Brian Leno has nabbed another couple of items for his bulging shelves — or you could think of it as three, maybe four items. The book Place of Hawks. The belly-band on the dustwrapper. A letter from August Derleth, a few years before he started up the publishing firm Arkham House with Donald Wandrei, with a letterhead new to me. And the personalized envelope it was sent in, with postmark – — you can see the top of the envelope off to the side on Brian’s hurried snap.
He teased it a few emails back: “I’ve got a pretty cool August Derleth book coming in a couple of days. Might be blog worthy. Like Trump always says, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.'”
Here’s Brian:
This is the Derleth thing I was trying to be so mysterious about. It’s a rare book in jacket, but I believe doubly rare because of the wraparound or belly-band. Never seen another copy with the belly-band — honest, it’s tough enough to find the book with any kind of decent dustjacket.
I’m in unknown territory here, I’m no Derleth scholar. Haefele probably has five copies of it.
The belly-band is interesting, with Edward J. O’Brien and Alfred Dashiell being the two reviewers. O’Brien was for a long time editor of Best Short Stories of (pick a year) and Alfred Dashiell was an editor at Scribner’s and Reader’s Digest.
The letter, from a young appreciative Derleth, is to Clyde Beck — a reviewer for the Detroit News. I’ve no proof, but I got the book from a seller in Detroit and I’m thinking this was Beck’s personal copy. Another Beck review was of Gone With the Wind, which he liked.
The letter is interesting, Derleth is trying to cozy up to Beck. Mentions Murder Stalks the Wakely Family, the first Judge Peck mystery. Plus another one, We Live in the Country — don’t believe that title ever appeared on a Derleth book. So, a “ghost title”? A lost Derleth book?
