My first serious turn at book collecting focused on Arkham House, the press founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to keep H.P. Lovecraft’s work in print after his death. My interest in their output was compounded when I was a kid by their scarcity – it was impossible to find them in the wild (the first I peeped was found at the Ocean County library). I got a catalog and snagged a couple here and there – mostly the core Lovecraft collection and the later Mythos anthologies. When I was a senior in high school, I found a copy of At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, the 1971 second printing with the orange cover, pictured here in slide 2, at a local used book store and I was hooked. Something about it… it just oozes a specific kind of pulpy aesthetic, doesn’t? That’s true of all the Arkham House titles, even the cornier ones from the 80s on. At this point, out of the 186ish titles Arkham House has produced, I’m only missing about 31. They’re mostly ghastly expensive ones, so aside of a few stragglers, I kind of consider the collection finished.

Lovecraft is in Appendix N, so sharing these isn’t that much of a reach! Mountains of Madness (first print in green, 1964, cover art depicting a shoggoth from the title story by Lee Brown Coye) is the second of three volumes collecting the majority of Lovecraft’s fiction. The 1960s editions, edited by August Derleth, were organized according to theme – this one focusing on Lovecraft’s longer works. In the 80s, the texts of all the stories were laboriously corrected by S.T. Joshi and re-issued with new covers by Raymond Bayless (1986, depicting a scene from Lovecraft’s Dreamlands – this is the only instance I am aware of in which art from an Arkham House book also appears on the cover of a Chaosium sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, in this case the second edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, 1988). The most recent edition (2001) has another new cover, depicting The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by Tony Patrick.