Slowly, slowly, I’m trying to acquire more Arkham House books. It seems that I’m mostly picking up books from the 1970s onward, as older books are harder to find.
Frank Belknap Long, mostly a writer of fiction within the Lovecraft circle, published a slim (66 pages!) Arkham House book in 1977. In Mayan Splendor collects a variety of poems by Long, and is illustrated by Stephen Fabian. Originally sold for $6, I picked this book up for just under twice the cover price, many, many years after it first was published.
From Evil’s Pillow is my third Basil Copper Arkham House book, but his first published by them. I already have And Afterward, the Dark (1977) and The House of the Wolf (1983), but when I saw this book listed for less than $12 I went for it without hesitation. There are a few scrapes or smudges on the back cover, but all in all the condition is quite good for a book published in 1973 and listed at $11.75. This book also originally was listed at the low cover price of $6.00, which makes me somewhat nostalgic for the 1970s.
Books like this in the current age would fetch $25 of more, given inflation and other related changes based on small press publishers. Of course, these days such books would have multiple states, such as signed/limited copies, vs. just published in an announced number of copies (3,500) in this case. It collects five short stories, with a cover by Frank Utpatel, who illustrated many Arkham House books.
This year I’ve been on an Arkham House bender, after many years of not looking for their books. I think that most of my AH purchases prior to 2025 were in-person acquisitions, but now I’m tossing my hat more in the online world. In many cases, at least where there are auctions involved, I’m losing out on books. So, instead, I’ve turned to fixed price options from resellers elsewhere. This means I’ll probably stall in terms of adding more books, as I do have an upper limit in terms of what I want to spend, and most fixed-price AH books from earlier than 1970 are well beyond my price range.
