A GENT FROM BEAR CREEK

A GENT FROM BEAR CREEK IS NOW AVAILABLE IN A TRADE PAPERBACK.  INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE BY CLICKING THE LINK ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THIS BLOG PAGE.

Coming Next Month

Almost every pulp had at least one ad for next month's featured stories.  Here are some samples from Weird Tales and Oriental Stories.

Uncanny Tales

The Canadian pulp, Uncanny Tales, reprinted Howard's "Always Comes Evening," which originally appeared in The Phantagraph in 1936.  Wartime Canadian pulps are extremely rare.  This was the final issue of Uncanny Tales.  This copy was scanned from the Richardson collection.

Marvel Tales variant covers

I've got a day or two to kill before Howard Days this year, and I'm going through some old scans looking for items of interest.  Here are the two covers for the July-August 1934 issue of Marvel Tales.  These are ancient scans, from the Darrell Richardson collection.  These were probably included in the recent auction of a small part of the Richardson collection.

H. P. Lovecraft's Tribute to Robert E. Howard

Fantasy Magazine was a highly respected early fanzine published by super fan and future Superman comics editor Julius Schwartz. In the September 1936 issue, the magazine published H. P. Lovecraft's memorial piece on Howard, with supplemental comments added by Otis Adelbert Kline, E. Hoffman Price, and Jack Byrne, the editor of Argosy magazine.

Here are scans of the original publication of the article.

Publisher Schwartz died in 2004, at age 88.

Revisiting Houston

I'm trying to learn more about this blogging business, so I thought I'd experiment and share more photos of the two events held in Houston in 2009 in honor of Glenn Lord.

Right, my friend Dave Hardy clowns for the camera. Hopefully, he won't make me take this picture down when he sees it!




Right, from left to right, a local fan whose name I don't remember, the McHaney Monster, Paul Herman, Damon Sasser, some old guy I don't recognize , Dave Hardy, Glenn Lord, and Todd Woods.

Where Have I Seen That Before?

When I opened the latest mailing of REHupa last month, I looked at the cover and got this really weird feeling that I'd seen it someplace before. I forgot about it, and a few days ago, while looking for something on my shelves, I realized why it looked so familiar to me. Four years earlier, I'd used the same piece of art and the same font on a book I did and quickly forgot. I printed half a dozen copies of it and handed them out for Howard Days in Cross Plains during that amazing gathering in 2006. In the fall of that year, I discovered that I'd accidentally had it up for sale for a couple of months on lulu.com, and it had sold about a dozen copies. I suppose it is certainly going to be a collectible, but it is certainly not a good reference book. The title was The Fiction of Robert E. Howard: A Quick Reference Guide. It was an update of the bibliography that had been published in The Howard Review # 13, and like its predecessor, it was in serious need of a proper proofing.
The font type was Auriol, and I came across it while researching projects on the legendary artist J. Allen St. John. It was the creation of the artist Georges Auriol and made its first appearance in 1901. It was highly influential on St. John's now famous lettering style, so familiar on a number of books published in the early quarter of the twentieth century by the Chicago based publisher A. C. McClurg. McClurg even paid St. John to do his lettering on cover paintings by other artists.
His most recognizable work is the logo used by Weird Tales magazine from the Howard era up until just a couple of years ago. Fans of the original Weird Tales were no doubt overjoyed when the current watered down lame version of the magazine finally stopped using the classic logo.

I have used the font myself on several St. John and Robert E. Howard projects.

I love Roy G. Krenkel's art. The source for my full color cover art was a limited edition art print done in conjunction with the publication of The Road to Azrael. The REHupa cover appears to be from the 3 color endpaper for the book. As a very serious Krenkel fan, I think that cropping a great piece of art like this is much akin to doing a pan and scan version of a cinemascope movie. The original artist's vision is completely mutilated. Fortunately, few will see this, unless you count the copy that one particular REHupan will no doubt have up for sale on eBay before the toner is even dry.

The Illustrators of ROBERT E. HOWARD - WEIRD TALES - Installment 4 - Curtis C. Senf

Curtis C. Senf did his first Howard illustration for the cover of the August 1928 issue for "Red Shadows." (the interior illustration for that story was by Hugh Rankin)

This was followed by
"The Children of the Night," in the April-May 1931 issue

"The Footfalls Within" September 1931

"The Dark Man" December 1931 (Cover and interior)

Senf worked for Weird Tales from the Spring of 1927 until the summer of 1932. He did the majority of the covers during that period.