Mere months after putting the wraps to Hobgoblin Apollo, Donald Sidney-Fryer has placed his autobio with Hippocampus Press and they’re offering it at half-off — I think that is the presale price. The sample cover is an early draft version, so I guess it’ll take them awhile before the finished product is ready. But probably not all that long.
Surf over to Hippo to read the blurb. Looks like it covers DSF’s famous encounters with Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth of Arkham House, but I was somewhat surprised to see that it includes
his long association with esteemed Robert E. Howard scholar Don Herron
I’m not saying I’m not pretty well known, and shouldn’t get a mention in the book, but I think if I were writing that blurbage I’d have pushed me aside and gone with DSF’s long association with fantasy and science fiction great Fritz Leiber. Believe DSF first met Fritz around 1961 and I know he visited him on his deathbed in 1992, as did I — 31 years.
I encountered DSF late in 1973 and since we’re both still alive, yeah, we’re at 43 years and counting. And I think I can claim the status of DSF’s most famous litcrit protégé. He once told me that of all the people — and there were so many — that he encouraged over the years that of the lot I showed the least initial promise, but produced the most results.
Yeah, I know, don’t you love back-handed compliments?
Yet how could DSF have known that I’d plug away, and among other things produce The Dark Barbarian, The Literary World of San Francisco, the Hammett tour?
I’m looking forward to reading the book. Depending on what he did with the text, it ought to have a lot about his years in San Francisco. A city of the hippies when DSF rolled into town, a metropolis now as vanished as Sidney-Fryer’s favorite image of Lost Atlantis.
