Conan by R E Howard, L S De Camp & Lin Carter

[redbrain]

johnlprobert said:

I'll just mention here (seeing as it's as good a place as any) that I am a huge fan of Clark Ashton Smith. The Gollancz Fantsay Masterworks 'The Emperor of Dreams' is the best place to discover his work, but I'm collecting that 5 volume set as well. And what fantastic covers!

Yes - nice dark brooding jackets on the 5 volume set.

[redbrain]

andydecker said:

For those desperatly interested in revisions of Howard´s texts is the Del Rey/Wandering Star edition recommended. In these books are a lot of revisions documented. But this sounds more interesting than it really is, it is mostly "no comma after this" and so on.

Oh! Those sounds very much like the (diappointing) restorations of Lovecraft's texts. As I said before, I haven't personally compared the old and new Conan texts. I based what I said on the word of an R E Howard fanatic.

[Craig Herbertson]

fascinating and helpful old fellow,

thanks very much

[Jaqhama]

Lots of free to read Robert E. Howard stories over at:

www.arthursclassicnovels.com

Just type the name of the author into the internal search engine.
Loads of Edgar Rice Burroughs and other authors also.

I love Arthur's website.

[franklinmarsh]

Dec 11, 2007 19:55:54 GMT severance said:

Conan the Wanderer - Sphere 1974.
Mixed selection - two great Howards "Shadows in Zamboula" and "The Devil in Iron", another de Camp re-write and a dire de Camp and Carter original.

Picked this up recently. A rather lacklustre Frazetta cover, but Shadows In Zamboula is a corker. Some dodgy racial overtones, but a buxom heroine, clothesless for most of the story, doing the Dance Of The Serpents. Conan's in it , too.

[cromagnonman]

Mar 21, 2017 10:19:17 GMT franklinmarsh said:

Dec 11, 2007 19:55:54 GMT severance said:

Conan the Wanderer - Sphere 1974.
Mixed selection - two great Howards "Shadows in Zamboula" and "The Devil in Iron", another de Camp re-write and a dire de Camp and Carter original.

Picked this up recently. A rather lacklustre Frazetta cover, but Shadows In Zamboula is a corker. Some dodgy racial overtones, but a buxom heroine, clothesless for most of the story, doing the Dance Of The Serpents. Conan's in it , too.

Although the book itself credits Frazetta as the artist that feeble cover is actually the work of John Duillo. He was actually a much better artist than his Conan paintings suggest. He did three covers for the original twelve volume series and they're all lacklustre. Fantasy evidently just wasn't his bag.

Heartily agree with you about "Shadows in Zamboula"; one of the best plotted of all Howard's original Conan tales, awash with dramatic high points and memorable imagery. I think Conan's epic struggle with the fearsome Baal-Pteor is one of my favourite episodes in all of Howard's fiction, and the only time that Howard ever delivered a human adversary that was all but Conan's physical equal. Just love that malicious epitaph which Conan snarls at him while he's still alive to hear it.
This is a story that also puts pay to that pernicious stereotype of Conan being stupid. In this story he shows himself to be anything but.   

[franklinmarsh]

Thanks for the cover comments, Cro. I'd hate to have gone to my grave moaning about Frank when it wasn't him at all. The twist at the end is great, and, as you say, shows Conan as more than muscle and violence.

[franklinmarsh]

Crom! Or even Set! A double post.

[severance]

Discussion of Robert E. Howard and Conan seems to have drifted onto the Fritz Leiber thread, so I'll see if I can't corral it back here. Cromagnon Jones mentioned that the various Wildside Press books make up a decent collection, but I always thought they were a bit scant and scattershot ("Treasures of Tartary" for instance - a couple of Middle-Eastern set adventures, a pirate story and a few westerns!) - so what are the VOE members favourite collection from a particular publisher. I have a great fondness for the 5 books published by the University of Nebraska Press in their Bison Books imprint, and the 7 books in the Robert E. Howard Library collection from Baen Books - but surely nothing can compare to the 11 volumes that Ballantine/Del Rey published between 2003 ("The Coming of Conan the Barbarian") and 2011 ("Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures")? What does everyone else think?

[jamesdoig]

Those deluxe Wandering Star volumes were pretty nice, and also those volumes Karl Edward Wagner edited.

[cromagnonman]

Draped in cobwebs and pursued by the rolling boulder of Sev's admonition I seem to have pitched up on the appropriate thread. So I guess I may as well offer my tuppence worth while I'm here.

I would say that the majority of Howard sets issued over the years have something particular in their favour to recommend them. And detrimental factors to consider too. But as to which is best rather depends upon each individual's priorities. Certainly for textual purity, scholarly diligence and comprehensiveness there is nothing to touch the Ballantine/Del Rey set. But, as with all trade paperbacks, they don't offer much in the way of convenience to handle and those black wraps crease and chip like anything. From an aesthetic viewpoint the books issued by the REH Foundation have few equals, but they're damned expensive and don't include very much in the way of Howard's premier league material. The Grant hardbacks are wonderful things to look at but the texts are corrupted and wholly unreliable, with Grant himself having censored many of them to spare racial sensitivities. Conversely the Ace paperbacks are dull as dishwater in appearance and yet include the two rarest Howard paperbacks of all in THE SHE DEVIL and HEROES OF BEAR CREEK. From a serious collectors point of view the three volume facsimile set issued by Girasol is the business, being the nearest thing possible to having a bound set of original Howard pulps but, as you can imagine, its priced accordingly.

Sev, you're absolutely right to single out the virtues of the Bison and Baen sets for praise. The Baens are particularly desireable to have on account of featuring the first unexpurgated printing of the Solomon Kane series. And then there are the Zebras with their sumptuous Jeff Jones paintings, and the Berkleys with their fold out posters albeit with the Conan set incomplete. All wonderful.

But speaking from a personal perspective, I've been a Howard collector for so long [40 years now that I stop to consider it: Crom's bones!] its perhaps inevitable that I should be swayed by nostalgic considerations rather than anything more practical. For that reason I will always award pre-eminence to the Orbit set of the mid 70s with their wonderful Paj and Achilleos covers and their collection of Howard's Middle Eastern tales which have remained especial favourites of mine ever since. And I can't neglect the Spearman SKULL-FACE OMNIBUS can I which, for all its editorial shortcomings, was the book that first introduced me to that wider wonderful Howardian landscape that exists beyond the hinterlands of the Conan tales.     

[Knygathin]

Finding your way through R. E. Howard publications is a vast jungle, to say the least.

This time around I was only after the Conan stories, and since not being a fanatical Howard collector, I chose the easy way out, and went for The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition. Not expensive. Quite attractive, in imitation black leather. Everything snug in one place. No dust-jacket, so it's easy to hold and comfortable to handle.

[andydecker]

I wouldn't call myself a serious collector, but I have bought a lot of different Howard editions over the years; in the last time mostly for their cover artwork. The Gollancz Conan hardcover is nice, the Ballantine is maybe the best edition in terms of additional material. I can't stand the Fantasy Masterworks which has so many typos and follows De Camp in presenting the stories in their supposed internal chronology. I gathered that Stephen Jones caught a lot of flak for this.

The Wildside Press is nice as a Kindle  and it is interesting to follow the different WT stories after their publiction dates. But I think of the Conan  editions I like most is the Karl Edward Wagner one by Berkley. These are so well done, and it is a shame that De Camp managed to sabotage this effort. Also on the shelf are the German translations which introduced me to Howard all those years ago, even if this is De Camp and Carter in all their glory (or lameness).

I still take one of those from the shelf sometimes and reread stories like Shadows in Zamboula, Queen of the Black Coast, Worms of the Earth or The Black Stone, which may be my favorite Howard horror story.

[severance]

Thanks for all the replies, it's sent me back through my own collection to see exactly what I've got and not got. Haven't got any of the Wandering Star collections, my budget isn't big enough for those, but the Del Rey's are basically the same I thought. It seems I have most of the Berkleys, including the three Conan's that KEW edited, and the majority of the Zebra's. I think CromagnonMan is a little harsh on the Ace's, some lovely work by Esteban Maroto and Sanjulian, both more familiar for their work at Warren, and "The She Devil" is a lovely little collection. The Grant hardbacks are lovely, managed to snag three over the years, even if the text has been butchered. In hindsight I probably should've mentioned the Orbit collections, as they introduced me to Howards's Middle-Eastern adventurers:

1976

Swords of Shahrazar - three tales of Kirby O'Donnell

Worms of the Earth - seven Pictish tales

The Lost Valley of Iskander - three tales of Francis X. Gordon (El Borak)

1977

Son of the White Wolf - three more tales of El Borak

Three-Bladed Doom - A short El Borak novel

Omnibus - a mixed dozen including Conan and Solomon Kane

That last one featured a Peter Andrew Jones cover of an ape-like creature carrying away a blonde woman - not much up top but unfeasibly large buttocks - it's a shame my scanner isn't working!!

Lastly I have to mention a single collection that led me on from the Conan Sphere collections onto the Orbit collections above - and that is a 1989 collection from Robinson Publishing (familiar to us through their "Mammoth" series of anthologies) called "Robert E. Howard's World of Heroes." A superb collection of Howard at his finest.

P.S. - I'm glad no one mentioned Peter Haddock!!

[cromagnonman]

Allow me to oblige Sev:



Something for everyone here in the buttocks lovers department, I think we can agree.

The Orbit omnibus is particularly recommended because it was the first single book to display Howard's range and versatility. Apart from the heroic fantasies which everyone would expect to be there, it also has a couple of the superb straight historicals which Howard was a real master of, a boxing story, some weirds and westerns and even one of his hilarious comedies. About the only things missing are a spicy and a detective yarn. It certainly puts pay to the idea that there was nothing more to Howard than grimness and gore which is the pernicious assumption that earlier collections, SKULL-FACE AND OTHERS especially, actively promulgated.

It certainly wasn't my intention to disparage the Ace set Sev, and I'm sorry if I conveyed that impression. I suppose my opinion of Ace is coloured by the fact that they were active accessories to de Camp's torpedoing of the Berkley Conans. But even that aside I've just never gone much on their designs. But there's no denying the excellence of the contents and the significance of the Ace set. Not when it has such unique assets to recommend it as the first collection of Howard's wonderful spicies in THE SHE DEVIL; the first and only omnibus edition of all of the Breckenridge Elkins stories in HEROES OF BEAR CREEK; as well as an unprecedented packaging of the contents of two distinct hardbacks from two different publishers in THE IRON MAN WITH THE ADVENTURES OF DENNIS DORGAN. Even the reprints of earlier Zebra titles such as SWORDS OF SHAHRAZAR contain additional material not found in the originals. And THE HOWARD COLLECTOR and THE GODS OF BAL-SAGOTH have fascinating stuff for the Howard completist too.

Let's face it, there's just no such thing as a bad Robert E Howard book, whoever prints it.