Hey Chris! Good to see another pulp fan on here.
Yeah, Finlay was awesome. One of the absolute titans of pulp art. However,
occasionally his stuff looks a little static (IMO) due to his use of photo reference.
Very cool that you have that pulp. Merritt is a total badass. One of the very few writers that REH, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith all admired, not to mention Merritt's influence on CL Moore, Brackett, Jack Williamson, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner and others.
Creep, Shadow features reincarnation memories of a badass Bronze Age king, the lost city of Ys, a hot shadow-sorceresss and the revival of a Lovecraftian being in New England. It's a ton of fun. I think we would've seen more along that line, but Merritt died soon after.
Deuce, I'm with you on the pulps, man.
I have only a few modern writers I follow (McKiernan, Salvatore, Butcher, maybe a couple others) with the rest of my reading and collecting efforts going to my passion for the guys who paved the path for those who followed after.
The absolute bulk of my shelves are consumed with Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, Merritt, Burroughs, Hamilton, etc.
I love collecting the paperback anthologies of the 50s-80s as well because I actually owe it to one of them that I grew interested in these guys, that little gem being The Macabre Reader, edited by Donald Wolheim I believe.
I had actually planned on starting a thread of 'What was your FIRST non-Conan Howard?' but I will say right now, mine was The Cairn on the Headland, from The Macabre Reader.
Actually, I believe that story was my first Howard period because after that I began seeking him out, easily finding the Ace Conans but not discovering how prolific was his body of work until later.
Although I was already reading Edgar Rice Burroughs by then, that single lucky purchase changed the direction of my reading forever because after finishing it I then knew of Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft - and Robert E. Howard.
Thanks Mr. Wolheim, wherever you are!
All of my pulps are of the Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novel printings - which were basically reprints of Merritt's stories from earlier pulp mags.
As far as Abraham Merritt - gads what can one say? He died FAR too young. His extant body of work is amazing and I still look for oddball copies of his stuff.
I searched for so many years (BI - Before Internet) for Creep, Shadow, Creep! and Burn, Witch, Burnt! that to this day if I find a copy and its decent and affordable, I snag it.
Growing up in BFE with nothing much but EE Doc Smith and Heinlein (another favorite though) on the used book store shelves, collecting these pulp guys was NOT an easy task.
I had to call Pandora Books and Kevin Hancer, I had to drive to different cities hoping to find something to make the drive worth while.
I recall going to Roanoke, VA once with my dad and a fellow REH fan friend of mine, discovering a bookstore called The Dusty Corner and discovering a veritable gold mine of REHs - they had nearly every ACE, Lancer, Berkley, etc edition you can think of, shrink wrapped, on a shelf of 'Rare Prints'.
Gosh freaking dang we about shi*.
Gods of Bal-Sagoth, The Howard Collector, Sword Woman, Road of Azrael, Three-Bladed Doom, Almuric, The Book of Robert E. Howard, The Second Book of Robert e. Howard, and on and on, with so many titles we'd never heard of.
This is how bad and good that was at the same time: I was there with a FRIEND who was just as big a Howard fan as me - we had to take turns picking items off the shelf - and we didn't have enough cold cash to come away with the whole horde!
Talk about wanting to rip out your beard and cry in your Meade!
Ah, but we sure had fun looking at our 'score' on the way home, though. My dad just shook his head.
He didn't understand.
Kinda like I couldn't understand my son's fascination with his Blue-Eyes White Dragon YuGiOh card when he finally got one.