Eldritch Tales (87 page)

‘Though it is unfortunate that this matter has not been called to your attention earlier,’ concluded Hartmann, ‘it has been very difficult for me to handle some of these matters not being familiar with August Derleth’s agreements and contracts. However, now that things are better organized, I can assure you of my fullest cooperation in handling any matters such as these.’

As it turned out, the problem had already been dealt with during the intervening four months. On November 26, Giles Gordon wrote to Forrest Hartmann: ‘It was kind of you to write the letter you did to Ballantine Books, but I am delighted to tell you that some months ago they agreed not to proceed any further with attempting to publish the editions of their two volumes of Lovecraft stories in our exclusive territory.’

As a result of these discussions, for British collectors of the Pan/Ballantine ‘Adult Fantasy’ series, the two volumes by Lovecraft remained available only in the original American editions.

The works of H.P. Lovecraft probably enjoyed their biggest commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic during the fantasy boom of the late 1960s and early ’70s, which was initially spurred on by college students discovering J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy.

As a result of this renewed interest, not only did Gollancz reprint some of its Lovecraft hardcovers, but the Panther paperbacks of the author’s work went through a number of consecutive printings as well.

But now there was another problem looming. Because there had not been a previous British edition, Panther could go directly to Arkham House to reprint the 1970 collaborative Lovecraft collection
The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions
(which they split into two volumes in 1975). However, their sub-contracts with Gollancz had been based on five-year licenses. These were starting to run out, and the books were still selling very nicely.

Since 1965 Panther had been owned by Granada Publishing, who eventually phased out the imprint in the early 1980s, and the paperback publisher soon began requesting extensions of their money-making Lovecraft licenses. According to the original contracts, these could be automatically extended for three-year periods, so long as the paperback sales remained at a minimum of 2,500 copies during the final six months of the agreement.

Although Granada renewed their sub-rights deals on the Lovecraft books a number of times during the previous decade, by the early 1980s Gollancz’s Rights Department was writing to the publisher informing them that licences had expired for a number of titles and asking if they wanted to renew.

In 1981, apparently in response to an enquiry from another British publisher about licensing the Lovecraft paperback rights, Gollancz confirmed in writing that
At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Shuttered Room
(aka
The Shadow Out of Time
) and the first volume of
Dagon
were all available.
The Lurker at the Threshold
had also been long out of print, although the rights were not officially reverted by Gollancz until March 1989. ‘Granada still have two titles under licence but they are not in print and I’m investigating,’ the letter continued. ‘These are
The Haunter of the Dark
and
The Tomb
(volume 2 of
Dagon
).’

In a letter dated April 2, 1981, Granada confirmed that it was reverting rights to
The Haunter of the Dark
, while the last extension for
The Tomb
, dated March 2, 1978, was for a further five years.

In March 1981, Granada’s contracts manager refused a request from Gollancz to revert rights on
The Tomb
because their edition was still in print. After that, there is no indication in the Gollancz files that they ever renewed the rights again.

However, that did not prevent Granada continuing to publish the Lovecraft titles in new editions . . .

Surviving correspondence indicates that in 1983 Gollancz had been considering doing their own
Best of H.P. Lovecraft
volume and, in response to an enquiry from Granada, they told the paperback publisher that they would ‘
probably
retain the rights’ in Lovecraft’s stories.

However, John Bush (who would step down the following year as Gollancz SF editor and chairman) had somewhat confusingly already confirmed the reversion of Gollancz’s rights in
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
in a note dated June 8, 1982, to A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd, who now represented the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in Britain.

In 1985, Granada Publishing/Panther Books issued three volumes in the
H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus
series, all with distinctive covers by Tim White. The inaugural book,
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror
, should have followed the contents of the earlier paperback editions in the UK but, as a result of an editorial oversight, the first printing of this volume only included August Derleth’s introduction, the title story and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’. Subsequent printings reinstated the remaining six stories.

The paperback edition of
The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
finally returned the collection to a single volume, while
The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales
retained the contents of the 1951 Gollancz edition, as well as adding ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’.

On January 1, 1988, the works of H.P. Lovecraft went out of copyright under Britain’s Copyright Act of 1911, which conveyed a protection period of fifty years after an author’s death. However, when the European Union Directive on Term of Copyright came into force in the UK on January 1, 1996, it retroactively extended copyright protection for a further twenty years to life plus seventy years. As a result, Lovecraft’s work went back into copyright until the beginning of 2008.

During the 1990s, independent imprint Creation Books issued the H.P. Lovecraft collection
Crawling Chaos: Selected Works 1920–1935
with an introduction by Colin Wilson, while Penguin Books imported the three paperback volumes of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi’s ‘corrected’ texts as part of their ‘Twentieth Century Classics’ series.

More recently, Carlton Books issued
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
under the Prion imprint, while Wordsworth Editions reprinted Lovecraft’s fiction in two ‘budget’ paperback collections, selected and introduced by M.J. Elliott:
The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories, Volume One
and
The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories, Volume Two
(the latter edition replacing the quickly withdrawn compilation
The Loved Dead & Other Stories
).

Just as Granada Publishing had swallowed up the Panther Books imprint years earlier, so it in turn was absorbed into the mighty HarperCollins empire. As a result, in June 2002 they reissued H.P. Lovecraft’s
At the Mountains of Madness
collection as part of their ‘Voyager Classics’ series of prestige paperbacks.

Meanwhile, Gollancz (now one of a number of imprints in the Orion Publishing Group) had launched its ‘Fantasy Masterworks’ series under the guidance of editorial director Jo Fletcher and John Bush’s successor, publisher and then managing director Malcolm Edwards.

The series was an avowed attempt to build a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written. As Gollancz had already compiled collections of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith’s work, it would seem only natural that they would do H.P. Lovecraft next.

In 2002, after checking the copyright situation and confirming that they still retained the rights, Gollancz came up with the idea of publishing all Lovecraft’s major fiction in two substantial trade paperback volumes,
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Eldritch Horrors
(containing mostly the author’s horror works) and
The Strange High House in the Mist and Other Dream-Quests
(which would feature all the remaining fantastic tales). Each volume would have included around 220,000 words of fiction.

However, the books got bogged down in editorial discussions, and it was not until four years later that the project was eventually revived as an even more exciting concept.

In 2006 Gollancz had combined the two volumes of Howard’s ‘Conan’ stories which had been put together for the ‘Fantasy Masterworks’ line into a single leather-bound hardcover entitled
The Complete Chronicles of Conan
, and priced to appeal to the mass-market. Along with an expansive historical Afterword, it included numerous interior illustrations by award-winning British artist Les Edwards. The handsome trade edition quickly went through multiple printings.

If it worked for Robert E. Howard, reasoned Gollancz, then why shouldn’t it also work for H.P. Lovecraft as well? Consequently, the publisher started putting together the commemorative omnibus
Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
.

Produced in an identical format as the Conan volume for publication in early 2008, the book contained around half-a-million words and most of Lovecraft’s major weird fiction (but excluded some minor juvenilia and the majority of the author’s ‘revisions’). Gollancz decided to utilise the ‘classic’ texts created by Arkham House and
Weird Tales
, but made a number of corrections and revisions based on the vast amounts of research that has been done by Lovecraft scholars over the past two decades.

The hefty volume contained another extensive Afterword, and Les Edwards once again filled the book with his remarkable illustrations.

‘Somehow Lovecraft has become permanent,’ explained the artist. ‘He endures. Even the word “Lovecraftian” has slipped into the language, although there might be strange ambiguities as to what it actually means. For some it refers to the literary style, for others it’s to do with bulging gelatinous masses, the chanting of barbarous names and huge, ancient and tentacled beings. It’s why the best of Lovecraft’s stories are worth returning to.

‘How these feelings translate into visual terms is another question. Obviously, the natural tendency for an artist is to concentrate on the visual, but there is limited capital in detailing every drooling fang and ensanguined talon. Certainly there must be tentacles and bat-winged night-gaunts, but, maybe – just maybe – there might also be some of the dread which will stay long after the lights are out.’

As an added bonus, famed American cartoonist Gahan Wilson allowed Gollancz to use his detailed map of ‘Arkham circa 1930’ (originally produced for August Derleth’s magazine
The Arkham Collector
back in 1970).

‘In one of the many scrapbook biographical anthologies on Howard Lovecraft produced and published by Arkham House there is a reproduction of a crude map of the witch-haunted village scrawled by HPL’s very own hand,’ he recalled, ‘and I remember my young self latching onto it obsessively and trying to fill in the blank spaces by hunting though memoirs and stories on the place by his friends and fellow authors, with only limited success.’