Will Hart has been piling up a Visual-Bibliography for the prolific pulp fictioneer Edgar Hoffmann Price on Flickr — photos, colorful magazine covers, some stories and letters. If you’ve gumshoed along on the Hammett tour, chances are good that you’ve heard me mention Ed Price as a pulp writer of my acquaintance. One of the fast writers on the typewriter, with around 600 tales populating the pennies-a-word pulp jungle.
“I knew Ed in the late 70’s and early 80’s,” Will tells me, “and I have always felt bad that most people only knew of him as a Weird Tales writer and because of his having contributed the original story that became ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price.”
It is true that his association with Lovecraft — and with Robert E. Howard and other regulars in the crew writing for Weird Tales — continues to be Ed’s main claim to lasting fame, overshadowing his writing for Argosy and other markets of the day. But it is an association that ought to keep his name kicking around for as long as I can project into the future. Plus, how cool: the only person who met both Lovecraft and Howard in person.
Will promises “a visual treat for anyone that takes time to look through” the site, and if you’ve never tried to interface that era and type of writing, Ed’s career is as good an entry point as any and a lot more interesting than most. Weird fiction, westerns, adventure, spicies — a crash course in pulp.
