Once again, I must thank Grim Blogger for bringing another cool project to my attention. Recently, artist and designer Eric Mongeon announced the publication of 4 by Poe, an illustrated collection of four short stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
Friend of The Cimmerian G.W. Thomas is publishing Masters of Adventure, a public domain anthology. It is fully illustrated by M. D. Jackson and the multi-talented Mr. Thomas himself.
The title isn’t exaggerated since the line-up is simply incredible, as you can see for yourselves in the table of contents. I think that ‘Grandmasters of Adventure’ would not have been a too strong a superlative.
“Ms. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Smith and the Pharaohs” by H. Rider Haggard
“The Brazilian Cat” by A. Conan Doyle
“The Grove of Astaroth” by John Buchan
“Tarzan Rescues the Moon” by Edgar Rice Burroughs
“A Thousand Deaths” by Jack London
“A Tropical Horror” by William Hope Hodgson
“The Breath of Allah” by Sax Rohmer
“The People of the Pit” by A. Merritt
“Wings in the Night” by Robert E. Howard
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. I’m not capable of writing an essay half as interesting as the one penned last year by the late Steve Tompkins for the bicentennial of Poe’s birth, so I will let other more competent (and prestigious) voices express their appreciation of America’s master of mystery and the macabre.
Halcyon Press is a Texan publisher based in Houston. Under the series name of ”Halcyon Classics,” it is publishing a line of Kindle eBooks. Kindle is Amazon’s digital wireless reading device. Several books by TC’s favorite Texan author are now available.
Whilst the bicentennial of the nativity of Edgar Allan Poe was amply commemorated here at The Cimmerian, we somehow let the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of his death on October 7 slip right by us. However, J. Kingston Pierce over at The Rap Sheet, one of the premiere crime-fiction blogs, was on the job. In his entry, “What Happened to Edgar?”, Pierce looks at Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by John Evangelist Walsh. The book was Walsh’s third foray into Poe-related historical research and he admits to being fascinated by Poe and his works. Check it out.
Pierce also took a look at the shenanigans surrounding the possession of Poe’s remains, as well as the lavish commemorative celebrations sponsored by the city of Baltimore this year, in “Evermore, Mr. Poe, Evermore.” Our own Steve Tompkins also commented on the nigh-Illiadic struggle over Poe’s remains in this blog post.
Considering the size of Cross Plains in comparison to Baltimore and the relatively recent date of Robert E. Howard’s passing, I would say the organizers of Robert E. Howard Days, and REH fandom in general, have plenty to be proud of.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
A rare first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s first book Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) sold at auction on December 4th for a record-breaking $622,500. This copy was one of a number of books from the library of TV and film producer William E. Self that were auctioned last week by Christie’s auction house. According to Christie’s only fifty copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems were printed and of those only about a dozen survive
1st Edition of Tamerlane and Other Poems.
Poe was of course one of the pioneers of weird fiction and his influence on the later Weird Tales generation, including Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, et al., cannot be overstated. He is generally given credit for writing one of the first detective stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” He also dabbled in the “lost civilizations” genre with his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a work inspired by the Hollow Earth theories of John Symmes and in which the protagonist encounters a mysterious race at the southpole.
Also, from the William E. Self library, a first edition of Poe’s The Raven and other Poems (1845) sold for $182,500 and a first edition of the two volume set Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) sold for $43,750. Several Poe manuscripts sold for amounts in the six-figure range. A first edition of the aforementioned The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) sold for $6875.
There were several other works in this particular auction that should be of interest to fans of speculative fiction. A re-bound first edition of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1918) sold for $50,000. A first published edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1866) went for $21,250. H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man: a Grotesque Romance (1897) sold for $750 and a very nice first edition, first state McClurg copy (no dustjacket) of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914) sold for $3000
The Nom de Guerre Theatre Guild is proud to announce that the 2009 Wicked Literature Halloween Theatre Festival will debut at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Wicked Lit will be produced as a joint venture between Nom de Guerre and Theatre 40 in association with the City of Beverly Hills Recreation and Parks Division.
The plays featured for 2009 include:
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe ~ Adapted and Directed by Paul Millet
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving ~ Adapted by Jonathan Josephson & Directed by Paul Millet
Pigeons from Hell by Robert E. Howard ~ Adapted and Directed by Jeff G. Rack (Continue reading this post)
Edgar Allan Poe • Bret Harte • Charlotte Perkins Gilman • Ambrose Bierce • Edith Wharton • Ellen Glasgow • Robert E. Howard • H. P. Lovecraft • Clark Ashton Smith • Robert Bloch •
That’s the lead-in list of authors on the Library of America site for their forthcoming edition of American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny From Poe to the Pulps, edited by Peter Straub. Apparently, Robert E. Howard rates in the “Top Ten” of American weird/horror authors (published prior to 1940) out of a total of forty-five. We are grading on the curve here, but in a good way. Since one would assume all authors in a Library of America collection should be “A-List” writers of some sort, Robert E. Howard would seem to be in the “A+” grouping.
In his first letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard informed HPL that he considered the Man From Providence to be superior to Machen or Poe. In other words, the finest horror writer of them all. In another letter (ca. June 1931), Howard wrote to Lovecraft that “the three foremost weird masterpieces” were Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” and last, but not least, “The Call of Cthulhu.” Thus, it is not surprising that some trace of REH’s enthusiasm for HPL’s landmark tale might be found in Howard’s own yarns.
“Skull-Face” would seem to echo with whispers out of R’lyeh. That is not to say “The Call of Cthulhu” was Howard’s only source of inspiration for his tale of Kathulos of Atlantis. Far from it. Over at the Official Robert E. Howard Forum, I went into some depth regarding the influence of Sax Rohmer’s writings upon “Skull-Face.” As I’ll demonstrate below, it appears that a Rohmer novel might have exerted some influence upon “The Call of Cthulhu” as well.
With luck a couple of Edgar Allan Poe straggler-items won’t seem excessive. The slideshow of Poe manuscripts and letters at the Paper Cuts blog of the New York Times is not to be missed, and be sure to click on the link to a PDF of “What Literature Owes to Edgar Allan Poe,” a rewarding trip in the wayback machine to the mindset of 1909 as the newspaper acknowledges Poe’s Centenary. Where we might expected overstuffed prose, a stylistic portliness suggestive of the about-to-be-inaugurated William Howard Taft, the NYT‘s Percival Pollard is gratifyingly lively: “Halls of fame are largely built by press agents and by prejudice. ” Of the post-Griswoldian EAP-bashers he says “[Poe] does not seem to have been much of an equestrian, or I am sure they would have said he was a horse thief.” The ink-stained tide is clearly turning in Poe’s favor; Pollard sees the animus of one region in particular as being washed away Howard-style by an influx of newer barbarians: “The New Englanders gave us sneers about Poe, and they themselves are now merely a convention that will die when the last New Englander has disappeared before the Celt and the Calabrian.” He does concede that “A halo of inebriety all too often encircles [Poe's] head,” but then that’s also true of an Ard Righ or three in Howard Studies…
Anyone who has watched one or more seasons of HBO’s The Wire will recall that the West Baltimore corner boys, when they don’t call out “5-0! 5-0!” whenever the cops roll up on them, sometimes refer to “Po-po” instead. Obviously an unaffectionate diminutive of police, but it’s fun to pretend our Eminent Baltimorean is being commemorated.
