University Press Brings Back "Lost Classics" of SF/Fantasy!

Cafe Society
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University of Nebraska Press, god bless 'em, has started to re-print handsome new editions of some of those cool books you always read about in literary histories and bibliographies but can never find because they haven’t been in print since 1922 or whatever!

I just ordered up copies of Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (complete with the original Boris Artzybasheff illustrations!), David Lindsey’s A Voyage to Arcturus, J.D. Beresford’s The Wonder, and Abraham Merritt’s The Moon Pool.

The last two I’ve never heard of, but they sound fascinating from the descriptions; the Lindsey I’ve been hearing about for years and never got around to searching for; and as for the Finney, well, one can never have too many copies of Dr. Lao around.

They’re also doing some choice, hard to find H.G. Wells, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs material!

God DAMN, I love small presses, and university presses. You’d never catch Simon & Schuster risking a buck on reprints of wacky shit like this.

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Need stuff! I have a lot of obscure sf/fantasy from small presses, although my copies of The Circus of Dr. Lao and The Moon Pool were from major paperback companies. (I love TCoDL, but – call me a heretic – I hate the original illustrations. My copy of The Moon Pool is from Collier’s, and I found it kinda boring.) I haven’t read Lindsay’s book, but I’d like to. I know nothing about Beresford or The Wonder.

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Uke, my wallet and I now hate you… :slight_smile:

They have Skylark! I can finally replace my falling apart paperback copy!

They have When Worlds Collide! (Hey! Where’s the sequel?)

Never read The Moon Pool but always wanted to, based on what I’ve heard of it.

Never read Dr. Lao. All I know about it is the movie. Is it worth picking up?

Thanks for pointing them out!

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Are they doing Doc Smith, too? I’ve been meaning to finish the Skylark series, but nobody anywhere has Skylark 3 or Skylark of Valeron.

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Nuts. Maybe I should just cancel that one…it’s holding up the whole order while they scramble around for a copy. Barron’s big Guide to Fantasy Fiction agrees that MOON POOL is not Merritt’s best work.

I only know him from BURN WITCH BURN, which was freely adapted into the 1936 Lionel Barrymore film THE DEVIL-DOLL. Merritt’s fantasy work sounds like re-hashed H. Rider Haggard, although some critics say his imaginative flights are wilder than anything you find in Burroughs.

I’ve always liked Artzybasheff’s paintings and pencil drawings…he might not be the absolutely perfect illustrator for DR. LAO, but he was in the library edition I first read, so it’s kind of stuck in my brain-pan. My current copy of DR. LAO is the enormous hardcover 1982 limited edition from Stinehour Press, with the lousy engravings by Claire Van Vliet…not easy to balance on your belly while reading in bed.

tanstaafl: Oh, yeah, you should definitely read THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO…as one critic pointed out, the difference between the book and the movie is that in the movie a bizarre circus comes to a small town and changes everyone’s lives – in the book a bizarre circus comes to a small town and changes nothing.

As a devotee of the late nineteenth-century Decadents and their celebrations of abulia and acedia, I much prefer the written version.

Chronos: Aside from the info on the website, I know nothing.

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I think opinions can legitimately be divided on The Moon Pool, but I quite enjoyed it. YMMV.

Have these editions only recently been released in the States, though? They’ve been lurking on the shelves of Borders in Oxford for months now. (I can hear their siren song as I walk past: “Buy me… buy me… you don’t need food this week…”)

In related news, for Wells fans, the somewhat dubious UK publishers House of Stratus have recently released cheap but fairly decent hardback editions of 38 Wells novels, including the best-known ones, but also a lot of semi-obscure stuff. Get in now before House of Stratus call in the receivers again. I’m quite looking forward to getting my teeth into Tono-Bungay and The Autocracy of Mr Parham.

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I’d hope not. It took me years to finish that series and to have someone just casually finish them off would make me cry. FWIW, if you want to finish a scifi collection, the Upper Peninsula is a great place to start–the used book stores up there are beyond description.
Still. Wow. UoNP has officially earned a place on my bookmarks list. Did they do the Lensman reissue that appeared a few years back? Seems to be a similar style. I always meant to pick those up but they seem to have disappeared.

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Week? Shit, dude, I’ve been sucking on placemats for the last month.

Crap, more stuff to spend money on…

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I own nearly all of those books, and, to be honest, it wasn’t even that difficult to find most of them. Ralph 124C 41+ is awful, incidentally.

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Well, bully for you, WW.

I still think it’s nice that they’re back in print. Call me a romantic.

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I wasn’t boasting about owning them. My point was that it was easy to find them. It’s not because I’m rich and can buy anything I want. (Indeed, over half my life I was barely scraping by.) It’s not because I found them online. (I’ve bought very little online.) It’s not because I have oodles of time to search sales and used bookstores. (Heck, the story of my life is that I have very little free time.) Those books are easy to find in used bookstores. Indeed, many of them have been in print just recently. If you had made any attempt to find them, you would have found them.

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I’m not sure that’s entirely true… sure, some of these are relatively easy to find used (though the UK differs from the US here, I guess; I’d not have considered A Voyage to Arcturus particularly rare), but some are quite definitely not. The Bison list includes things like Mizora or Flammarion’s Omega which I’ve never seen in second-hand shops… and if you know a used bookstore where you can get M. P. Shiel on a regular basis, I’d just love to know about it. (Except it’ll be in America, won’t it…)

Anyway, I agree with Ike; it’s a good thing these books are back in print and readily accessible to a mass audience.

(And Ralph 124C41+ is good clean goofy fun.)

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Nope, that was Old Earth Books (which is one guy’s part-time job – he’s a sales rep for Johns Hopkins UP by day). They’re still in print, but they’re easiest to find at SF conventions, which doesn’t help you much. B&N has several of them listed as available in 1-2 weeks, so you could try them.

On to the OP: I’ve heard grumbling in some circles that the reprints are nice to have, but there’s no scholarly aparatus whatsoever, which is odd for a UP book. Their edition of Ralph 124C14+ has caused particular interest – that book has an odd textual history, and the Bison edition doesn’t say (as I recall) anything about that, or about which edition it was set from.

So, I’m a bit torn. It’s nice to have them back in print, and it’s neat to have a UP doing them. But I have a suspicion that Nebraska thinks of these as less-than-serious, and doesn’t want to devote the resources to them that they’d give to a “real” resissue series. On the gripping hand, they got an author friend of mine to do one of their introductions, so I have to love them for that.

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Ukulele Ike, whether the books are available elsewhere, it’s a step in the right direction. So many great books aren’t available because a publisher/owner is sitting on them.

I’d be interested in how good the printing and the paper is. Nothing like a book with creamy pages and sharp print.

I was reminded of another advantage of reprints last night, having repurchased Jack Vance’s “Showboat World”: Opened it up, pages felt strangely limp. Put it up to my face . . . yep, mildew.

Now, if they’d only publish another 300 or so titles I could become a truly useless member of society. . . .

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Hey, I like Ralph 124C41+! The book and the poster (even though he doesn’t use the “+”. I gather he’s unpretentious and wants us to call him by his first number).

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Fair enough. But here’s my story, and the reason I started this thread.

I’m not really an aficionado of the SF/Fantasy genre. I’ve read and enjoyed many of the classics, but I tend to stay away from board discussions and arguments between the better-read SDMB members, as they would all point and laugh at me when they found out how much I like Fredric Brown’s MARTIANS, GO HOME.

While I spend my fair share of time in used bookshops, the SF section is not the first area I head for. I like bizarre fiction…I’m a professional crime-fiction editor, I love classic horror, collect Arkham House, stuff like that. Occasionally, there is a cross-over into Fantasy and the softer subgenres of SF.

I was having a conversation about Finney’s DR. LAO with a friend a few days ago, and I poked my nose into Amazon to see how hard it would be to dig one up for her. Seeing that it was back in print was an unexpected treat, and I clicked links to all the other titles in the Bison series, thus learning that I could easily score a copy of ARCTURUS, and could sample MOON POOL (which a number of our cohorts here know) and THE WONDER (which I may be the first here to read!!!).

So…sure, if I had walked into bookshops over the years with a powerful urge to locate David Lindsey, I probably would have read ARCTURUS years ago. But I didn’t. I read Thorne Smith’s THE GLORIOUS POOL instead. And Flaubert’s TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY. And Charles Maturin’s MELMOTH THE WANDERER. And Oswald Spengler’s THE DECLINE OF THE WEST. And Walter de la Mare’s MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET.

The University of Nebraska made it easy for me, and for dozens of others, to lay hands on these babies.

Thank you, University of Nebraska.

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You’re making my mouth water, here.

Some of the customer reviews on Amazon carp about lousy proofreading…which isn’t terribly fair, because the el cheapo way to reprint old novels is to offset from an old copy, so the errors would have appeared in previous editions. I sincerely doubt that UofN bothered to re-set the texts.

Once my package arrives, I’ll get back to ya on the quality of the production!

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I, too, have read MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET, but found it woefully short on plot or character development.

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THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, and THE WONDER arrived in this afternoon’s mail.

Nice looking uniform editions, black matte finish to the covers, same typeface used for each, handsome spot art.

Standard cheap trade paperback-style paper and, as I suspected, they’ve been offset from earlier editions…I recognize the typeface from the old Viking Press DR. LAO. The halftone illustrations came out very nicely: crisp, no blurring.

Recommended.

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A) I loved Ralph 124C41+. I find that (outside of certain insane British critics who feel that Gernsback “stole” S.F. from the Brits ( :rolleyes: ) the problem most people have with Ralph is that they’re trying to read it as though it’s a novel. And it isn’t. No rising action, no serious character development, the climax is clunky as hell and obviously tacked on in an attempt to make it seem…novel-ish and notable only for predicting radar.

However, read as a travelogue of the future (a-la “Through Darkest Africa with Gun and Camera”) it’s a stunningly good period piece filled with unbounded optimism, enthusiasm and “sensawonda”.

B) Regarding the reprints that Ike talks about, as far as I know (which isn’t very far, admittedly), Arcturus was last published as a Ballantine “Unicorn Fantasy” edition in the late '60s, which are getting hard to find, Moon Pool was in an Avon edition from the early to mid '70s, my edition of Dr. Lao was from the early '60s and I’ve never heard of The Wonder

Of the three I’ve read (or tried to read), Lao is the obvious winner…stylish, clear, readable prose…a great book. I’ve never made it all the way through Merritt. Any Merritt. His stuff is just a trifle too…um…Weird-Talesy to me. Of Arcturus, I’ve heard Lindsay described by someone as the Ed Wood of SF/F. He had these really good ideas (ok, it’s not a perfect comparison :slight_smile: ) that he was desperate to share and absolutely no ability to communicate them. I read Lindsay when I was on a “Unicorn Fantasy”* kick about 15-20 years ago and frankly I remember nothing about it except that it had some profoundly weird imagery.

Also, Ike, if you’re looking for another source for fantastic SF (although more of the 1940-1960s era stuff), try NESFA. They seem dedicated to bankrupting me. :slight_smile:

BTW: I just picked up an old SF book called The Second Deluge by Garrett Serviss (published by Hyperion Press). Anyone ever read it?

Fenris

*For those not in the know, following Ballantine getting the rights to publish Tolkien in the mid/late '60s, Lin Carter (IIRC) decided that the time was right to reprint a bunch of old, nearly forgotten fantasy (and some new stuff, Joy Chant and Katherine Kurtz both got their start here): there was a fantasy craze and so they published about 60 books all with a little logo of a unicorn on the cover (the line was officially called the “Adult Fantasy” line). They published some great stuff. Ike, if it turns you enjoy the stuff you’ve gotten, you might want to start hunting up the Unicorn Fantasy line.