Morgan has his own personal Substack which he’s populating with posts from the past, in addition to new material. A great migration across platforms, similar to the nomadic cavemen and proto-cavemen striding across continents.
And in this case, as usual, rediscovered in Brian Leno’s storied trove.
Autograph Hound Saturday once more — and here’s Brian:
I’m really digging into my autograph folders, probably just procrastinating to avoid stacking and shelving books.
I don’t know if I’ve ever shown you my William Desmond Taylor signed cafe receipt. Love it. The signature looks great.
Pretty sure it’s legit, bought it off one of the Taylor authorities. Compares to other examples.
Research on Taylor at the San Gabriel Country Club revealed that he frequented it during January 1922. Said there are two receipts dated Jan 5 and 21 from then.
Could be sticking my neck out, but here’s a third.
I had forgotten that his death date was February 1, 1922 — this week, 104 years ago.
So he signed this receipt two weeks before he was murdered. Pretty cool.
Inscribed to Scott personally by me, as editor, and also by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Dennis Rickard as contributors. And we all knew Scott well, a pal for many years.
The seller renders this transcription of my holograph:
Inscribed on the title page by Herron; “For Scott Connors, Who, as a youth contributed and essay to an earlier assembly of what would become; The Dark Barbarian, Don Herron.”
Can’t the guy read my handwriting?
Check his sales image above. No way would I write “and essay” instead of “an essay.” And that is a colon, not a semi-colon. Plus, check out all the exclamation points.
But it reminds me of something otherwise long since submerged from the surface of the old brainpan: that Scott — as a very, very young Young Scott — was in the running for an initial lineup of essays on Robert E. Howard. Pretty sure it was his piece from Nyctalops, about Bran Mak Morn or something.
Also in that lineup I had my “Conan vs. Conantics,” but I realized those contents just weren’t good enough to do what I wanted to do.
So I worked on it and produced the critical landmark The Dark Barbarian.
By the time I got around to editing The Barbaric Triumph twenty years later, Scott was seasoned enough to be one of my first choices to contribute. Although I did have to beat him with a stick to get out of him what I knew he should be able to do. (And his essay “Twilight of the Gods: Howard and the Volkstumbewegung” is what I knew he could do — excellent, flat-out excellent.)
Everyone else may well know that rocker Alice Cooper has a son named Dashiell Cooper, b. 1985, also a rocker. I just stumbled over the news during casual browsing on the net. No doubt many more celebrities named a kid Dashiell and nobody told me about it.
And like so many of the Dashiells, apparently Alice Jr. goes by “Dash.” Of course he does. Even Hammett went with Dash once he hit Hollywood.
And also, if you haven’t heard, Dash Cooper fathered twins, named Falcon and Riot.
The last few days Amazon has had Eph Book — alias Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years — at 5% off. Today I see they’ve cut it a notch more to 7% off, and it’s in the top tier of sales in the History & Criticism Fantasy category. Someone must have ordered a copy — maybe even at the 5% off rate.
And the companion tome, the eBook LitCrit MegaPack that goes by the title Death Litalso just surged. Death Lit has the full text of my article from Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine in which I first tackled the ephemera. Gave my personal history about getting into the hobby.
Left the memoir-heavy piece out of Eph Book because I wanted to keep it lean and mean, to the point. That’s my policy for guides, and since it also serves as a pictorial history we needed to leave lots of room for the covers and other images.
Autograph Hound Saturday again, and the maniacal Autograph Hound Brian Leno has been digging around in his trove, reminding himself of what he’s got.
“The Intruder by Beaumont is interesting,” Brian says, “because the dust jacket is signed by William Shatner, who starred in the movie.”
Charles Beaumont’s novel came out in 1959 and he then did the screenplay for the 1962 film directed by Roger Corman. About segregation in the South, generally considered Corman’s most serious — read best — movie, and one of Shatner’s most powerful roles.
Still raw-edged. And if you prefer a lighter approach to viewing you could watch it just to see the appearances by that circle of writers who scripted The Twilight Zone. Beaumont is in it, and George Clayton Johnson. William F. Nolan plays a town thug.
Brian tells me, “I don’t remember if I ever saw the movie but now I’ll keep an eye out. It’s a first but the jacket is in rough shape. Who cares? It’s signed by Captain Kirk!”
I can assure Brian that if he’d seen it, he’d remember it.
And he also throws in “A Zane Grey signed check, obviously he’s not difficult to get but I thought I should have him.”
In the shot yesterday of (at least a small part of) The Leno Library I noticed the top row of books by or about Robert E. Howard, this month’s birthday boy — and next row down, on left, the Gnome Press editions of Conan.
That shelf also housed some Richard Matheson, Clark Ashton Smith’s Genius Loci, Seabury Quinn’s Roads, Leigh Brackett, Hammett’s Creeps by Night — on the bottom shelf I spotted some Fritz Leiber.
I couldn’t tell if an overall theme pervaded this hodgepodge of the fantastic, but suspected — since Brian is a known maniacal Autograph Hound — that maybe they were signed. No books signed by Robert E. Howard, of course, since he died by suicide before his first book hit print.
Here’s Brian to confirm my guesses, invoking the time-lost Shaver Mystery and the ever bubbling cauldron of the La Brea Tar Pits:
The Howard books for the most part aren’t signed — couple signed by artists Jeff Jones, Roy Krenkel.
Everything else is signed.
The book right to the left of the skull — my left, not the skull’s — is very common looking, but it’s one of my treasures: I Remember Lemuria, inscribed by Richard S. Shaver himself.
It’s extremely rare with the fragile dust jacket, but just to find a signed copy is a real job. Took me years of looking.
I’ve tried three or four times to read it but find it terrible. I wanted it for it’s rarity, which is the usual priority when I go after a signature.
And I’d like to tell you about my skull. Growing up I always felt a library needed a human skull to make it complete.
About forty-five years ago I saw that some company, near the La Brea Tar Pits, I believe, was selling museum quality reproductions. I ordered this one and it’s been one of my most cherished library items ever since.
Robert E. Howard was born 120 years ago today. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Certainly you’ve heard mention of his character Conan — the Cimmerian, the barbarian, etc.
I know today’s date well, but began to get hints it was rolling around again a couple of days ago. My big eBook The Dark Barbarian That Towers Over All— first in an ongoing series of LitCrit MegaPacks — jumped up the Amazon lists from 115ish into the 20s, so someone bought a memorial copy. Still the largest — and best — roundup of litcrit on REH. No bragging. Just the facts.
But I was surprised to notice yesterday that the biographical Famous Someday exploded volcanically from the sales doldrums to chase on the heels of Towers. I like that little book, the interviews with Texans who knew Howard, exploring a trove of books that once belonged to Doctor Isaac Howard, REH’s father.
In one of those books Doc Howard doodled the remark that “Robert will be famous someday”.
Welcome to a hard-boiled and not without noir blog with news and reviews, occasional outbursts of maniacal Autograph Hound activity, plus archival records from the forty-five year run of The Dashiell Hammett Tour.
