Paul Herman just announced over on the Inner Circle that the Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard “should be available by early February.” This will be a three-volume set, with each book between 400 to 500 pages, with an introduction and light annotations by Rusty Burke, and edited by yours truly. REH didn’t write these things for publication, and he wasn’t working on a word processor with spell check. Besides dealing with the formatting difficulties, I’ve also added italics, apostrophes, and corrected typos and misspellings. A complete “Notes on the Text” will be available for free download or cheap paperback/hardback on lulu.com as soon as the page numbers are locked in. This information will also be available in the index I’m preparing which should be ready to go fairly soon — if all goes as planned.

As for the contents, the heavy hitters are, of course, Tevis Clyde Smith, with 113 dated letters, 14 undated, and 9 “documents” that were included with his letters, and H. P. Lovecraft with 55 items — 52 letters, 2 postcards, and one prose poem — many of them more than 10 pages long. All of the correspondence includes the poems, plays, parodies, drawings, etc. that REH frequently embedded in the body of his letters and which were removed when some of these letters appeared in Necronomicon’s two volumes of Selected Letters.

The letters are arranged chronologically and, in addition to the above named, include the following recipients:
August Derleth — 30
Harold Preece — 19
Novalyne Price — 10
Clark Ashton Smith — 10
Weird Tales — 9
Robert W. Barlow — 8
Wilfred Blanch Talman — 7
Robert W. Gordon — 6
Charles D. Hornig — 4
Otis A. Kline — 4
Emil Petaja — 4
Farnsworth Wright — 4
The Fantasy Fan — 3
Carl Jacobi — 3
August Lenniger — 3
E. Hoffmann Price — 3
Carl Swanson — 3
Adventure — 2
Denis Archer — 2
Magic Carpet — 2
Kirk Mashburn — 2
Frank Thurston Torbett — 2

And a single letter each to Argosy All-Story, Harry Bates, Brownwood Bulletin, The Californian, Claytons Magazines, Fort Worth Record, R. Fowler Gafford, Herbert Klatt, William Kofoed, Edna Mann, P. Schuyler Miller, Oriental Stories, Alvin Earl Perry, Hugh G. Schonfield, Thrills of the Jungle, The Ring, Donald Wandrei, Western Story, and one to an Unknown Recipient. That’s a grand total of 350 items.

That’s all of the known letters, but what’s really frustrating about all of this is what’s not there; we know Howard wrote letters to Truett Vinson, Henry Whitehead, etc., but these have vanished, and who knows what’s missing from the other correspondents. We know, for example, that Howard included a letter with “Shadow Kingdom” that he assumed would “be published as a forward to that story,” but that letter has not turned up. How many other letters to Wright, Lovecraft, Smith, etc. reside in private collections that we don’t know about, or are stashed in some grandma’s attic, or are buried in a file in a warehouse somewhere, or have just plain disappeared? And there are rumors of letters to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Machen, and others. Do these still exist? How many just got thrown away?

While it is unlikely at this point that any of these other letters will ever turn up, it’s still nice to dream. Maybe, some day in the not so distant future, Danton Burroughs will return my call and say he’s found a stash of Howard letters — but I’m not holding my breath.