x THE SCIENCE–FANTASY PUBLISHERS

THE SCIENCE-FANTASY
PUBLISHERS

THE SCIENCE–FANTASY PUBLISHERS x

PREFACE xi

PREFACE
This is a reference work unlike almost any other, and that has been a source of
controversy from the start, so let's deal with it before going into the nuts and bolts of
the work.
Both of us have done extensive bibliography in the SF/fantasy/horror field both
on an amateur and a professional level for over 30 years, occasionally together but
usually separately. During most or all of those projects, we've usually adhered to the
lock-step standards set by academic works since at least the Thirties (earlier works
are often entertaining and not at all a mere cold recitation of facts). If this work was
intended purely as a comprehensive bibliography of SF specialty presses, it would
probably resemble that standard. Instead, we have attempted to keep the bibliogra-
phy itself as accurate as possible, but the cold facts of bibliography are only a part of
the book and not its primary purpose; rather, it is an essential ingredient of a larger
objective, which is to present the science-fantasy small press in the Twentieth
Century in its rightful and yet usually unperceived historical context, and to provide
critical and analytical information that, we believe, achieves the purpose of creating
a gestalt system for placing this movement in its proper place and perspective in
literary history. An account of people like these can never be coldly objective; clearly
these are a unique breed of individualist interconnected in a tapestry that has
helped shape and vastly enrich the genres to which it has been so devoted for so long.
It is also, then, a critical history, with us in the rather unique role of historical-
ly-based literary critics, discussing and analyzing the publishers and their works.
We think this enriches and adds to the story what we believe should be the primary
objective of scholarship—imparting and interpreting facts—while taking nothing
away, and allows professionals and non-professionals alike to get a feel for what's
going on and what's gone before. However, in so doing, we have knowingly and with
malice aforethought committed a scholarly sin, the equivalent of a fundamentalist
evangelist coming to the pulpit smoking a big cigar and cussing like mad, and the
fundamentalists of SF bibliography and criticism as well as some of the subjects of
this book are beside themselves about it.
We first attempted this in the initial 1966 versions, and it was controversial
then, both in academic circles and among bookmen. Going through and cataloging
the papers of the late Joseph Payne Brennan, Lloyd Currey reports finding corre-
spondence between Brennan and August Derleth arguing about its propriety, as now,
and not its substance. If our system here makes you uncomfortable, so be it; we wear
three hats here, not one: historians, bibliographers, and critics. The latter is
supposed to discomfort some people. If we published three separate works rather
than integrating them into a whole, the work would be more expensive, and, worse,
without extensive cross-referencing between volumes, the picture that emerges here
would remain mostly hidden. This is, as we said, a unique work in its conception,
and if it's not revolutionary, at least it accomplishes what we set out to do in a way
no other methods could. It is also, we hope, the most readable, entertaining, and
useful book on the subject in a field awash in both unreadable and useless nonfiction
works on it.

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This volume is based directly on the 1991-92 complete revision of this work,
which was in turn the first in almost a quarter of a century, and the result of
continuing research that has lasted through the entire period since the second
edition appeared in 1966. Although part of a continuing research project, the Third
Edition is in almost every sense a new work, following the old one only in form and
intent, compiled mostly from scratch using constantly updated files and research. It
was always the intent of the authors to keep the files on specialty publishing—now
more properly a database, a word that barely existed in 1966—current, subject to
constant addition, correction, and updating, and to produce periodic revisions of the
work as new material warranted. We did not, however, plan on so vast a lapse in
time as this, nor foresee in 1966 that the next edition would be better than ten times
the size of the old one as well as 25 years later.
This work is not 100% complete, and, here and there, you will even find some
blanks. Indeed, we doubt if we will ever see the day when it is 100% complete. It is as
complete and checked out as we could possibly make it, and the lapses are generally
due to the lack of cooperation from a few publishers (or their disappearance), or
simply the lack of records, but there are gaps. A gap in, say, pagination, should tell
you that in spite of our huge panel and long efforts, the book was not seen by us and
the information on it compiled from external sources that did not include that infor-
mation. There's not much of this, but it exists. To leave such books out, which we
know exist and even have some third party bibliographic data on them, would, we
felt, be a far worse sin than including them. The books not seen are obvious by their
blanks, but they exist. Indeed, if experience is any guide, most of them will turn up
as soon as this book is in its “final” form and at the printers, even when no copies
could be found anywhere during the years we were looking. Such is the way of bibli-
ography.
But—blanks? In a comprehensive reference work? Many will say, “How dare
they publish without filling them?”
Well, we decided to publish anyway. All editions of this work were and are
considered to be interim reports—history, bibliography, and analysis of the state of
the art as we know it on a specific date, time, and year. The 1966 edition was valu-
able in its time, but is hopelessly dated and contains many major (and some outright
embarrassing) mistakes as well. This edition might well be no different in times to
come, although what bibliography there is will certainly stand. This is not, however,
intended as the definitive work on this subject destined to stand for all time,
although the last one we ever do will probably be as close to that as anyone can get
right now. There are really only two types of problems:
The first group are Gray Holes: publishers on which we have some data, the
data we could independently collect, but we know for a fact that we are incomplete
on some data and have had no way to verify some of the information. Although few
in number—perhaps one or two percent of the total—they are here, and will be made
clear as you go along, since we report our failures within, and we desperately want
this information even now if anyone can and will provide it.
The second is plain old Gaps, and this category is by far the most prevalent
throughout the book. There is probably some small gap in five to ten percent of the
entries here. These are noted when we know they exist, and anyone who can fill a

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PREFACE xiii

gap is also encouraged to do so. The most common gap is when either we or someone
on our panel simply could not secure a copy of the book to determine pagination or
(very rarely) a verifiable table of contents, or jacket artist, or some other detail.
So, with missing material, why publish now? The answer is quite simple: there
are far fewer gaps than even we could have hoped for, and the vast bulk of informa-
tion herein is really available nowhere else; it's extremely valuable to collectors,
dealers, libraries, and scholars, and what we do have is an enormous amount of
information. We could sit here forever saying that we could be more complete or fill
in this or that hole or gap if we only waited another month or another year or what-
ever, but that would mean that all the information we do have would remain basical-
ly proprietary, and you wouldn't be able to make use of it. No one else can really
compile much of this information; a large number of the older publishers are dead,
and gave interviews and access to their records only to us, and both the interviewees
and the data are now lost forever except in our files. In other cases, publishers who
did a tremendous amount of work digging through their own files for us swear they'll
never do that again for anybody.
It is also our intent to issue periodic supplements as the amount of material
requires it, and to publish at least an interim edition whenever new material (includ-
ing corrections) exceeds 10% of the material here, although, it must be admitted, we
said that last time, too.

OBJECTIVES

The Specialty Publishing Project was created by the authors in 1963 almost out
of necessity, as both of us were collectors and bibliographers in the science fiction and
fantasy fields and discovered material on the specialty publishers to be anywhere
from scattered beyond any reasonable ease of retrieval to never having been chroni-
cled or recorded at all, the sole exception being Arkham House, which continued to
periodically publish its bibliography and update its history.
We needed information that was nowhere to be found. As we began speaking
with many of the people here, initially at SF conventions, and heard their stories, we
also came to believe that the historical information was in danger of being lost as the
old-timers died or vanished forever, and that it was very important to preserve as
much of it as possible.
It was Arkham House: The First Twenty Years that provided the initial model
for this book. It was when the authors attempted to find out similar information on
other imprints that we discovered that Arkham was unique and determined to set it
right. Then using file cards, loose leaf notebooks, and copious correspondence, acqui-
sitions of the books involved where possible or practical, trips to major libraries and
collections when it was not, we compiled the initial files and attempted to keep them
updated and current. In spite of all that, it is inevitable that we missed somebody
somewhere. If we did, we'll not only hear about it, but we want to hear about it. The
project database continues and will continue as long as we are capable of doing so,
and beyond that if someone in the future wants to take over for the old codgers, who
were barely 21 when the first Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers, as it was then
called, was published, and are in their fifties at this writing.

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The objectives were and are rather basic: to keep on file a history of each and
every imprint that can be called a "science-fantasy specialty publishing imprint"
along with as extensive a bibliography of all the books under that imprint as was
possible to compile. Eventually, to compile this information into usable book form for
the use of bibliographers, collectors, dealers, researchers, and other interested
parties and publish it, issuing updated editions as demand and new information
warranted, along with analysis, commentary, and subjective evaluations as we felt
necessary, so that we had not merely a bibliography but also an ongoing study, evalu-
ation, and subjective critical history of the specialty publishing phenomenon based
on everything from interviews to correspondence to old articles, books, third party
research, memoirs, etc. In the interim, we would share this knowledge with qualified
interested parties, and many bibliographies on this subject actually came (often
unacknowledged) from us and our work.
Almost immediately, it became clear that we needed a set of rules in order to
get the project under control. In defining what was a science-fantasy specialty
publisher, we ultimately hit on a few simple requirements that may not only seem
arbitrary, they are arbitrary. The only defense for these few simple rules is that, so
far, they (mostly) work.
First and foremost, the imprint (not necessarily the parent company, but
the imprint) had to be devoted exclusively to science fiction and/or fantasy
or be market-oriented totally towards the science-fantasy market. This last
has given us a bit of leeway in a few cases where a single book in a large output
might otherwise disqualify; no company that ever came to our attention that 100%
fulfills our requirements is left out. Many vanity press imprints which have no
kinship with the books under examination were omitted under this same criteria,
although, again, the authors have exercised some discretion in listing a few items
that, because they have been listed and cross-indexed in other bibliographic works
such as Bleiler or Tuck, warranted mention. In a couple of cases, titles are listed with
a publisher that do not actually belong there simply because, time and again, we
have been called for not including them. Hence, they're here, along with why they
shouldn't be. We've actually fudged on this rule slightly, in the name of sanity.
Should Underwood–Miller, for example, be shoved to the back for doing a few main-
stream-oriented books under its own imprint? No, because it was not a trend but
rather an occasional exception, we decided. Dark Harvest, on the other hand, delib-
erately abandoned the field for another and collapsed as a result. It had to be thor-
oughly covered for that reason alone, but it certainly gets shoved to the back for so
doing.
Second, the imprint must have issued at least one hardcover book. This
is our most arbitrary rule, but it eliminates the vast bulk of self-published fan press
material, much of which is of great interest but which really has as much in common
with the books listed herein as they do to pulp magazines or comics or dramatic
works. That material deserves its own books and chroniclers, but is not what
concerns us here, and to have attempted its inclusion would have made this already
huge work impossibly large, impractical, and beyond anyone's ability to complete.
Although arbitrary, we believe you will find that this requirement disqualified very
few who really should be here, and provided a remarkable consistency among the

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PREFACE xv

vast majority of publishers.

It must also be pointed out that, even if a publisher was primarily or wholly
paperback oriented, but published just one hardcover, no matter how few the copies,
of a partial edition of just one of its titles, then all of its books, regardless of format,
are listed where possible. The only exceptions to this are the large-scale mass
market commercial imprints with corporate foundations and national distribution
such as Del Rey Books or DAW books; these are discussed in the first appendix,
which we call Fellow Travelers, but are not given bibliographic treatment, since
they are mainstream mass marketed publishers with a different set of rules (and
bibliographies of them are available elsewhere). Likewise, we limited ourselves
strictly to book production when faced with organizations like the N3F, which
ground out reams of fan material every year, nor do we cover magazines from the
listed publishers (except to note them) unless those magazines also had hardcover
book editions distributed through book, rather than magazine, channels.
Third, we concerned ourselves totally with the Twentieth Century,
primarily because, while there were some self-published books in earlier centuries
that might fit in, they did not have any historical relevance to this study or to the
other books herein because there was no market, nor any attempt to create an SF/
fantasy market, in prior centuries. Again, they would make a fine and fascinating
bibliographic and historical study on their own, but they aren't what we are doing.
We would love to do those other projects, too, but even this project alone has, at
times, overwhelmed us. If you think they should be done, go ahead and do them—
we'll both buy copies.
Finally, the press must be commercially oriented. That is, it must intend for
its books to be sold in the normal fashion by booksellers or distributors. These are
not books published entirely to go to Aunt Edna and the family back in Innsmouth.
Interestingly, our survey of the SF book business shows that our criteria are
now used as a standard by many who buy and sell in the field as well as by major
collectors. Whether the 1966 edition influenced this, or whether our criteria evolved
by subconsciously absorbing accepted practice and attitudes, we don't know, but it
certainly wasn't an articulated policy back then.
And that's all the rules.
Almost immediately, we realized that there were a number of publishers who
came directly out of the tradition of SF/fantasy specialty publishing, many producing
important works in the field, that were disqualified by one of the rules above, and, in
particular, non-qualifying imprints of publishers we do list. For those, we have creat-
ed a second supplementary section we call Fellow Travelers, which follows the
main bibliography and uses the same format. Thus we are able to list associated
imprints of publishers in the main work like Prime (Oswald Train) and Arkham
House (Mycroft and Moran), include publishers like Owlswick that are essen-
tially science-fantasy publishers but who have produced (and continue to produce) a
number of books under their imprint that disqualify them and were never intended
as strictly genre imprints (and, indeed, we even list some of the non- genre books
from those publishers when appropriate), and associated or affiliated operations run
by or linked to publishers in the main body, or involving people cross-referenced in
the main body. Don’t neglect these publishers—they are a vital part of this overall

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tapestry.
And, as mentioned above, we also add commentary there on publishers who
actually fit the definitions above but, because they are mass market professional
imprints competing with the big boys, violate the spirit and intent of the listings. We
have also used this section to list and discuss relevant books by non science-fantasy
publishers such as Entwhistle and Morrison-Raven Hill who are often mistaken for
SF specialty publishers, simply to provide a guide of sorts to who's who and what's
what, and we also list some representative mystery publishers there because, again,
they fit our historical context, but we by no means attempted to cover the mystery
specialty press, which is as extensive as the SF specialty press and deserves its own
bibliography (and we'll buy that one, too). Just why a press is there will usually be
obvious from the commentary.
The ultimate difference between the main bibliography and Fellow Travelers
is that we felt compelled to list everything by everybody who fit our definitions in the
main bibliography, to the best of our abilities, while in Fellow Travelers we could be
more selective both in which books we list and which publishers we might or might
not include. The scope and limitations of Fellow Travelers are covered in more
detail in the prefatory material to that section.

METHODOLOGY

The authors attempted, wherever possible or practical, to physically obtain or

examine a copy of each book listed herein, although not necessarily each variation of
the same. Of the enormous numbers of books covered in this work, we estimate we
own all but perhaps five percent between us. This gives us a true physical check
against the compiled data (and, incidentally, one whale of a book collection). Even on
those few we do not own, it has usually been possible to physically examine copies in
other libraries or collections, or through the cooperation of out of print book dealers,
of all but a tiny fraction of the rest. It may come as a shock to many that The Library
of Congress throws out tons of the books it receives, much like any other library.
Although virtually all the books listed here sent in copies for copyright, a shocking
number have no record copies in the Library of Congress. Many small editions are
kept, but in areas where neither the public nor scholars can have access to them. The
British Museum, while retaining at least one copy of everything, even more severely
restricts access to the rarest of them.
After compiling the book lists, we went out and compiled, using collections,
library sources, data in the books themselves and in catalogs, ads, and promotional
materials, as comprehensive a bibliography and history of each imprint as we could.
These were then formed into individual publisher's entries and printed out, and only
then did we send our work to the publisher (if active) or principals in the publishing
company (if no longer active or out of business) if they could be found. They then
gave us a great deal of additions, corrections, points on variant editions, etc. In a few
cases, information was so totally lacking that we asked for and generally received
information on the entire line. Cooperation was generally excellent, although we did
have a few nonparticipants, one or two of whom took exception to our commentary or
even our project itself, and a couple of contemporary publishers who acted as if we

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were the IRS. In that case, we found other people to use as work-arounds and feel we
covered them pretty well, but if there are any major mistakes or omissions here, they
are most likely in the coverage of those non-cooperating publishers. If questions or
problems exist in our minds due to these or other factors, they are noted in the intro-
ductory or afterword material in those publishers' entries.
If possible, principals were interviewed as well, either in person or by mail.
Using this, a second updated and revised listing for the publisher was created and
cross-checked against our existing physical evidence. Then the pages were printed
out by laser printer/copier and assembled in loose-leaf format to create a galley-like
manuscript, and these copies were sent to a great many collectors, new and rare
book dealers, and experts in the field for their own commentary and corrections, a
group which we refer to as our "panel." From these, yet another revision was made of
each entry, and this version stands until new material might surface or be added
later, in which case the entire process begins all over again. The process is never-
ending; what this book represents is the state of the database as it existed on a
particular date—in this case, a date certain in June, 1991. There is no question that
some errors have crept in, and some omissions, particularly of obscure imprints or
perhaps a missed minor title, are inevitable. We will hear about them as a result of
this publication—and we will then add that information to the database for next
time. We have discovered, when all else fails, nothing brings us the information we
couldn't get by hook or crook quicker than to publish without it.
It is always a temptation to succumb to “bibliographer's disease,” which is basi-
cally the fear that you will publish with something missing or with incomplete infor-
mation on some area, and the subsequent refusal to ever publish because of this.
Because the project is unending, we feel publishing is simply another step in the
perfection of the data. We do feel, however, that we are as accurate and as complete
as we could come at this stage, or we would not have published.
The few blatant gaps we have are, ironically, almost all on the newer contempo-
rary publishers. On these we were more dependent than we like on the kindness and
willingness of the personnel involved at those houses to compile data for us. We don't
like to do that, but it was occasionally necessary. Not everybody responded. Where
we could neither get the information directly or indirectly, there are comments to
that effect in the entry. We even had one fellow keeping a bibliography of one
publisher where data was difficult to get write us and ask us not to publish, since
only that person had the details we sought! Again, anyone who wants now to fill in
any of the blanks is encouraged to do so and send the data to us. If you don't, we'll do
the best we can without you.

FORMAT: HOW TO USE THE BOOK

Because this book is subtitled “A Bibliographic History,” the format is historical

rather than practical. It was felt that the best way of giving the history of a house
was to first do so, then list the titles in order of publication, rather than alphabetical-
ly or by author. In this way, one can scan down the list of titles and associated data
and see how it grew, what its sense of purpose and direction might have been, what
sort of decisions were made both in editorial and production as things went along, as

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well as how each either prospered or got into trouble, etc. A wrap-up commentary
then either tells how the house fell and our analysis of why it did so and what
happened to its principals, etc., or, if still in business, gives our candid evaluation of
the operation so far, as well as cross-referencing them, if required, to other entries.
Although it was tempting to also list the publishers in chronological order for histor-
ical consistency, we found that, for quick reference purposes, an alphabetical listing
within each section was simply more practical. This book is not intended to be read
or used in a linear fashion.
The problem is, while this gives the reader historical perspective as no other
method could, it makes it very difficult to locate information on a specific book or
author, particularly if you don't know the publisher. Since we believe that, once the
book has been read through as history, the bibliographic function will become its
dominant use, we have indexed every single title, author, and jacket artist and illus-
trator covered. Use the Author-Artist Index to find a listing of all the works done by
those people, or the Index by Title to find any specific title in the book. We would
have loved to have indexed every single story, poem, and illustration as well (and,
indeed, we started on just that) but when we discovered that we were well over 150
pages and hadn't yet gotten past “B” we knew we were licked. Anyone who wants to
do such a project independently to supplement this work has our permission and
encouragement to do so. We'll buy that, too.
The commentary is entirely subjective and is the opinion of the authors,
although every effort has been made to label commentary as commentary or make it
very obvious and thus separate it from the bibliographic material. We make no apol-
ogies for it, but we do stand on over a quarter-century of intense and continuing
study of specialty and small press publishing, something we do not believe anyone
else can claim. We were both nineteen when we started this, with youthful enthusi-
asm and full heads of hair. Now well into middle age, the enthusiasm remains,
although, alas, not the hair. We feel that, thanks to our own continuing efforts over
so long a period and to the continuing cooperation, good will, and aid of so many
publishers past and present, collectors, dealers, and experts, we are the foremost
experts on this particular small field in the world today. Anybody else as crazy as we
are could have done it, maybe better, but we are the only ones who did it, and at a
time when it still could be done, and we stand on that. It must also be noted that
many of the principals herein have now passed away and their memories and
records with them. Had we not done this project, and maintained it, that information
would have been forever lost, and with it a vital key to the understanding of the
evolution of the science fiction and fantasy fields, and, in a few cases, their memories
late in life gave false information to other bibliographers while we had a good long
look at their records.
But it's the highly subjective and opinionated commentary, and our tendency to
be brutally frank and honest, that is the most controversial part of our project. We
must emphasize here that we were antagonistic to no one, and weren't out to “get”
anyone or insult anyone deliberately or even hurt anyone's feelings. What we write
is the informed experts' analysis of the facts at our disposal. You are free to disagree
or take exception, but it is honest commentary based upon the evidence we gathered.
We have no malice nor axes to grind. And, yes, we've published specialty press books

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ourselves, and between us we've engaged in most aspects of the book business from
fanzines through magazines and small presses to mass market books.
A sample individual title entry is shown below, in the format followed through-
out the book. Commentary is always single column with margins differing from the
bibliographic listing; the listings are in slightly smaller type and double column
format, even if there is only one column's worth and the other column is a blank (in
which case the single column is centered). No publisher's entry begins or ends on any
page common to another publisher, so that additional space, if any, can be used by
the reader/researcher for notes, addendums, etc.
Let's take a look at that sample entry now:

EYES OF THE OVERWORLD, by Jack Vance, 1978, pp.285, $15.00. 111

signed and numbered by author and artist, $25.00; trade edition of 1474
copies, $15.95; 11 copies lettered for presentation only. Contents: The Over-
world /Cil /The Mountains of Magnatz /The Sorcerer Pharesm /The Pilgrims /
The Cave in the Forest /The Manse of Iufflinu. Jacket and interiors by
Stephen E. Fabian. Points: Limited state additionally has initials “J.H.V. on
lower right front of cover and signature/limitation plate. Book says it was
published in 1977 but wasn't ready until April, 1978. Different plates than
Gregg edition noted below. All copies of the signed and numbered edition also
were sent out with the next book, below.
Other Printings: Ace, NY: 1966; Mayflower, London: 1972; Pocket Books,
NY: 1977 et. seq. Ironically, original hardcover was Gregg Press, Boston: 1977,
blowup of Pocket pb plates with original introduction by Robert Silverberg,
jacketless, $15.00.
Novelization of the balance of Vance stories set on the Dying Earth. Not up to
Dying Earth but still good stories.

Note the format. The book is listed with the title in bold and ALL CAPS; that's
to make the title paramount. The title is followed by the name of the author(s), the
year of initial publication, pagination, then the description and price of the most
expensive or exclusive edition is given first, the next most second, and the trade or
cheaper edition or paperback (if any) last. If a collection or anthology, the contents
are then listed in the order they appear in the book—contents page order, or real
order if no contents page is given. This makes for some particularly long listings,
especially of the poetry volumes, but we feel the contents listing is essential, particu-
larly in light of subsequent mass market publications, reprints from other houses,
etc. We also credit the illustrator(s) and jacket artist, if any, and next, in some cases,
points, or specific information on peculiarities about some versions of the book if it's
available or relevant. These can range from oddball variations, errata sheet informa-
tion, variant bindings, and the like to whole anecdotes on said oddities.
Next comes Reprints or Prior Editions or both, giving you not only other
printing information but also any differences between those printings and the one
listed. If there was a later (or earlier) edition from another publisher, particularly a
mass market or general publisher, we will also tell you if we know, particularly if it
was in a different version or under a different title, but no attempt was made to list

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every other publication of any given work, merely the first or, in some cases, major
mass market issues to avoid confusion. Again, this is supplied as an aid, and no
attempt was made to list every reprint; some reprint histories of titles here would
make bibliographies of their own. We print what we feel is useful here to someone
interested in the book we are covering, with enough information, we hope, to allow
that someone to find more information elsewhere following our leads.
Some attempt has been made when the information was easily available to list
magazine origins of stories and novels (but not poems) after or (rarely) within the
contents entry, but only first publication and only if it predated its appearance in the
book being covered. This is not true of every entry, however, and such information
when it appears is also offered only as a convenience, and may even appear in the
commentary.
A few have additional warning lines in bold capital letters, such as the COUN-
TERFEIT WARNING in a couple of Arkham House entries, followed by details.
All bibliographic information is in Roman type unless italics or bold might be
called for under the normal rules of typography, or is used by the book itself. Points
and Reprints are labeled in bold but the information there, too, flush left in stan-
dard (not indented) paragraph form, is also in Roman type.
Finally, under most but not all, flush left and wholly in italics, are any short
comments, critical notations, etc. by us on that particular book. The opinions are
subjective and might be the opinion of either of the authors, but we tend to agree
about 90% of the time. These are intended merely as guidelines for potential future
purchasers puzzling over a particular title coming from one or two people who have
actually read them, or, in some cases, at least tried to read them, and as a continuing
reminder that we are discussing books here, not commodities trading. It is also here
that we might note the occasion of publication (if any) or any anecdotes, real or apoc-
ryphal, about the book and/or author. We believe that any attempts at pretending
objectivity would be fundamentally dishonest; clearly, however, we didn't do all this
work to make a fortune, and our reputations in the field (Chalker for both fiction and
publishing, Owings for bibliography) stand independent of this work. We did it
because we love these books, even the bad ones, and as a sort of love letter to, and
repayment of the debt we owe, these publishers, many unsung, to building and
preserving science fiction and fantasy yesterday and today.
Please note that commentary, reprint information, and points (with a few
exceptions) are not indexed. While this might be handy for a very small number of
people, it would bloat the indices to massive proportions, making it more difficult to
find what most will be looking for.
A note on points: Although some of these are valid, some are defects that
never were sent out as commercial products (i.e. you couldn't buy them) and others
are over-hyped leftovers from the printing process. Trial proofs of some color jackets,
for example, are sometimes done in “blues,” monochrome on white, to insure a fit,
proper sizing of the illustration to the page, to copy edit jacket material, etc. They
are not “rare first jacket states” because first jacket states are the ones on copies
offered for sale. Nor is a “rare suppressed jacket” thus because it contained a major
and often embarrassing misprint or technical error. These are defects that were
pulled prior to sale. At best, they are ephemera, and we note them only when copies

PREFACE xx
PREFACE xxi

have been hyped as such. We own a couple of “rare suppressed first printings” where
opposing pages are blank or a signature is bound upside down. We own none of them
deliberately and would gladly sell them to the ignorant, but we only list such things
if they were actually sold as such. Books are not postage stamps, where an acciden-
tal printing of an upside down airplane means a fortune, but, even if they were,
those inverted airmails were offered inadvertently for sale. Those who purchase such
items in the belief that they have some great value are doomed to discover that they
could have done no better to have bound blank sheets; in the main, they are not odd
variants, they are books defective in manufacture, and are no more special or desir-
able than a house with one side wall missing or collapsed would be a “unique variant
in architecture.”
A Note on galley proofs: Almost all of the publishers listed here also
produced galleys, which are advance (and usually uncorrected) copies of the book,
sometimes in long strips of type, just as often assembled like books with a paper
cover and then perfect or spiral bound (see the glossary if you don't know what
perfect binding is). Most publishers do not keep track of the number of galleys,
bound or otherwise, that they put out, as they are really just a step in the production
process, but the galleys do get out into the collector's marketplace because they are
also what is normally used to send out copies for review, so that reviews might hit
the stands at around the same time as the book. As with almost anything else, there
are galley proof collectors, since they are uncorrected and often contain small items
not in the final book, but as they are ubiquitous we do not list them (except in rare
cases where the publisher could and did provide exact information even when not
requested). Proof collecting is a separate hobby (and occasionally rewarding, as the
“uncorrected” proofs often contain unintentional gaffs or excised passages) but it is a
different sort of thing than book collecting. To qualify for inclusion here, a book must
have been not merely printed but published—that is, distributed and offered for sale.
Lexicography: As we said about “perfect bound” above, the book industry has
its own terms and SF has more, just as lawyers and doctors and other professions
have their own jargon. If terms like “worldcon” and “fanzine” and “apa,” which you'll
find sprinkled throughout the text, or short forms for magazines like ASF and UNK,
are unfamiliar to you, we've included a Glossary in the back explaining as many as
we thought you might need. Other appendices list books announced by covered
publishers but never done by them—and what the fate of the titles ultimately was if
we know (Almost-Rans), a listing of names and addresses for active publishers and
also active mail order dealers we have personally dealt with that will certainly be
the one part of this work to quickly date (Where To Find Them), and a discussion of
the books as collectibles, But What's It Worth? We have also included the master
ISBNs (although not for every title, just the prefix) for each imprint that is current
enough to have them (they only began in the late 1960s) and also participates in the
system (some, including major players like Pulphouse, either don't do so or did not
until they were well along).
If you have any additions, corrections, objections, or comments you would like
to share that would help perfect future revisions, please write us care of The
Mirage Press, Ltd., P.O. Box 1689, Westminster, Maryland 21158–1689, U.S.A.
Spare us, please, the “Ha! Ha! You goofed and I'm not going to tell you where!”

xxi PREFACE
xxii PREFACE

type of letters. For one thing, they're childish and serve no purpose but to hinder the
researchers and collectors who need the information in this book. But, if we blew it,
we want to know where. If we missed something, we want to know what we missed.
If we got something wrong, even slightly, we want to know not only that we did, but
exactly what we got wrong and what's correct. If we committed some stupid mistake,
or some gross error, please feel free to laugh at us or groan at it or even embarrass
us—so long as you tell us. It is cooperation like that which has kept this work as
complete and up-to-date as it is, and we need you.
While we believe a work of this kind to be essential and a major contribution to
bibliographic history, we are under no illusions that this is going to be a best-seller or
a massive popular work, nor is it intended to be. We would, in fact, we quite
surprised and shocked if this edition sold out in any short period of time. As a result,
we do not anticipate reprinting this edition and will not unless sales and interest are
far greater than we now believe. If that is so, and we do, we will attempt to incorpo-
rate such revisions as we discovered them or as they were reported to us in any such
reprinting, at least as an addendum or companion booklet which would also be made
available to purchasers of the initial printing if we know who and where you are.
While we didn't include any warranty cards, dropping us a postcard to the address
above and keeping that address current will insure that you are notified of such
supplements.
Otherwise, the project will continue so long as either or both of us live, and
when sufficient new material warrants, a brand new edition will be compiled and
published.
The Third Edition Version 3.5 was intended to be complete only through the
year 1997. Some books published later were included, if information on them was
available prior to final printing, but we make no guarantees beyond 1997 and some
recent titles might lack exact printing figures or points. If you are a new publisher
launched after the cut-off, though, and we didn't catch you this time, we most assur-
edly want to hear from you. If you're a publisher we overlooked somehow and you
think you should be here, we want to hear from you as well. The database will
continue to be available to, and used by, others, published or not, and we have never
charged for its use by legitimate scholars.
Finally, a work of this kind requires more hard work and cooperation from liter-
ally hundreds of people than can possibly be acknowledged or repaid. If possible we
have tried to credit those specific to a publisher in the historical matter with their
entries; we apologize if we missed anybody (as we probably did). In addition to those,
we'd like to particularly thank the following people for extra help above and beyond
the call of duty at various times during the more than quarter of a century this
project has so far consumed:

Ken Abner, Forrest J. Ackerman, Justin Ackroyd, Pat Adkins, David Aronovitz,
the late Ian Ballantine, George Beahme, Claire Beck, Gordon Benson, Jr., Richard
Bergeron, Alex Berman, John Betancourt, Mervyn Binns, Everett F. Bleiler, the late
Joseph Payne Brennan, Seth Briedbart, C.W. Brooks, Jr., Bob Brown, Stephen
Buhner, Orson Scott Card, John D. Carr, the late G. Ken Chapman, Richard Chiz-
mar, Gavin Claypool, Tracy Cocoman, Charles M. Collins, Dr. Robert L. Collins, Jeff

PREFACE xxii
PREFACE xxiii

Connor, the late Willis Connover, William G. Contento, Peggy and the late William
Crawford, Lloyd W. Currey, L Sprague deCamp, Wayne and Darlene Decker, Barbara
de la Hunty, the late Gerry de la Ree, the late Ted E. Dikty, Ron Drummond, Chris
Logan Edwards, Robert Eighteen-Bisang, Peter Enfantino, Les Escott, Lloyd Arthur
Eshbach, Ken Faig, Dr. George Flynn, Alan Dean Foster, Meade and Penny Frierson,
W. Paul Ganley, Robert Garcia, Chuck Garvin, Robert Gavora, Jack Gonzalez, Jean
Gonzalez, Michael Goodwin, Craig Graham, Donald M. Grant, Martin L. Greenberg,
Philip Gurlik, Jr., David G. Hartwell, David Hinchberger, Allen J. Hubin, Greg
Ketter, Jerry Kaufman, Ken Keller, Dan Knight, Erle Melvin Korshak, David Antho-
ny Kraft, Kenneth J. Krueger, David A. Kyle, Barry R. Levin, Jeffrey A. Levin, Dr.
Anthony R. Lewis, Richard G. Lewis, Gordon Linzner, George Locke, Thomas M.
Loock, Richard A. Lupoff, John Maclay, Robert A. Madle, Bill Malloy, Dennis McMill-
an, Sean McMullen, Peter McNamara, Terrence McVicker, Norman Metcalfe, Ann
Cameron Mikol, Charles F. “Chuck” Miller, Debby Moir, Thomas F. Monteleone, and
the late Sam Moskowitz.
Also, Alan Bard Newcomer, Rick Norwood, the late Dr. Alan E. Nourse, Dwayne
Olson, Dr. Frank J. Olynyk, Jim Pattison, John Pelan, Otto Penzler, James E. Pervi-
ance, Jr., Keith Petersen, Rog Peyton, Andrew Porter, J.B. Post, Phil Rahman, Mike
Resnick, Andy Richards, Jame A. Riley, Barbara and Christopher Roden, Conrad H.
Ruppert, Ray Russell, Tom & Enid Schantz, Dr. Stuart David Schiff, Julius
Schwartz, Darrell Schweitzer, George H. Scithers, Jim Seels, Dean Wesley Smith,
Richard Spelman, the late Roy A. Squires, Joe Stefko, Graham Stone, J. Grant
Thiessen, the late Oswald Train, Bill Trojan, Donald Tuck, Wilson “Bob” Tucker, the
late James Turner, Tim Underwood, the late Julius Unger, the late Karl Edward
Wagner, Peder Wagtskjold, R.F. Wald, Michael J. Walsh, Robert Weinberg, Jacob
Weisman, Tom Whitmore, Robert Wiener, Jason Williams, Chet Williamson, Richard
Witter, the late Ed Wood, JoAnn Wood, Cindy and Mark V. Ziesing, and countless
others too numerous to mention, all of whom contributed more than mere reports
and made this work as complete and as correct as it is, and particularly to the late
August Derleth, who inspired and enthusiastically aided and encouraged us in the
beginning. Without a lot of volunteer work by what amounts to a small army, this
would have been impossible.
Now, start with the Introduction which gives the background history essential
to understanding the specific commentaries, then start turning to any reference
therein that catches your eye, or follow the cross-reference threads around the book.
You purchased this work (we assume) because you have some interest in this field,
and you probably have many of these titles on your shelves. You may agree or
disagree with us and our analyses, but we think you will be fascinated overall. Like
the historical artifacts in the Smithsonian or British Museum, you might not have
given them a second glance until you know the stories behind them, until you can
put faces and names and events to those artifacts. Ben Franklin's original printing
press, in the Smithsonian, just looks like a piece of somewhat restored junk from
someone's cellar or attic until you know that it was Franklin who used it and it was
on that press that everything from Poor Richard's Almanac to broadsides on the
cause of American revolution were produced on it. It was our intent to do the same
with the SF specialty press books in your personal or institutional library or collec-

xxiii PREFACE
xxiv PREFACE

tion; to put faces, names, and histories on those volumes, so that you will never look
at them again but to think of the history and hands and stories they represent as
well.
If we achieve that, then a few uncaught errors and a few blanks here and there
will be a small price to pay.

PREFACE xxiv
PREFACE TO THIS NEW EDITION xxv

SUPPLEMENTAL PREFACE TO
THIS
EDITION
In 1991, we predicted that there would be a major shake-up in the SF/fantasy/
horror field in the Nineties and we were right. The shock was, however, that it
wasn’t as much in the small presses (although a few were really spectacular crash
and burn operations like Pulphouse Publishing), which continue to, well, contin-
ue, thanks to desktop publishing, not thriving but certainly not in any worse condi-
tion than the average over the past twenty-five years, but rather the shake-up was
in SF/fantasy/horror mass market publishing—or, more properly, all of mass market
publishing regardless of category.
A combination of factors were at fault for this, as serious a collapse as the great
small press and magazine collapse of 1955. Ironically, this shift from mass market
publishing pushed a lot of writers into the small presses who either weren’t there
before or were there with ambitions to go national. Just as the mass market paper-
back killed the first wave, then created the second wave, so, too, its near demise has
created unprecedented opportunities for specialty publishing growth. Why? Because
few in major publishing even know how to sell trade hardcovers; for almost fifty
years they have set themselves up as developers and designers for the mass market
paperback. They can handle the best sellers, but the rest is beyond them. The spe-
cialty press is always a trade press and knows how to sell. Whether it is up to the job
remains to be seen, but there is clearly money to be made here.
This edition of The Science–Fantasy Publishers has been updated to include
information received since the publication of the 1992 Third Edition. All the biblio-
graphic information, including updates through at least 1997 and the histories, as
well as all corrections to older entries, have been folded in. Not all of the historical
material in the supplements is included here, since what might be interesting in that
arena really amounts to footnotes in the larger context, but all the vital information
is here.
In addition, we have reformatted the book somewhat, changing to Adobe
FrameMaker from the old original word processor for the book and taking advantage
of some of the additional layout possibilities that program allows. Introductory mate-
rial has been updated where appropriate, both in the main introduction and in intro-
ductions to entries, although no thorough rewrite was attempted so some material
might well be old. A few marginal publishers from Fellow Travelers have been
eliminated because of size considerations or for revealing that they did not meet our
criteria; a few other publishers have been reassigned front to back or vice-versa. In
spite of its mainstream titles, we’ve kept, for example, Underwood Books in the
front since its primary marketing is to the SF/fantasy/horror buyers (and, since the
shake-out suddenly produced lots of returns and no payments for the mainstream
stuff, Underwood’s shifted back to the genre rather fast). Dark Harvest goes to the
back because it deliberately turned its back on this market and tried to go in a new

xxv PREFACE TO THIS NEW EDITION

xxvi PREFACE TO THIS NEW EDITION

direction–and collapsed when it did it. Still, this is essentially just a corrected and
updated 1991 edition; if you have the original big book and the supplements, you will
find nothing new here save a better integration of the data. That’s why this is 3.5,
not the fourth edition. We are also looking into the idea of putting the book on CD
ROM with hypertext links as the Electronic Edition, and this might well be what you
are reading, predating the very expensive hard copy version. We are getting con-
cerned that it may one day be too expensive to even print, let alone buy, a book like
this in any other form than electronic.
So, keep it always in mind that what you have here is an interim version of a
work still very much in progress.
—JLC/MO

PREFACE TO THIS NEW EDITION xxvi

INTRODUCTION xxvii

INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD

EDITION

There have always been private publishers and small presses. Until the era of
Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, however, these were always the exclu-
sive domain of the very rich and influential, simply because the cost of self-produc-
tion was prohibitive.
These early works, which extend from only decades after the invention of
movable type and whose descendants still continue today, cover every topic and type
of book imaginable. Quite a number of them, surprisingly, are period science fiction
or fantasy, although those terms as literary genres did not exist then, and while
some are quite interesting, or even charming, and have small but devoted collector
followings, the vast bulk were (and are) simply dreadful.
Our story, like much else in the cultural history of western civilization in the
Nineteenth Century, begins with Sears & Roebuck's contribution to self-publication,
the Sears catalog.
In 1867, the Sears catalog introduced the first popular and affordable private
small printing press for the educated masses. It was no simple or easy gadget to use;
you had to set each page by hand, a letter or symbol at a time, manually chock it,
then carefully roll on just the right amount of ink, expertly place a piece of paper on
it, and then apply the literal press to transfer the words to paper much as Gutenberg
had done more than four centuries earlier. The difference was that the presses sold
were small, the type and parts mass produced, and the whole thing affordable to the
newly emerging middle class.
Not coincidentally, two years later, in 1869, the National Amateur Press Associ-
ation was formed in the United States with a then unique idea. Members from
almost anywhere would write and print a sufficient number of copies of their small
magazines or chapbooks to give one to each other member; the other members would
do the same. Thus, if you had fifty members, you produced fifty copies of your little
masterpiece—well within the patience of the amateur operator of a cheap basement
hand letterpress—and sent them, in bulk, to an official editor, as did the other forty-
nine members, on, say, a quarterly basis. Back in the mail, every quarter, you would

xxvii INTRODUCTION
xxviii INTRODUCTION

receive a bulk mailing of fifty publications—one each of yours and forty-nine others.
Other than to pay dues sufficient to cover mailing and administrative costs and to
supply the correct number of copies regularly, there were no other limits. One could
literally publish anything that interested him or her (and, yes, from the start, a
number of women found this a great creative outlet as well).
By the turn of the century, NAPA had been joined by a number of other
amateur press associations, and some were not nearly as fussy as NAPA was as to
the quality of print. The typewriter was now around, and, shortly after, Sears intro-
duced the poor person's press, the hectograph. The “hecto” was incredibly messy and
used a master sheet which created a stencil of sorts when typed upon. One then used
a box, stretch frame, and gelatinous ink in any color you liked to create one copy at a
time. The print quality was bleary, and because the masters were made of paper,
they were good for only a small number of copies before, saturated, they disintegrat-
ed. Still, the entire process was incredibly cheap and much faster than setting type
by hand. This and the growth of other affordable methods like mimeography and
dittography made the amateur press affordable and available to anyone who wanted
to join in, although the purists continued to use the printing press and the old ways
and looked down upon these newcomers as cheap and tawdry imitators.
In the early years of the Twentieth Century, there was no clear genre called
science fiction, or fantasy, nor weird / horror / occult, or whatever the trade is calling
it this year. Genre fiction existed around the dime novels and pulp magazines, most-
ly westerns, fight stories, romances, and the like, but there was no independent
outlet or forum for science fiction and fantasy nor any real concept of it as separate
and distinct from the mainstream. That idea began in the U.S. in the Twenties, as
can be seen from the listing of the oldest book in here, the first known genre-based
imprint established by people to publish someone other than themselves. This lone
wolf, listed here for just that reason, is The Lunar Publishing Company, and, if
nothing else, it shows how early this field was generating the soon-to-be-communica-
ble disease of small press SF publishing.
SF, fantasy, and supernatural horror did, however, have apostles, adherents,
and fervent fans, and the amateur press associations provided the perfect gathering
place for them and one way of linking them together in a social web that Lunar was
never in. A real magnet was a sickly but brilliant young man in Providence, Rhode
Island, who seemed to belong to just about every amateur press association in the
country, and he introduced others, mostly in their teens, to the “apas,” as they are
affectionately called. Drawn into that world by a friend and neighbor, W. Paul Cook,
who would go on to unknowingly launch the first “real” hardcover specialty science-
fantasy press, Recluse Press, it was Howard Phillips Lovecraft who would set the
fire that ignited the movement—after an occasional wet match.
H. P. Lovecraft's own literary energy was nothing short of phenomenal. While
publishing for all those apas, he also wrote articles, poetry, and occasional amateur
fiction pieces for many other little magazines, and in between tended to issue volu-
minous correspondence. It has been said that Lovecraft could not write “Hello,
having a good time, wish you were here” in less than five thousand words. Certainly
we have seen postcards of his containing over 800 words, and letters running
upwards of a hundred pages of close handwriting. Lovecraft could type but hated to

INTRODUCTION xxviii
INTRODUCTION xxix

do so; he did most everything in or from longhand.

Around Lovecraft formed a small but significant group of like-minded young
people who loved fantasy, science fiction, and the printed word. For many, the apas
were their vaudeville; here they could be bad and learn their craft. Although many
would develop into major writers in the field, including Lovecraft himself, they also
learned editing, publishing, and printing, and many more had no professional aspi-
rations but merely liked the company. Although often separated by vast distances,
they wrote each other constantly, helped each other, and even visited each other
when and if they could. Indeed, when they did get together, they referred to their
gatherings as “conventions,” and the parties were often very good if contemporary
apa accounts like Lovecraft's “The Haverhill Convention” are to be believed, sound-
ing very much like the sort of thing that SF fans would later refine into almost an art
form.
The first of this apa group to break into print, with a poetry collection of his
own, was Clark Ashton Smith, a poor and reclusive poet out in Auburn, California,
east of San Francisco. Smith's first book was published when he was only nineteen,
and, as a result, he became something of a protegé of famed mainstream poet George
Sterling, who took the young Smith under his wing and involved him in the artsy
writer's circle of the time (which included such luminaries as Virginia Woolf and
Ambrose Bierce). It was a heady experience for young Smith, who had little formal
schooling, lived in a log cabin without the amenities of modern civilization, and who
did arduous manual labor to earn enough for his literary activities. He and Love-
craft, who had not much more money than Smith but did live in civilized Providence
with family support, hit it off immediately in letters, and Lovecraft's still-evolving
but quite complex fantasy universe inspired Smith, who had translated Baudelaire
by firelight and studied other's fantasies. Soon, Smith was creating his own comple-
mentary universe to Lovecraft's, with the two freely trading ideas and fantasy
worlds.
Other names followed. A shy young Texan named Robert E. Howard, who
initially broke in to professional print with fight stories and westerns, was one; a
highly educated San Francisco area student of Oriental philosophy and mysticism
named Edgar Hoffman Price was another. Young Midwestern poets August Derleth
and Donald Wandrei became enthusiastic associates.
Lovecraft used the amateur press as his initial vehicle for his fiction, but sold
his first stories to a short-lived magazine called Home Brew, one of the few early
places that would pay for this sort of material. However, it was with the advent of
The Thrill Book in 1919, giving a regular place in the pulps to occult and bizarre
fiction, that many others joined the professional ranks, and the pair—Smith out
west and Lovecraft in the east—formed the anchors for many more. When the maga-
zine Weird Tales was launched in 1923, these men and the others who would become
writers in the genre had a true home. They also had a letter column, Weird Tales'
“Eyrie,” through which more and more fans and would-be writers in the field got in
contact with each other and, eventually, were introduced to the amateur magazines
as well. When Amazing Stories appeared in 1926, it spawned yet another whole new
forum and rallying point, followed in the next few years by Astounding, Wonder
Stories, and many more.

xxix INTRODUCTION
xxx INTRODUCTION

Thus these letter columns, together with the apas, created SF fandom as it is
known today. Cook, who was a big fan of supernatural fiction but whose early work
was far more general, produced the first books for the new apa market, most by
fellow apans, and printed, but did not bind, what would have been Lovecraft's first
book if he had, The Shunned House. But the press was never intended to be a genre-
specific, let alone commercial, enterprise, but rather an extension of Cook's amateur
press work. It just wound up being mostly genre oriented because of the people
involved.
In 1930, a young New Yorker named Allan Glasser, along with fellow teenagers
Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, launched The Time Traveler, acknowledged by
most scholars of the field as the first amateur magazine devoted exclusively and
specifically to science fiction. It was also an independent publication, not an
“apazine,” intended not for a limited apa membership but rather to be sold (or traded
or given) to all those people with whom he and others in the New York area had come
into contact with through the SF pulp letter columns. This was the first of an eventu-
al flood of such amateur magazines that continue to this day and are now collectively
lumped together under the common term “fanzine.”
The relationship between the fanzines of the Thirties and the professional
magazines (called by fanzine people “prozines,” naturally) was symbiotic. The
fanzines remained the vaudeville of the field, but now, unlike earlier days with their
restricted circulation apazines, there was in fact a Palace to play. One could graduate
from fanzine to prozine, in other words, and start getting paid rather than paying to
be published. This was not simply limited to writers; artists, too, graduated from
fanzine to prozine, and one fanzine editor, Charles Hornig, so impressed Hugo
Gernsback, a New York publisher who had launched Amazing, the first SF maga-
zine, that Hornig was offered the editorship of Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, a leading
professional science fiction magazine of the time, and became a major editorial force
in the field before his twentieth birthday.
The sterling successes of these fanzine-to-professional types quite naturally
inspired a lot of folks. One New York fan, Conrad Ruppert, decided not to wait to be
called. Owner of his own printing press and the printer for The Time Traveler, he,
along with Schwartz and Weisinger, decided to put out his own professional maga-
zine, Science-Fantasy Digest (later shorted to Fantasy Magazine). He quickly discov-
ered that merely printing a magazine is not enough; the economics of it involved skill
and luck, a distribution agreement, and, even if you had those, a fairly large cash
reserve. He tried a variety of formats, then finally decided that Fantasy Magazine
simply couldn't get newsstand distribution with all the competition from the big
publishers. He therefore began doing it on a subscription-only basis, with print runs
that were less than ten percent of, say, Astounding or Weird Tales. It was always a
marginal enterprise indulged by his parents, successful bakery owners, who hoped
that if he wasn't to take over the family business he might perhaps become a major
commercial printer (he did).
Still, he broke even or made a small profit over the years, if labor isn't counted
in (and, as you'll see, we never count labor in). During this period, to capitalize on his
subscriber list and to generate a little side money, Ruppert published four single
short story chapbooks to sell to Fantasy Magazine subscribers, although he never

INTRODUCTION xxx
INTRODUCTION xxxi

had any intention of them being more than a supplement to the magazine any more
than Cook had intended his books to be more than extensions of his amateur press
activity. Still, they were the seed from which all that followed grew, and that seed fell
on an admiring young SF fan, one without family money and who lived far from the
bright lights of New York, to put everything together.
He came in fact from the most unlikely of places—Everett, Pennsylvania, a
small town not near any large ones, in the Appalachian region of southwestern
Pennsylvania. His name was William Crawford and he began as others had—as a
fanzine publisher, an apa member, and a prodigious correspondent with Lovecraft
and everybody else in that literary universe.
To Crawford, Fantasy Magazine was the ideal. The concept of editing and
publishing your own prozine, no matter what the odds, was dazzling, and he used his
contacts, mostly via correspondence, with professional writers (starting with an
encouraging fellow Pennsylvanian, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach—later to start Fantasy
Press—who bought the near penniless Crawford his first type font set to encourage
him) to put together Marvel Tales, Uncanny Tales and other experiments, all in obvi-
ous imitation of the much slicker-looking Fantasy Magazine. These were all labori-
ously hand-set on his own printing press, an ancient clunker bought not merely
second hand but really used, and in spite of advertisements and every promotional
method he could think of, they were a major commercial flop. The money was
running out fast, and he looked around to see what he might be able to do to subsi-
dize his magazines, and, again imitating Ruppert, he hit upon the idea of doing
books.
This attitude, magazines as primary and books as a minor sideline, may seem a
rather backwards attitude to many today, but you must remember that, in the Thir-
ties, the magazines were where the action was, where the creative forces congealed,
if only because so many of them had to produce so many pages a month, and because
the editors of the magazines were far more open to new and different approaches,
styles, and concepts than the book editors, who remained firmly rooted in Nine-
teenth Century editorial traditions and were not much interested in science fiction
or fantasy unless it was from someone perceived as outside of those traditions—a
Philip Wylie, for example, or H.G. Wells. Fantasy was to be light and New Yorkerish;
Thorne Smith was king here, and while he was great at what he did, there was no
room for a Hyborean Age or a Necronomicon or a Zothique, let alone a Skylark. The
only book Robert E. Howard could get published in his lifetime was a collection of
satirical western stories—and that only in Great Britain! Lovecraft was already
winning critical and academic acclaim and had even won the prestigious O Henry
Award for short fiction, yet nobody was interested in him for books, either.
The magazines, on the other hand, were places of mystery, creativity, and
wonderment. Most of them also paid reasonably in the Depression era, even with the
occasional ones that “paid on lawsuit” or, more often, on publication.
With that in mind, it's not difficult to see why Ruppert and Crawford both
wanted their own magazines, not book companies.
As we said, though, magazines require newsstand distributors and have an
economics all their own that is cash intensive. Fantasy Magazine never had more
than spotty regional newsstand distribution and was basically a subscription maga-

xxxi INTRODUCTION
xxxii INTRODUCTION

zine all the way, and Crawford couldn't publish a sufficient number of Uncanny Tales
and Marvel to get even that far. However, when he took two totally unrelated stories,
one by David H. Keller and the other by Clark Ashton Smith, and bound them
together as a booklet, the thing sold. Emboldened, he received a manuscript from a
minor SF pulp author, Eugene George Key, basically a collection of stories Key
couldn't sell to the pulps. More interested in publication than royalties, Key deferred
any advance and agreed to a pay-as-you-sell contract, and Crawford produced his
first book, Mars Mountain. And it was a book, organized in signatures, with jacket
and frontispiece, and a small part of the edition was hardbound.
And that, really, is where our work begins. True, we do have Ruppert covered
briefly in two places—ARRA back in Fellow Travelers and in the main body under
Milwaukee Fictioneers, and Cook is here as well under The Recluse Press, but
Cook and Ruppert form the Preface and the Introduction to the story we are telling;
that story truly starts with Crawford's Fantasy Pubs.
It is not our intent to take the story from here in this Introduction; it would
merely duplicate many of the stories you'll find within the work itself. Still, it flows
from this tiny Ruppert-Crawford trickle in a steady and amazingly interrelated flow
to the mighty river of specialty publishing today. Crawford begins with Fantasy
Pubs., then grows to Visionary Publishing Company, and returns after a brief
gap with F.P.C.I. to span almost fifty years of science-fantasy specialty publishing
and see it grow and blossom. As Ruppert's small press activity spawned this, Futile
Press was similarly, if less ambitiously, spawned out west, where Clark Ashton
Smith, another small press veteran, was doing some of his own books. In Wisconsin,
August Derleth and Donald Wandrei would despair of obtaining a mass market
publishing home for their memorial collection by their late friend and mentor, Love-
craft, The Outsider and Others, and decide after looking at Crawford's and Ruppert's
work to do it themselves, founding Arkham House for that purpose, and, when cash
ran short, Derleth would do Someone in the Dark and launch a trail-breaking
publishing enterprise that would survive wars, recessions, market collapses, and
even his own death.
The apparent success of Arkham House would inspire others at war's end, big
fish and little alike. A chance meeting of two men in a Providence bookstore, there to
look over books from Lovecraft's library, would launch Grant-Hadley Enterprises,
The Buffalo Book Company, Hadley Publishing Company, Grandon, and,
ultimately, Donald M. Grant, Publisher, which would one day publish a book
“strictly limited” to a mere 41,200 hardcovers—and sell them out in less than a
month—as well as Centaur, and, inadvertently and indirectly, would pull Lloyd
Eshbach, who'd bought Crawford his type, into founding Fantasy Press as well as
Polaris Press, while, more directly, Kenneth J. Krueger would have not only his
namesake imprint out of it but also help create Shroud, Valcour-Krueger, and
Fantasy House, while out of the SF club Krueger would co-found with Robert Brin-
ey would eventually emerge SSR Publications, Weirdbook, Weirdbook Press, W.
Paul Ganley: Publisher, and The New Establishment Press, while SSR's Brin-
ey would also be one of the founders of Advent.
When you've followed those dizzy cross-references for a while, and read their
stories, you'll see how a misapprehension of just how successful Arkham House real-

INTRODUCTION xxxii
INTRODUCTION xxxiii

ly was combined with a dinner at long-time SF fan turned professional writer and
editor Donald A. Wollheim's would create The New Collector's Group, and how
conflicts within the NCG would lead rather quickly to Gnome Press. Then discover
how a prewar bibliographic dream would lead eventually to the formation of Shasta:
Publishers, while the man who thought up the project would eventually found
Carcosa House and get no less than Bill Crawford to produce his book; and how
that same project would take a man named Thaddeus Dikty from a small town in
Indiana to Shasta, and, after briefly touching Advent, Carcosa, and a few other
places, would find a home with Fax Collector's Editions and Starmont House.
You'll see how prewar friendships made at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society
(PSFS) led eventually to Prime Press, and how that caused Chamberlain and
eventually involved Gnome Press, while others founded New Era, and how and
why many others got into the SF specialty publishing business and made lesser
marks: from the insanity of Pirate Press to the well-meaning ambitions of Avalon,
Trover Hall, and many others you might not have heard of until now.
Discover their stories, filled with fascinating personalities and great authors
and artists and entrepreneurs, for yourself.
The years 1946-1955 were the Golden Age of SF Specialty Publishing, and it
seemed like they could do no wrong and that they were the wave of the future. Most
of the major SF of the day was done by the specialty houses, with first books of Isaac
Asimov, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, the collected works of John W. Campbell, and
countless others being done by them while they preserved the best from the Thirties
and Forties. They had national book distribution and even their own trade associa-
tion, as the photo that led off this discussion illustrates.
And yet, by 1956, all but Arkham House of this great assemblage were dead,
dying, or moribund. Some took longer to die than others—Gnome, for example,
lingered into the early Sixties, a shadow of its former self—but the grand crusade
was over. Gone, too, were the great magazines, reduced from more than fifty at the
start of the decade to a mere six by the end of it.
This period is to SF publishing what 1929 is to the stock market: a near
complete collapse. Like that great Wall Street crash, not everything died, but for
generations after it was a pale imitation of its former self. After, there would be a few
attempts in the late Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, to launch new magazines, but
only one effort, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, launched under the editor-
ship of a fanzine editor and SF specialty publisher, would succeed. Only one SF
publisher began in the late Fifties, Advent, but it was always intended as a sideline
and, as such, had the time to discover its niche as the publisher of nonfiction. Only
one publisher would be launched in the Sixties—Mirage Press, aided and encour-
aged by Gnome's Marty Greenberg and, most of all, by Arkham's August Derleth,
but, while it did occasional fiction, its success, like Advent's, was rooted in nonfiction
about the field.
Much has been written on this collapse, and the most popular theory about it
was that it was caused by the growth of television. Of all the ideas about its cause,
that is the least correct. We could go into a whole sociological tract on that theory,
but the fact is that the three decades that followed the collapse saw the per capita
sale of books rise to be the highest in history. Since the bulk of the people buying

xxxiii INTRODUCTION
xxxiv INTRODUCTION

those books grew up as a television generation, if there was any validity to the TV
villain theory then we should have seen a steady curve of declining sales. Enough
said on that.
Villain number one in the collapse was seen at the start of the decade as
specialty publishing's salvation: the mass market paperback book. Contrary to the
error-filled histories of this phenomenon, this is the way it was, told to us by the
folks who did it, including particularly the late Ian Ballantine:
The paperback as a true mass market medium was introduced into the U.S. by
the British publisher Penguin in 1939, when they hired a young marketing genius
named Ian Ballantine to establish and run their U.S. operation. Penguin had
pioneered the paperback in Britain in the Thirties by producing inexpensive editions
of public domain classics which could be cheaply purchased by university students
and did only occasional reprints of contemporary works at the start, and they wanted
to try the same thing in the much larger U.S. market.
When World War II made quick and easy contact with Britain difficult, Ian
Ballantine, under Penguin's U.S.-based New American Library division, ran the
subsidiary basically as an independent house and aimed, as did home-grown compet-
itor Pocket Books, primarily for the military market, which had millions of bored
young men far from home and without either the cash or the ability to pick up,
purchase, or store hardcovers. By the end of the war, Ballantine had come up with a
solution for what to do when peace broke out, and, rather than go back to being a
subordinate under Penguin, he left and founded Bantam Books on the basis of this
revolutionary invention and theory.
The invention was the revolving wire paperback rack. The theory was that,
since the rack took up only a square foot of floor space, the paperback could be
distributed not just to bookstores and newsstands, but to supermarkets, convenience
stores, truck stops, gasoline stations—anywhere any business had a square foot of
floor. Although quickly imitated by Pocket and NAL, Bantam immediately took the
lead as the number one mass market paperback publisher in North America and, in
spite of bumps, remained a major player in a shrinking field.
Initially, the paperback was no competition for the hardcover. It began mostly
with old stuff, and took a few years to exhaust it, building up capital until it could
compete with the major hardcover houses for first-rate material. But the system ate
up new titles at a horrendous rate; the increasing number of paperback publishers
needed between six and thirty new titles every single month and depended on quick
turnaround and quick sales. With the end of the war, rubber was once again avail-
able so that paperbacks could buy the type from hardcover houses and photo-engrave
them onto rubber plates, churning out tens of thousands of each title on a printing
and binding assembly line, and rubber plates stored flat on hangers and could be
hauled down at any moment and almost immediately thrown back on the press as
needed. At those quantities, and using materials no better than the pulp magazines
in quality, the production cost per copy was minuscule. With the mass market distri-
bution system and the racks, it didn't even pay to have distributors return whole
copies of unsold books; instead, as with the pulps before, only the cover was to be
returned for credit, with the distributor promising (not always faithfully) to destroy
the rest.

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INTRODUCTION xxxv

Hardcover publishers had always purchased a share, often as high as 50%, of

any subsidiary rights, and the more savvy specialty publishers did the same. The
sale of set type to mass market paperback gave them instant cash infusions with
which to acquire and publish more books, and it looked like a wonderfully symbiotic
relationship was developing.
The problem was, almost all SF specialty publishers were or are collectors. Not
a one could conceive of the fact that a large number of their patrons might be more
interested in reading Heinlein's next book than in whether or not they owned a fine
hardcover of it. The public, however, learned quickly that if they just waited a year,
instead of paying $3.00 for a big, heavy hardcover, they could own a smaller copy of
the book for a quarter or thirty-five cents. The publishers had rolled their cash inflow
back into their lines; a sudden loss of up to fifty percent of their previous purchasers
caused instant cash flow problems and cascaded into defaults on royalties, contracts,
you name it. Most were running on empty by 1954.
Also, in 1954 the cost of acquisition was up; the big boys had not been ignorant
of what the specialty publishers were doing and had learned that science fiction and
fantasy sold quite well. Naive, a number of specialty publishers, including Eshbach,
Greenberg, and Korshak, were only too willing to discuss the field with Doubleday's
Walter Bradbury, who used a lot of what he learned to launch Doubleday's own
science fiction line as well as The Science Fiction Book Club, which, beginning
with Max Erlich's The Big Eye in 1950, began to sell cheaply-made hardcovers of SF
titles for a mere $1.20 each, a figure no specialty press could match (although
Gnome, at least, tried for a while to do just that).
The other big companies were in it now, too. Few could escape noting that The
Man Who Sold the Moon, for example, had sold over eleven thousand hardcover
copies for Shasta, higher than the average New York publisher's run for all but the
guaranteed best-sellers (and Korshak hadn't spent much promotion money to do it,
either). Indeed, many Doubleday SF books of the Fifties are far more difficult to find
than many specialty press books of the period (try finding a Doubleday first edition
copy of Poul Anderson's The High Crusade, or Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, for
example—and note the price if you do). Crown was in, and Fell, Winston, and Simon
and Schuster, the latter two specifically targeting the YA (young adult) market
developed so profitably by Gnome Press, and just about everybody else was jumping
on the bandwagon with both feet and stuffed wallets. Ian Ballantine was even more
competition; having made his fortune with Bantam and tiring of producing dozens of
books a month he cared little about, he sold the company and, with wife Betty, found-
ed Ballantine Books, which would publish only those things the Ballantines liked—
and one of the things they liked very much was science fiction. They could even offer
hardcovers for the library market and to make authors happy (produced in very
small editions and most extremely rare today—again, many far scarcer than the
Gnomes and Arkhams of the day) and then do mass market paperbacks of them,
thus keeping all the proceeds and buying first book publication rights, not mere
reprint rights.
This was important to the authors, too, who got full royalties rather than
having to split fifty-fifty with a hardcover house. And a Ballantine could pay, up
front, more money than any specialty publisher probably did for the entire life of

xxxv INTRODUCTION
xxxvi INTRODUCTION

their books.
The Fifties are, in fact, not a depression at all but a new Golden Age for science
fiction in books rather than magazines—but specialty publishing was doomed, not by
bust but by boom, essentially a suicide, done in by its own success in proving the
market.
There had been an unmet need out there and the SF specialty publishers had
filled it and showed what a gold mine it could be—and the mainstream boys looked,
watched in amazement, then moved in with their superior capital, distribution, and
resources, and took it over.
The magazines? Much the same villain. A store could put up far more paper-
backs on a rack than magazines, have the same cheap and easy cover-only return
system, and get a better discount. Distributors edged out magazines for paperbacks.
And so it went....
So it was that in 1966, when we published The Index to the Science-Fantasy
Publishers, the first version of this work, we wrote that we didn't expect to have to
add all that much in the future, that it was a historical work, a tribute to the dedica-
tion and sweat of the pioneers who'd made SF and fantasy major, who'd carved a
market out of nothing, and who'd saved so many great writers of the pulps from
obscurity when most of the pulps themselves had vanished in wartime paper drives.
You doubt this? Try and find a Norvell W. Page book out there now. He deserves to be
there, but he was overlooked. So were many others, but the fact that there are very
few Pages in the SF/fantasy field who got overlooked is because of Bill Crawford,
Don Grant, August Derleth, and the rest. Men who also launched book careers—A.E.
van Vogt, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, L. Ron Hubbard, Robert A. Heinlein—only a
few of the great names whose first SF/fantasy books were specialty press ones.
And so, with our 35 main publishers and half-dozen or so associated imprints,
we said in 1966 that it was all over, a golden era of import well worth chronicling,
but basically it was a memorial. Oh, we predicted that we'd discover that we’d
missed a few (we did), had a lot of errors and mistakes that would need correcting
(we certainly had those in abundance!), but, in the main, it was over. Arkham House
and Don Grant would continue to do the old classics, maybe, and Advent would do
the nonfiction and bibliographical material, but that was about it.
A glance at the Table of Contents here will show seven or eight times the
number of imprints as we had in the 1966 volume, and the supplementary section,
Fellow Travelers, alone contains more entries than we had in the whole 1966
edition.
Nobody can say we made a little mistake....
Where on earth did we go so completely wrong?
The sole reason we gave back then for having specialty publishing, the only
reason for success, save vanity press items and memorials, was to fill an unmet need,
and that was absolutely true. Where we goofed was in our failure to perceive that
there might be unmet needs in this market beyond those which launched the earlier
generation of specialty publishers. And one of us was partly to blame as well.
Jack L. Chalker came out of SF fandom in the late Fifties and began with a
fanzine, Mirage, which went against the contemporary fanzine grain—it was a seri-
ous magazine containing much nonfiction and bibliographic information on and

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INTRODUCTION xxxvii

about the field as well as publishing fiction and poetry by promising amateurs like
Ramsey Campbell, Tim Powers, and Edward W. Bryant, as well as material by old-
timers like David H. Keller and Seabury Quinn (the latter's last new work of fiction
appeared there first). It was an old-style fanzine that attracted the top people
because it had, at the time, no competition. To help finance it, shades of Conrad
Ruppert, Chalker launched a chapbook line which was quite successful (see Mirage
Press for all the gory details), including The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publish-
ers, the original form of this work. All Chalker lacked was what Crawford had also
lacked: money.
The year after the Index was published, Chalker found it in a partner, William
Osten, and launched The Mirage Press, Ltd. Having given advice the year before
that only nonfiction had a future, Advent was the model, and Chalker even wound
up using Advent's printer in Michigan and picking up a couple of projects Advent
had turned down as too complex. Unlike Crawford, he dropped the fanzine to concen-
trate on the book market, but Mirage had shown the market out there for serious
fanzines on the SF/fantasy/horror field, and good ones of that type were now popping
up all over, many from Mirage subscribers. Soon there was Weirdbook and Nyctalops
and Whispers and many, many more, most superior to Mirage in a number of ways.
In 1971, August Derleth died, and Chalker found, to his total astonishment,
that, for that brief period of the early Seventies, he was now the central figure in
science-fantasy publishing. Like Derleth, he wasn't as successful as he appeared to
be, but he was profitable (and, reading his own analysis, careful not to sell a Mirage
Press book to paperback until after its hardcover sales began to trail off or less than
10% of the edition remained in stock).
It appeared to a lot of others that there was still life in specialty publishing
after all, though, and people began asking him for advice on starting up their own
operations. Most he happily gave advice to, but turned down offers of partnership,
since most of the would-be publishers wanted to do fiction again, and the two books
of fiction he'd done were the most trouble and the least financially rewarding of all
the Mirage titles. This process continues, though, both directly and indirectly—and
often obliviously. When Chalker wrote Aphelion, a new Australian imprint, for
information on them and their titles for this work, the reply noted, “Well, it's as
much your fault as anybody's. We sat and talked about this at the 1985 World SF
Convention in Melbourne....”
And so the chains are forged again. Advent, Gnome, and Arkham House people
lead to the formation of Mirage Press, which shows a new market out there and
leads to another complex web that is still being spun.
George Scithers, whose own fanzine, Amra, had provided material for three of
Mirage's books, including its first hardcover, launched Owlswick Press. Sid Altus
joined with Alex Berman to launch Phantasia. Two mail order book dealers from
opposite ends of the country got together as Underwood–Miller. Presses, many
launched with Chalker's advice and information, soon shared their own experience
with others who launched new presses. The successful serious fanzines that had
picked up where Mirage had left then launched their own book lines—Weirdbook
Press, Whispers Press, Silver Scarab, and others. Even Bill Crawford tested the
waters again with three more books! The whole thing was starting all over again,

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xxxviii INTRODUCTION

with threads and interrelationships and friendly aid weaving a pattern even more
complex than before.
Of course, not everybody was successful, but that was just like the last time.
But at least the same percentage of new presses as before were successful, including
several that published almost exclusively fiction.
Why? What need were these people filling?
Believe it or not, the primary reason was the mass market paperback!
It had been there, staring at us, in 1966, but neither we nor anyone else noticed
it at the time. It began, as usual, with Ian Ballantine, who decided that his hardcov-
er line just wasn't worth the time and effort—but he didn't want to lose his authors.
So, in the late Fifties, Ballantine had still purchased both hardcover and paperback
rights, but now he reversed the classic process and sold hardcover rights to the books
by his top authors to hardcover houses, particularly those geared to library sales.
The authors were happy—they got nice hardcover editions and full paperback
money—and so was Ballantine. Naturally, though, only the best, most automatic
selling authors were salable that way, and during the Sixties and Seventies the vast
bulk of important SF and fantasy/horror fiction came out exclusively in paperback.
Authors hated it—some top authors were virtually unknown to libraries, for
example, and even The Library of Congress threw (and still throws) most paper-
backs right out into the trash dumpster. Mark Owings noted that, in 1990, Chalker
had forty novels published by major mass market publishers, yet the Library of
Congress credited him with only six! Many top authors had none at all during this
Sixties and Seventies period. But authors, in the main, couldn't afford to sell to hard-
cover houses in the midst of a booming market fueled by Star Trek, Star Wars, and
the like. They'd get a few thousand dollars up front and wait three years or more to
see just half of the far larger paperback royalties (royalties are still paid in part
based on the amount of time it took the transcontinental railroad to ship returns
back from the west in 1880 and then assemble and count the returns by hand—even
in today's computerized point-of-sale world, because they get to keep the money long-
er and “float” it as investments).
A Doubleday or St. Martins couldn't make a lot of money on back-licensed hard-
covers without a share of paperback royalties; indeed, many if not most hardcover
houses became more like typesetting shops, where they buy books for small advanc-
es, produce a small quantity in cheap editions, then sell them to the paperback hous-
es and book clubs and the like and keep 15-50% of the income, controlling at all
times all the revenues earned by a title as well as retaining editorial dominance,
with only a few best-sellers to rake in the real money in hardcover and make it look
like they are still as they were.
No, a Doubleday or St. Martins couldn't make a lot of money with no subsidiary
rights shares, but a specialty publisher might.
This market, recognized first by Underwood–Miller and Phantasia, is still
tapped by savvy editor/publishers who know which authors would have sufficient
followings for successful hardcover operations.
The market, too, also opened up for several reasons. A new generation came in,
partly, as we said above, on the winds of the Star Trek, Star Wars, and other media
phenomena, but also because of the increasing academic interest in SF, as well as the

INTRODUCTION xxxviii
INTRODUCTION xxxix

fact that the baby boomers had reached the peak of their wave at a period where
they had a great deal of disposable income. Doubleday, whose Fifties SF Book Club
was created partly because it continued to perceive SF as a YA market and noted the
baby boom coming, ultimately lost its own domination of the field by its failure to
recognize that SF from the Sixties to the present was increasingly being purchased
by older, adult audiences and by both sexes. Indeed, Doubleday was so out of touch
with the evolution in buying patterns that in the late Eighties it was bought by
Bantam, Ian Ballantine’s old paperback house which by now was owned by the huge
German Bertelsmann conglomerate, following G.P. Putnams and many other venera-
ble imprints to be so eaten by other paperback companies (and in turn be eaten by
even bigger competitors, leaving few survivors). Indeed, by early 1998, even Random
House would be merged into the Bertelsmann empire while Berkley/Ace/Putnams
would become a division of Penguin.
Also, those who came in late, particularly the baby boomer generation, read
and learned enough to find out what they'd missed, and produced a secondary boom
in the out of print market. Arkham House books that could be had for eight to forty
dollars tops in the Sixties became three figure collector's items in the Seventies—and
some four figures. Sotheby's auctioned off an Outsider and Others for close to two
thousand dollars as early as the Seventies. Mark Owings, who had acquired a Histo-
ry of Civilization at auction in the mid-Sixties for $48, notes that a similar set in
lesser condition brought five thousand dollars in 1989. Prices for first editions of
books which had cult-like followings, like the original Chilton edition of Dune (a
mere and unbelievable 1500 copy edition!), went into the hundreds as well. Scientol-
ogists drove signed copies of Hubbard up into the thousands of dollars, and anything
with Hubbard in it to three figures. Specialty publishing, the collectibles of a select
few, had become, like old coins and stamps, an area for investment.
The newer buyers, on average, were neither knowledgeable nor sophisticated
about the market or the field, but they did have income, and a great deal of specula-
tion buying emerged. It wasn't long before some of the new specialty publishers
noticed that a sizable number of people were playing the limited editions field as a
sort of commodities market and began to produce some or occasionally all of their
books specifically for this unsophisticated speculative collectible buyer. A few
publishers began to look less like the “filling the need” sort and look more and more
like miniature clones of the Franklin Mint, editorially heedless of what they
published and publishing only those SF/fantasy authors sure to be on the best seller
lists and thus have autographs in great demand.
For a while, the autographed Stephen King book became a standard, and the
Wall Street Journal even did a semi-serious look at the business of “Stephen King
Futures.” (They concluded, by the way, that it had a low return-per-dollar compared
to more conventional and safer areas and didn't recommend it). This reached the
height of absurdity when specialty publishers began publishing hardcovers of hard-
covers, hoping (at times unsuccessfully) to be the “first state” by beating the mass
market hardcover to press by days or weeks, the only really distinguishing thing
between theirs and the mass market versions being a different jacket and that all-
important autograph page, and there also emerged the ultimate commodity produc-
er, who bound mass market galleys or photo-reproductions of galleys and sold them

xxxix INTRODUCTION
xl INTRODUCTION

autographed for hundreds. Catering to this market grew so profitable that even
major general publishers like Putnams and Doubleday began doing their own small
and limited deluxe signed and numbered editions.
Underwood and Miller established what they themselves characterized as a
“Franklin Mint type operation” in cooperation with the Waldenbooks bookstore
chain, printing signed and numbered limited editions of Janet Daley, Frederick
Forsythe, and other mass market authors under the Brandywyne Books imprint,
although in their defense and unlike some others, they did not take their own
imprint in that direction save to sample audiences. These were successful enough
that Waldens itself launched its own line, with Crown, of such collectibles exclusively
for its stores (although it went nowhere, causing resentment that a major chain was
competing with other publishers depending on it for sales and shelf space, and was
allowed to die when Crown was merged into Random House, one of the few surviving
original hardcover houses because it bought a paperback line before a paperback line
could buy it.). Waldens, however, did establish a special order service to secure a
percentage of collectibles by the most famous SF/fantasy/horror authors for their
patrons.
A few of the smarter old hands, most notably Donald M. Grant, used that
market to their own advantage. Lloyd Eshbach had created the special limited and
signed edition for Fantasy Press back in the Forties because it guaranteed retail full-
price prepublication sales that could, in whole or in part, provide the front money to
pay all or almost all of the cost of mass market editions and thus lessen or almost
eliminate the capitalization problem that plagued and doomed so many. Grant used
the new Instant First Edition system, primarily with King and Straub, to gain large
amounts of ready cash to finance his extensive line of less commercial books. Grant
even managed to get hardcover exclusives of King's “Gunslinger” books. We wonder
what the Don Grant of the Forties might have said if he were assured that one day
he would publish a hardcover fantasy book under his own specialty imprint strictly
limited to a mere 41,200 copies! And sell them out almost instantly at that.
Fortunately, the “instant first edition” hardcover of a hardcover seems to have
been mostly a passing if profitable fad, now limited to those very few authors who
can be counted upon to generate enormous amounts of capital for other projects or to
very small editions where the autograph is rare enough to be really commercial
(such as Phantasia's 450 copy signed edition of William Shatner's Tekwar, although
that didn't prove to be such a instant money-maker after all).
Publishing such editions to build capital for less commercial (or, at least, harder
to sell) but still deserving enterprises is, we think, a legitimate purpose; the tenden-
cy of some during the height of this to devote almost all their energies to such
projects we felt, and still feel, was not. This is not to say there is anything immoral or
illegal (although possibly fattening) about such endeavors; if there's money to be
made and people are willing to pay the price, then somebody will fill the demand.
The Franklin Mint-like Easton Press is doing a series of autographed deluxe leather-
bound SF hardcovers in just this manner. It's just that we are surveying a unique
corner of the book publishing business here, and it's what we're interested in, and
what we love. That sort of operation, except when it's intended to generate cash to
finance real books, isn't the book business at all—it's the autograph business, and we

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INTRODUCTION xli

daresay that a vast majority of that type of book will never be read or even opened.
Books which are not read or even opened are not what we are all about.
When Jack L. Chalker spoke out in print against this at its height, at least two
publishers got very offended and angry and ceased all cooperation with this project
for several years. That hurts the collector more than us, but we've done our best with
them anyway, and Chalker, at least, notes that shortly after he criticized the opera-
tions, they veered away from the hardcover-of-hardcover business and went back
into the business of publishing hardcovers of original paperbacks, a worthy Second
Generation project. We're sorry about hurt feelings, but killing the messenger is
always easier than digesting the message.
It does, however, raise an important point, and that is that many of our fellow
bibliographers have noted our sincere criticism (which most agree with, let it be
noted) and blunt honesty, yet have urged us not to do it because of the threat of no
cooperation. We have not found this a limiting factor, in that even those few who
wouldn't deal with us have dealt with others, and there is a lot of cooperation
amongst bibliographers and collectors in this field. On the other hand, the criticism,
we feel (and feedback also indicates this) is a positive force done out of our passion
for these books. It's our feeling, too, that a scholar who holds back sincerely held
beliefs, or even data, out of fear of this sort has compromised his or her work far
beyond the few bruised egos he might cause. Ours is a different concept of bibliogra-
phy, one meant also as a critical history, and intended to be read by ordinary folks as
well as by scholars. Our favorite review of the 1991-92 Big Book was the one that
said that it was the “only three pound reference work we keep in the bathroom for
reading purposes”!
Another trend is due to the concurrent unprecedented affluence of SF clubs and
conventions, starting with NESFA Press and spawning, by imitation, PSFS, WSFA
Press (out of which came Old Earth Books), Serconia (initially), and many
others. Tiny little Dryad Press, launched as a project for a specific Norwestcon,
literally instantly launched Axolotl, which led to Hypatia, which led to Pulphouse
Publishing (which also printed and bound books by others including Mirage and
Wildside), while jump-starting old hand Ted Dikty's Starmont as well. It goes on
and on....
And, we suppose, that brings us to the current state of the art.
We are seeing something of a decline in the instant first edition produced
specifically for speculators, but that is as much a consequence of the mainstream
publishers doing their own versions of these as any real lack of interest on the part of
some of the contemporary publishers. The current record for such a book is probably
Stephen King's expanded, uncut The Stand, done in a gorgeous leatherbound, tray-
cased edition of 1250 copies by Doubleday at $350 each, and sold out before publica-
tion. We always thought Doubleday would make a better specialty publisher than
general one. However, CD Publications has done some equally expensive Dean
Koontz titles since. Again, though, it's the big boys following the little guys' lead. In
Britain, it's getting impossible to tell the big from the little, since almost every major
SF/fantasy/horror title there seems to have an in-house collectible version.
Indeed, in 1988, New York's Whitney Museum published a $1750 a copy limited
edition of Stephen King's My Pretty Pony, of all things. It stands as the only coffee

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table book that we know of that, thanks to its metal binding, could, with the addition
of four legs, actually become a coffee table.
This trend more than any other is responsible for the fading out of the instant
first edition collectible trend in specialty publishing, and we think it's all for the
better.
Several other presses are falling victim to the same old diseases, lack of capital
or lack of personnel or both (usually they go hand in hand but not always), accumu-
lating backlists, and a slowdown in the market's near panic buying of just about
anything with a number or an autograph on it as speculators without knowledge
discover that the majority of books they purchased aren't worth much more than
they paid for them—if buyers can be found at all. We confidently (if sadly) predict
that some of the major contemporary presses covered here will be gone in classic
fashion not only within the decade but in the next few years.
Doubleday's Walter Bradbury, speaking back in 1949 with the specialty
publishers, was amazed at their optimism. “But what do you do when there's a down-
turn in interest in science fiction?” he's said to have asked, knowing that all genre-
specific publishing has cyclical ups and downs. Underwood-Miller, for example, did a
tentative branching out into mainstream titles, and did quite well until the book
distribution system collapsed. Gnome once had that idea as well (they had Edd Cart-
ier draw that gnome of theirs with a cowboy hat, a deerstalker, and the like in case
they branched out, which they never did). Mirage nearly launched a companion
nonfiction mystery line, Baskerville Hall, and, as you'll see, an attempt to go main-
stream was the final nail in Shasta's coffin. Will history repeat? We don't know,
particularly about any specific imprint, but, in general and on the major points, it
sure has so far. Again, it's the Shasta model that shows the risk: it wasn't sales, but
a heart attack by a major author at the start of a promotional tour, that killed them.
These things happen; sooner or later something like that will happen and cost any
publisher playing in that league a bundle. Random House, Penguin, St. Martins and
the like can afford it and factor it in; few small presses can swallow thousands of
unsold copies and the cash it represents.
Equally disturbing is the near uniformity of editorial philosophy, or so it
appears, among most contemporary specialty publishers. It often seemed as if the
same editor was at work at Arkham House, Ziesing, Kerosina, Morrigan, and many
other Eighties publishers. Everybody was required to do a Phil Dick, a Tim Powers, a
Lucius Shepard, a Joe Lansdale, maybe a Gene Wolfe, etc., etc. That's not to say that
those authors aren't good authors or to reflect at all on their work, but it often felt as
if there was little variety among SF specialty presses large or small. Through this
work, we often call this phenomenon “doing the Usual Suspects.”
There are exceptions. Britain's Kinnell, for example, did a wonderful cross-
section of titles, authors, sub-genres, and themes; Illinois-based Dark Harvest was
another doing a wide variety of interesting pieces without an apparent editorial bias,
while Donald M. Grant, as always, pursued his own unique editorial style and
interests. You'll see what we mean about this editorial lock-step of the majority of
contemporary specialty publishers when you go down their bibliographies, or note in
the Index how many different publishers are listed below the same names.
The Northwest Publishing Revolution was at its height exciting if not always

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creative. The first of it was Ted Dikty's discovery of Alan Bard Newcomer's system
that eliminates a step no one else had ever dreamed of eliminating—the printer.
Using a desktop publishing program like Pagemaker, a Macintosh computer, a high-
quality laser typesetting printer, and an equally high-resolution copier, Newcomer
discovered that it was actually cheaper to run off copies of the high quality cold type
by xerography and bind that than it was to send the cold type to a printer! While
certainly not for higher-volume presses, for the smaller limited edition market, it is a
revolution. It must be noted that some people doubt the longevity of a book produced
entirely by xerography, but considering how many of the old pulps still survive and
that even the later Gnome Press books, whose paper quality was so poor it yellowed
going through the presses, are still around after more than three decades, we think
the risk is worth it. For more on this system start with Dryad Press and follow the
cross-references from there. Alas, the publishers were, in the main, more entranced
with what the technology could do than on what exactly they were publishing with
it, and after a spectacular production it burst very fast
Still, this high end technology at affordable prices continues to have other
impacts as well. About half of the text you have just read and much of the older
imprint's bibliographies were originally composed in 1979-80, when it appeared we
were going to publish but were, in the end, prevented from doing so by personal
factors. In 1989, those typewritten sheets were fed into an HP Scanjet scanner and
read into a Compaq 386 personal computer via a smart OCR program by Calera
Systems and thence into a word processing program, Borland's Sprint, where it was
revised, manipulated, and expanded. The same system created a neat, professional-
looking title-author listing of Donald M. Grant's books to date from one of Grant's
handouts in just a few minutes with hardly any typing. The fact that “omnifont”
OCR technology has now progressed to the point where it will accurately read in
even mass market paperbacks bodes well for future projects, and OCR is getting
better and better—and cheaper. [This latest was done using Adobe FrameMaker
5.5].
The text you are reading now was first output on an Adobe PostScript-based
laser printer identical to ones found in thousands of offices, and that output was
then sent as set type first as working galleys going to publishers and dealers and
then, in final form, the same files without modification were printed out on a 1200 X
1200 dots per inch Lexmark typesetter and sent directly to the book's printer. Even
the publishers' logos presented here (and most other illustrations) were scanned in
from photocopies of the title pages of the books, positioned and resized via computer
and then electronically inserted where you find them, then printed out on the same
system at the same time as the text, allowing us to not only bypass thousands of
dollars in typesetting costs and hundreds of hours of labor, but also allowing us to
run off proofs at any time, type in corrections with no adjustments needed up until
the last moment, and provide as many galleys as required. This technology, and
what we dub the Newcomer–Dikty Economics of limited edition publishing, is a revo-
lution in its own way as profound as Sears' personal printing presses, although it
must be noted that some of the presses herein who attempt to produce their books as
models of book design think the system is more the equivalent of the hectograph.
Operations like Pulphouse or Starmont could not have existed without this sort of

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technology. We might note here that the lesser quality of some of the illustrations
herein comes not from the process but because we elected from the start to lift illus-
trative material only from the books we discuss rather than run around and paste up
the same old photos, as an illustration of the current, still imperfect but improving,
state of the desktop publishing art.
Of course, there remains the problem of good editorship, publishing things
worth publishing. This technology also has the potential to exponentially increase
the real garbage of our field as well. Distribution, as always, also remains a chal-
lenge, and it’s still hard to make a living doing small press work. Only a very few
have ever managed it.
The old dangers remain, in classic Catch–22 style. Anybody can publish a book,
and, as you'll see, Anybody has. This is an amateur game that is no place for
amateurs, as it always was. You have to have the capital and you have to know the
territory. Most difficult of all, you have to let your head rule your heart or else you
won't be around to publish what your heart tells you to. Distribution is still pretty
hairy and is no place for those not willing to learn fast and work hard, and the few
true success stories, particularly in contemporary specialty publishing, spent some
lean years at the start and none are exactly millionaires now. It is not merely a joke
that it's said that the best way to make a small fortune in specialty publishing is to
start with a large fortune.
Even doing it right can be hazardous; Mirage Press and Phantasia suffered
from a lack of affordable hands to do the paperwork, packaging, and heavy lifting
that's an often unforeseen part of the job, and essentially shut down because they
were unable to keep pace with their own success and growth. Operations like Pulp-
house, which employed lots of hands to do this work, would up drowning in their own
overhead.
There are a lot of failures in this book, including many recent ones, and very
few successes. Even the failures were, for the most part, noble, and many were
worthy, but they are failures none the less. There are lots of types of specialty
publishing operations chronicled here, from vanity press items to memorial volumes
to hobbyists to serious attempts at establishing large publishing operations. You'll be
introduced to these recurring types in the individual introductions. The one thing
you'll find is that this field is no different than any other sort of business—to
succeed, never mind prosper, takes a combination of knowledge, skill, money, timing,
and out and out luck, combined with a willingness to do endless hours of mind-
numbing drudge work.
Too, the days of the mid-Eighties when anything would sell and sell out quick,
are fading. Time and again as we've made our surveys and taken our interviews, we
heard, “It's not like it was....” The truth is, it was never easy, except for that brief
speculator heyday period in the mid-Eighties—it just looked that way. Remember
that the first Golden Age was founded on the mistaken notion that Arkham House
was thriving, not merely surviving. The second was partly founded on precisely the
same mistaken view of Mirage Press. With less new book speculation, and more of
that money going into older titles (a trend we fear this work will accelerate), you'd
better have capital, be willing to work hard, and choose your projects wisely. Many
publishers now are facing a situation they never had to face before, but one which

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INTRODUCTION xlv

many publishers before them had to face: they have to learn to be book publishers,
not commodities manufacturers.
In late 1995 through early 1996 the second devastating blow forever injuring as
well as changing the field happened. Unlike 1955 it wasn’t genre specific; everybody
suffered.
The mass market paperback, by definition, is an impulse buy market, which is
why they spent so much time on cover research and so much money on cover art.
Non-impulse, where you went specifically looking for an author or title, was the
provence of the bookstore as always and accounted for about 40% of the market. The
other 60% of sales, particularly the immediate gross, was from those revolving racks
and Safeway and Wal-mart and similar stores that had a small book area next to the
squash and ground beef or the lamp shades.
The system, as essentially established by Ian Ballantine, had allowed growth
and nurturing of whole fields. It had made SF/fantasy/horror mainstream. It had
allowed the growth not only of some small presses by allowing them to get into
“normal” distribution, but also the semi-pro magazine industry from Deathrealm to
Cemetery Dance. Over 500 independent distributors, called IDBs in the trade,
distributed to all those newsstands and racks and minor departments, in airports
and bus stations and grocery stores and truck stops, across the U.S. Impulse buying
was taken to a fine art and it all worked.
Except that it got greedy at each step of the production chain. This raised the
price of the mass market paperback over and over again, even in a period of extreme-
ly low inflation. Like a value added tax, small increases at each step pushed the
retail price of the paperback through the four and then the five dollar level. By late
1995 it was $5.95 with no sign of stopping, and $6.96 was not uncommon. At those
prices, one did not pick up two or three mass market paperbacks that looked inter-
esting while out shopping—twenty, twenty-five dollars was the kind of amount you
thought about. They had gone past the price where there was price resistance and
kept raising prices. At that rate, the inventories piled up, grosses sank, vast
numbers of copies were stripped and destroyed and their covers returned for credit,
and that led to critical points where the IDBs no longer could support their overhead
with cash flow and the publishers were taking baths as well. The system had broken
down and nobody knew how to do it any other way. With the IDBs poised near bank-
ruptcy, and some already gone that route, it was inevitable that a few heavy pocket
firms, the kind of Wall Street firms that take over any industry showing real weak-
ness, moved quickly. It started with the management of Safeway Supermarkets, one
of the largest grocery store chains in the world, announcing it was bypassing distrib-
utors for its stores and would place books in its rack bought from the lowest bidder or
bought directly from publishers if those publishers were willing to give them distrib-
utor discounts. If not, no books. The scheme was quickly imitated. By the end of
1996, the more than five hundred IDBs had been reduced to five, all controlled by
commodities brokers in financial houses, not booksellers. To deal with them, major
New York publishers who hadn’t yet merged or been taken over sought to find people
who could deal with these new owners and thus relieved the “old guard” editors and
removed editor’s abilities to buy work on their own within a budget and develop new
authors. These decisions were then placed in the hands of sales reps, money men

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who, in the main, were also not particularly from the book business and see books no
differently than they would see sodas or cell phones. With the two buyers for the
largest chains and superstores, a few men, all driven by quick profit and bottom line
commodity sales and not by those with a long-term view, now controlled what books
went where, and they were interested only in blockbusters, filling out the racks with
stuff they could buy dirt cheap and forget. There was no longer an interest in the
writers and titles that were the bulk of American letters: below Stephen King and
Dean Koontz there was nothing until you reached the cheap two and three grand a
book formula romances and such. It wasn’t worth it to develop talent, and you didn’t
get gold stars and bonuses for selling a million copies over a number of years but by
selling a hundred thousand in a week. One of those new distributors commented in
early 1997 in Publisher’s Weekly, the industry magazine, that “Stuff like scifi is
chicken [feed}; barely a forty, fifty million a year annual business. This isn’t worth
my time or effort. It should dry up and blow away.”
In an instant, New York publishing was thrown back to 1940, when trade
publishing rather than mass market was the way you sold books. There simply
weren’t people around who knew how to do this any more; like plowing a field with
oxen and a hand-fashioned yoke, it was a skill that had died out in the world that
suddenly needed it once again.
At this writing, we can’t tell how this collapse of book distribution, which did to
the book industry what 1955 did to the magazines, will work out. The old way is
certainly dead. Whether there’s a new Ian Ballantine out there to invent a new way
to sell books remains to be seen. Certainly the remaining major publishers are losing
money, and at the mercy of the new buyers who read only spreadsheets, and the new
buyers are also not doing so well since all they want are instant best sellers and
media names and tie-ins. Racks that used to contain fifty books now contain only the
top ten, only five times as many of each. Since there is still a finite number of people
who buy those books, this has removed the impulse buy from the supermarket and
newsstand and with it the profits, leaving only loss leaders. How long this can go on
is anybody’s guess. Long enough to drive some publishers and many authors bank-
rupt, certainly, and most of the rest into mergers, but not forever. The question is,
when you’ve created a situation where people are buying fewer books, can you lure
the next generation back when you need them?
In the meantime, though, this, may ironically give a major boost to the small
presses. Authors who can no longer sell in New York want to get their works out and
keep their names current. While some small presses got hit hard—Wildside Press in
particular, also Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, among others—and many of the
semi-pro magazines also found themselves sinking, desktop publishing, the
Newcomer-Dikty system, not to mention new conventional technology that has
allowed quite reasonable production costs on small to medium runs has given the
small press new openings. If they take advantage of it, if they expand their horizons
beyond the Usual Suspects, if they start giving the public what it wants, we might
well again see the equivalents of Gnome and Shasta and the rest, and, if that market
opens, the specialty publishing industry might, once again, provide the model for the
big boys. We’ll see.
Finally, we can’t neglect the development of the next marriage of computers

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INTRODUCTION xlvii

and hard copy, the book on demand machine. If you haven’t seen one, you will. It’s
quite entertaining to watch as it actually prints, binds, and delivers one copy of a
book you just ordered, complete with color covers. Setup of a book on this machine by
computer costs very little, and services now set them up and store them, list each
title in Books in Print and you can promote them, too, since many distributors
including the big ones like Ingram are now adopting this system as a secondary
system as well. Delivering as little as Quantity One of even hardcovers, this could be
the next big revolution in small press publishing, and particularly backlist publish-
ing.
So, at this writing, all we can say is that the small press is more alive and
healthier than it’s ever been, while the mass market publishing empires are in major
trouble. Film director Ridley Scott once said that, in the Twenty-First century, books
will be “the opera of the upper classes.” We hope he’s wrong in spite of these trends,
but, if that’s where it does go, we’ve identified the opera houses.
—
We can’t end without discussing the long-term speculation on these titles. Yes,
there are some very expensive books here—but many of them took decades to reach
that plateau, not a year or two or even five. Most of the ones from the Eighties that
appeared sure-fire, like many of the Kings, have, in market parlance, “plateaued.”
That is, they went immediately up from, say, $80 or $100 to $325 or whatever, and
they're still there at $325 years later. There are so many copies in speculator hands
that it'll take a decade or more for prices to slowly creep up, and in many cases, at
least in the short-term, they're going down as dealers in particular try to unload that
dead wood. This, too, is not a new phenomenon—The Outsider quickly went to a
hundred bucks, then remained there for twenty years, and only from the late Eight-
ies has supply and demand begun to price it where most would have expected it to
have been for decades.
Even so, because of the increasing number of people entering the market for the
older material, no one who does not have a decent seven-figure income can hope to
accumulate complete sets of many of these publishers today even though, with a very
few exceptions, every book listed in this work can be found. That, we think, says it all.
If you own every book in this work, you own a fortune. But if you just started,
remember the time frames for appreciation and the fact that the baby boom genera-
tion is aging and the number of affluent buyers, while always present, in a steady
declining curve for the next couple of decades at least (a mini-boom of births starting
at this writing won't be in position in the marketplace until 2015-2020). Therefore,
one must be knowledgeable enough to buy only what will have great long-term
appreciation and consider it like an insurance policy, not a stock. In the end, if you
aren't buying the books because you want the books, and out of love of books, buy the
paperbacks and put your money elsewhere.
And that brings us to the end of this introductory history and analysis. Now, go
ahead—pick an entry that we've mentioned and start following the cross-references,
or just open at random and start from there. Introducing the looniest, most dedicat-
ed, most creative, most foolish and optimistic, most rascally and visionary a bunch of
fanatics you ever ran into. Their stories are all here—saints, sinners, scoundrels and
visionaries. They are the people who created the science fiction, fantasy, and horror

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markets. They are the people who gave us our past, formed and shaped our present,
and they're still coming. And, as you go, you'll discover, quite to your amazement,
what we discovered years ago. All of them, without exception, even those who would
vehemently deny it, from Lunar and W. Paul Cook and Conrad Ruppert to today's
desktop publishing operations, have one thing in common—a passion for what they
are doing.
This is more than a bibliographic history, as you will soon realize.
It's a collection of love stories.
—Jack L. Chalker / Mark Owings

INTRODUCTION xlviii
THE SCIENCE-FANTASY PUBLISHERS:
1923–2002