ARKHAM HOUSE: THE FIRST 20 YEARS 1939-1959 A History and Bibliography prepared by August Derleth ARKHAM HOUSE: Publishers Sauk City, Wisconsin 1959 Though it was not immediately foreseen, Arkham House had its inception in the death of Howard Phillips Lovecraft on March 15, 1937. The first word of Lovecraft’s death came in a letter from the late Howard Wandrei, then in New York, a letter I read on my way into the marshes below Sauk City, where I had intended to spend an afternoon reading Thoreau’s _Journal_. Instead, I sat at a railroad trestle beside the brook and considered ways and means of putting together Lovecraft’s best works and bringing them out in book form. I was under no illusions about the difficulty of persuading a New York publisher to bring out such a collection, for, in the broadest sense, Lovecraft was relatively obscure, he wrote in a vein for which there has never been too large an audience, and all his previous submissions of book manuscripts to publishers like Putnam, Knopf and others had been futile--though it should be said in favor of the publishers and their readers that Lovecraft, certain of their failure, customarily submitted dog-eared, hardly legible manuscripts, which were certainly enough to discourage all but the most hardy reader. Once back at my typewriter later that afternoon, I wrote Donald Wandrei that something should be done to keep Lovecraft’s work in print; he replied that collecting only the stories, as I had thought to do, was not enough--all the work should be collected and eventually published, including the marvellously instructive and entertaining letters. I lost no further time in collecting and arranging the stories, which were put into typescript by my then secretary, Alice Conger, and immediately submitted to Charles Scribner’s Sons. Scribner’s were at that time my own publishers, and, while sympathetic to the project and cognizant of the literary value of Lovecraft’s fiction, rejected the manuscript because the cost of producing so bulky a book, combined with the public’s then sturdy resistance to buying short story collections and the comparative obscurity of H. P. Lovecraft as a writer, made the project financially prohibitive. Simon & Schuster, to whom the manuscript was next submitted, likewise rejected, for similar reasons.