LOVECRAFT, H.P. The Outsider and Others. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. 1939.
8vo. Original black cloth, gilt lettering to spine; illustrated dust jacket by Virgil Finlay; pp. xiv, 553, [5]; bookplate of a certain Richard A Frank to front pastedown; minimal creasing down spine and rubbing to some rubbing to extremities; some marks to endpapers with a few to cloth also; otherwise near fine.
First edition, first printing of the first Arkham House title.
The Outsider and Others, published in 1939 (two years after the author's death), was the first book issued by Arkham House. 1,268 copies were printed, and it was out of print by early 1944, never to be reissued. The Outsider and Other Stories was Lovecraft’s preferred title for a proposed collection considered—but ultimately not published—by editor Farnsworth Wright. The stories included in the Arkham House edition were selected by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Virgil Finlay’s montage for the dustwrapper was originally created for Weird Tales magazine, though only one or two of the images had originally illustrated Lovecraft’s stories. E. F. Bleiler later described the book’s publication as “the beginning of serious specialist publishing of fantastic fiction in America.”
Laid in at the front of this copy is an August 1937 review by August Derleth of Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth (April 1936).
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