A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

In mid-December Leiber sent Lovecraft a novella or short novel, ‘Adept’s Gambit’. The work profoundly impressed Lovecraft. This was the first tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser—two swashbuckling characters (modelled upon Leiber himself and his friend Harry O. Fischer, with whom Lovecraft also briefly corresponded) who roamed some nebulous fantastic realm in search of adventure—and Lovecraft wrote a long letter commenting in detail about it and praising it effusively. The published version of the story (in Leiber’s collection, Night’s Black Agents, 1947) apparently differs somewhat from the version Lovecraft saw, hence Leiber presumably revised it substantially along the lines Lovecraft recommended.

Leiber has testified frequently and eloquently to the importance of his brief but intense relationship with Lovecraft. Writing in 1958, he confessed: ‘Lovecraft is sometimes thought of as having been a lonely man. He made my life far less lonely, not only during the brief half year of our correspondence but during the twenty years after.’¹⁸ Leiber’s subsequent career—with such landmark works of fantasy and science fiction as Gather, Darkness! (1950), Conjure Wife (1953), The Big Time (1958), A Specter Is Haunting Texas (1969), Our Lady of Darkness (1977), and dozens of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories—is as distinguished as that of any writer in these fields during the past half-century. He learned much from Lovecraft, but, like the best of Lovecraft’s associates and disciples, he became his own man and his own writer.

Late in 1936 Lovecraft finally saw something he never thought he would see—a published book bearing his name. But predictably, the entire venture was, from first to last, an error-riddled debacle. It is little consolation that The Shadow over Innsmouth has, by virtue of its being the only actual book published and released in Lovecraft’s lifetime, become a valued collectors’ item.

William L. Crawford had a variety of plans for issuing either At the Mountains of Madness or ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ or both as a booklet. He was proposing all manner of schemes for the two stories, including prior serialization in either Marvel Tales or Unusual Stories before their book appearance. Finally—presumably after learning of the acceptance of Mountains by Astounding—Crawford focused on ‘Innsmouth’. The process began in early 1936, and the book was typeset by the Saxton Herald, the local paper in Everett, Pennsylvania. Lovecraft began reading proofs later that spring, finding them full of mistakes but laboriously correcting them as best he could; some pages were apparently so bad that they had to be reset virtually from scratch.

It was Lovecraft who, in late January or early February, had urged Crawford to use Frank Utpatel as an artist for the book. Utpatel executed four woodcuts, one of which—a spectacularly hallucinatory depiction of Innsmouth’s decaying roofs and spires, rather suggestive of El Greco—was also used for the jacket illustration. Lovecraft was delighted with the illustrations, even though the bearded Zadok Allen was portrayed as clean-shaven.

The illustrations, in the end, proved to be perhaps the only worthy item in the book, for certainly the text itself was seriously mangled. Lovecraft did not receive a copy of the book until November—a point worth noting, since book’s copyright page gives the date of April 1936. Lovecraft claimed to have found thirty-three misprints in the book, but other readers found still more. He managed to persuade Crawford to print an errata sheet— whose first version was itself so misprinted as to be virtually worthless—and also found the time and effort to correct many copies of the book manually.

Although four hundred copies of the sheets were printed, Crawford had the money to bind only about two hundred. Lovecraft declares that Crawford had actually borrowed money from his father for the entire enterprise.¹⁹ The book—although advertised in both Weird Tales and some of the fan journals—sold slowly (it was priced at $1.00), and shortly after its publication Crawford was forced to give up printing and publishing for seven years; at some point during this time the remaining unbound sheets were destroyed. So much for Lovecraft’s ‘first book’.