alert hornet’s nest of gunships and newschoppers, but otherwise the precise shade of azure that we’ve come to think of as “September 11 blue.” In the past 5 years the financial district has morphed into a dual-usage, newly residential neighborhood, swarming with young couples towing or being towed by their toddlers and pets — and that’s certainly one in the ‘nads for Thanatos and his cave-dwelling, video-releasing lieutenants.

My co-workers and I have long since finished swapping memories of that morning, so this blog will come in handy. Can’t forget the suddenly de-officed paperwork, more than any previous human civilization could have produced, snowstorming down on us after being converted to confetti by some apocalyptic document shredder. And as long-suffering REHupans can attest, I tend to think in literary allusions and resonances, so that when I try to recall the wordless but oh-so-vocal reaction of the thousands of evacuees and rubber-neckers on Greenwich Street as the second tower despaired of further verticality, it’s the famous first sentence of Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow that flashes through my mind: “A screaming comes across the sky.” I associate the tongue-coating taste of the destruction that drove us northward, block after block after block, with Gollum’s rejection of the proffered lembas bread in The Two Towers: “Dust and ashes, we can’t eat that.” Robert E. Howard comes into it, too, what with his prescience about cult-like conspiracies based in Afghan hill-forts, dreaming of globalized murder, or my thoughts of a high school friend who died that morning and the fact that he’s still unavenged. Like so many here, I’d do the avenging myself if granted the chance; some situations just cry out for the Old Testament rather than the New (It occurs to me that part of the genius of “The Dark Man” is that de facto representatives of both — Turlogh and the priest — are allowed to make forceful cases, and neither discredits the other).

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Indiana Bill Cavalier, REHupa’s benevolent dictator and longtime Official Editor, makes it a point to go to the annual Gen Con gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. He’s a hardcore role-player, you see, and Gen Con is the largest gaming convention in the world. This year, however, Indy got a shock when he discovered that Paradox Entertainment has been hard at work planning to host a Robert E. Howard Day next year at the Con, complete with panels, Guests of Honor, and lots of dealers.

Cimmerian readers already have the lowdown from Indy in V3n8 (August, 2006) — if you haven’t snapped up that ish to learn all the details, then as usual you’re missing out on much Howard information. In the meantime, here are high-res copies of both the left and right pages from the Gen Con flyer above announcing the event:

We’ll be posting more information on this blog as it’s learned. Gen Con 2007 is scheduled for August 16-19, so mark your calenders and start saving your lunch money.

Halloween is looking to be extra-special this year. On that Tuesday, Del Rey is slated to release the latest book from the Wandering Star gang, Kull: Exile of Atlantis. Interested readers can visit Dale Rippke’s website Heroes of Dark Fantasy for a listing of the volume’s contents, or cruise on over to Amazon.com to reserve your copy now for only $10.85.

In addition to what should be a serpent-riddled Introduction by this blog’s own Steve Tompkins, the book contains an essay by Patrice Louinet titled “Atlantean Genesis” that is sure to expand on the many textual discoveries already revealed in The Dark Man #6′s “A Short History of the Kull Series.” There are also numerous unpublished fragments, a variant of one of Howard’s best poems — the Kull-themed “The King and the Oak” — and of course a cataclysmic tsunami of illustrations by the talented Justin Sweet. Justin’s work evokes Frazetta more than any of the other Wandering Star artists, and those wishing to see a preview of his work should click over to his website, or visit this page for an in-depth demonstration of how he paints everything on the computer (warning, there are lots of big images that take awhile to download).

Incidentally, for anyone who wants great hi-quality scans of all the Del Rey Howard covers, you can visit their public archive.

What I have been waiting patiently for are the hardcover editions to each of the Del Rey books. It’s been about a year since The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian appeared in hardcover, and since then nada. Back in May of 2005, a Howard fan posted information about a talk he had with Del Rey editor Steve Saffel, wherein Steve states that The Bloody Crown of Conan (a.k.a. Conan II) and The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane each sold only two-thirds the amount that The Coming of Conan did. This might have caused Del Rey to rethink their plans about releasing hardcovers of these titles. I hope not: The Coming of Conan was a great book at a great value, and it would be unfortunate if yet another hardcover set was derailed before it was finished.

The following blurb is slated to appear in the forthcoming volume Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, the book that will be given away to attendees at the 2006 World Fantasy Convention:

World Fantasy is proud to celebrate the life and literature of Robert E. Howard during our 2006 Convention. Robert E. Howard is the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, and this anthology is a tribute to the heroic fantasy tradition he helped create. If you would like to help preserve Howard’s legacy and honor Howard’s contributions to fantasy literature, please support Project Pride, the non-profit institution that maintains Robert E. Howard’s family home and heritage in Cross Plains, TX. Project Pride can be found on the Web at: http://www.crossplains.com/howard/museum.htm, or mailed at Project Pride, PO Box 534, Cross Plains, TX 76443.

As always, Project Pride accepts donations of any size, and uses them to provide upkeep to the Howard Museum. New paint, roof, paving, and fire repair have all been required in the past, and every donation helps. If you can, toss a few pazoors their way this centennial year, and help keep Howard’s legacy alive.