THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS - TWO INSCRIBED COPIES, WITH RELATED CORRESPONDENCE

by Lovecraft, H.P. (stories); Finlay, Virgil (design)

$65,000 · Offered by Biblio

First edition · Signed

Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1939. First Editions. The first major collection of Lovecraft's weird fiction and the first production by the legendary Arkham House - a landmark in 20th century genre publishing. The 32 stories written for various pulp magazines were gathered and preserved by Lovecraft's friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arkham House in 1939 to preserve and publish the best of Lovecraft's fiction. The stories "range from early exercises in Dunsanian pastiche to the mature and highly distinctive tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which construct a horrific cosmological and historical context for human history. Luckless protagonists who stumble upon various dire intrusions of Cthulhu and his kin, or who unwisely pursue dangerous inquiries in the appropriate revelatory tomes, are inevitably brought to repulsively stick ends. Lovecraft became the consummate master of the confirmatory ending, in which what has been suspected all along finally becomes manifest" (Barron, Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide 3-132). It took Derleth and Wandrei nearly five years to sell through the modest print run, and The Outsider has not been reprinted since. Enclosed with the present copies are a five letters (written between May 10, 1937 - November 26, 1939) between the Arkham House principals, detailing both the publication history of The Outsider, as well revelatory background information concerning the dustjacket design by Virgil Finlay (1914-1971). In his time, Fin

• Publisher: Arkham House
• Year: 1939
• Edition: First Edition
• Printing: first
• Binding: unknown

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