Arkham House is an American publishing house specializing in weird fiction. It was founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish hardcover collections of H. P. Lovecraft's best works, which had previously been published only in pulp magazines. The company's name is derived from Lovecraft's fictional New England city, Arkham, Massachusetts. Arkham House editions are noted for the quality of their printing and binding. The colophon for Arkham House was designed by Frank Utpatel.
Matthew Phipps Shiell, known as M. P. Shiel, was a British writer. His legal surname remained "Shiell" though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name.
Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. is a fantasy and science fiction small press publisher in New Hampshire that was founded in 1964. It is notable for publishing fantasy and horror novels with lavish illustrations, most notably Stephen King's The Dark Tower series and the King/Peter Straub novel The Talisman.
The Kingdom of Redonda is the name for the micronation associated with the tiny uninhabited Caribbean island of Redonda.
The Purple Cloud is an apocalyptic "last man" novel by the British writer M. P. Shiel. It was published in 1901. H. G. Wells lauded The Purple Cloud as "brilliant" and H. P. Lovecraft later praised the novel as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty."
Gnome Press was an American small-press publishing company primarily known for publishing many science fiction classics. Gnome was one of the most eminent of the fan publishers of SF, producing 86 titles in its lifespan — many considered classic works of SF and Fantasy today. Gnome was important in the transitional period between Genre SF as a magazine phenomenon and its arrival in mass-market book publishing, but proved too underfunded to make the leap from fan-based publishing to the professional level. The company existed for just over a decade, ultimately failing due to inability to compete with major publishers who also started to publish science fiction. In its heyday, Gnome published many of the major SF authors, and in some cases, as with Robert E. Howard's Conan series and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was responsible for the manner in which their stories were collected into book form.
Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature is a study by L. Sprague de Camp that provides a detailed examination of theories and speculations on Atlantis and other lost lands, including the scientific arguments against their existence. It is one of his most popular works. It was written in 1948, and first published serially in the magazine Other Worlds Science Fiction in 1952-1953; portions also appeared as articles in Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Natural History Magazine, and the Toronto Star. It was first published in book form by Gnome Press in 1954; an updated edition was published by Dover Publications in 1970. De Camp revised the work both for its first book publication and for the updated edition.
Fantasy Press was an American publishing house specialising in fantasy and science fiction titles. Established in 1946 by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach in Reading, Pennsylvania, it was most notable for publishing the works of authors such as Robert A. Heinlein and E. E. Smith. One of its more notable offerings was the Lensman series.
The Complete Compleat Enchanter is an omnibus collection of five fantasy stories by American authors L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, gathering material previously published in three volumes as The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), The Castle of Iron (1950), and Wall of Serpents (1960), and represents an expansion of the earlier omnibus The Compleat Enchanter, which contained only the material in the first two volumes. The expanded version also differs from the previous omnibus by omitting its afterword, de Camp's essay "Fletcher and I". The omnibus is the first edition of the authors' Harold Shea series to be complete in one volume. It has appeared under three different titles. It was first published in the UK in paperback by Sphere Books in 1988 under the title The Intrepid Enchanter and with a foreword by Catherine Crook de Camp. The first US edition appeared under the title The Complete Compleat Enchanter, and replaces the foreword with a preface by David Drake. That edition was published by Baen Books in 1989, and has been reprinted a number of times since. Orion Books published an edition in the UK under the title The Compleat Enchanter in 2000 as volume 10 of their Fantasy Masterworks series. The stories in the collection were originally published in magazine form in the May 1940, August 1940 and April 1941 issues of Unknown, the June 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy, and the October 1954 issue of Fantasy.
Xélucha and Others is a collection of stories by British writer M. P. Shiel. It was released in 1975 by Arkham House in an edition of 4,283 copies. It was the author's first book published by Arkham House and was first announced in Arkham's 1948 catalog. It contains the stories Shiel considered to be his best.
A Praed Street Dossier is a collection of detective fiction short stories, essays and marginalia by author August Derleth. It was released in 1968 by Mycroft & Moran in an edition of 2,904 copies. It was an associational collection to Derleth's Solar Pons series of pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. The two science fiction stories, "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" and "The Adventure of the Ball of Nostradamus", written with Mack Reynolds, were originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk is a collection of supernatural detective short stories by the author M. P. Shiel. It was released in 1977 by Mycroft & Moran in an edition of 4036 copies. The first three Prince Zaleski stories had appeared in Shiel's first published work, Prince Zaleski. The fourth was first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for January, 1955. The Cummings King Monk stories were drawn from The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911).
Albert Reynolds Morse was an American businessman and philanthropist. His wife, Eleanor Reese Morse was also an American philanthropist. They founded the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Fedogan & Bremer is a weird fiction specialty publishing house founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1985 by Philip Rahman and Dennis Weiler. The name comes from the nicknames of the two founders when they were in college.
Shasta Publishers was a science fiction and fantasy small press specialty publishing house founded in 1947 by Erle Melvin Korshak, T. E. Dikty, and Mark Reinsberg, who were all science fiction fans from the Chicago area. The name of the press was suggested by Reinsberg in remembrance of a summer job that he and Korshak had held at Mount Shasta.
Slaves of Sleep is a science fantasy novel by American writer L. Ron Hubbard. It was first published in book form in 1948 by Shasta Publishers; the novel originally appeared in 1939 in an issue of the magazine Unknown. The novel presents a story in which a man travels to a parallel universe ruled by Ifrits. The protagonist takes on the identity of a human in this dimension, and becomes involved in the politics of Ifrits in this fictional "Arabian Nights" world.
Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc., or FPCI, was an American science fiction and fantasy small press specialty publishing company established in 1946. It was the fourth small press company founded by William L. Crawford.
Harold Wayne Billings was an American librarian, editor and author best known for his role in developing national and state library networking and resource sharing among libraries.
The Incomplete Enchanter is a collection of two fantasy novellas by American writers L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, the first volume in their Harold Shea series. The pieces were originally published in the magazine Unknown in the issues for May and August 1940. The collection was first published in hardcover by Henry Holt and Company in 1941 and in paperback by Pyramid Books in 1960.
William Scott Home is the pen name of an American author, poet and biologist principally known for writing horror and dark fantasy. Best known for a short story that appeared in 1978 in The Year's Best Horror Stories, Home was most prolific during the 1970s and 80s when his poetry and fiction was published in a wide range of media. Part of a circle of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror writers that paid homage to M. P. Shiel and H. P. Lovecraft, Home is considered by many to be a unique talent in his own right. His range of styles and control of language and suspense is well-demonstrated in his published collection: Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons. While he has published little since the 1980s, Home is still writing and currently lives in the Dyea Valley, west of Skagway, Alaska.
