It was at this point that the idea of publishing the omnibus under an imprint of our own occurred to me and took hold. I wrote again to Donald Wandrei, setting forth my plan. Both of us were impecunious writers--and how rare is the writer who is not!--but I was at that time building a home for which a local bank had advanced a considerable loan (not, however, without four times the amount of the loan in collateral, as is the invariable custom of banks), and it occurred to me that there was one manifest course open to a would-be publisher--to advertise for advance prepaid orders, and to pay off the printer from the sum of my loan. To this, Donald Wandrei added what small sum he could scrape together at that time, at great personal sacrifice; and, with the full co-operation of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Mrs. Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, and Robert H. Barlow, the project took shape. There was never any question about the name of our publishing house. _Arkham House_ suggested itself at once, since it was Lovecraft’s own well-known, widely-used place-name for legend-haunted Salem, Massachusetts, in his remarkable fiction; it seemed to us that this was fitting and that Lovecraft himself would have approved it enthusiastically. And, once the project had been decided upon, there was never any question about the printer chosen to do it--we turned at once to the nearest, most widely-known printer--the George Banta Company of Menasha, Wisconsin, whose plant was only a hundred miles distant. But by this time two years had elapsed since Lovecraft’s death, and by the time initial announcements of the work appeared in _Weird Tales_, offering prepaid advance-ordered copies of _The Outsider and Others_--a title selected because it had been once mentioned by Lovecraft himself as a possible title for a collection of his work, and because Lovecraft was in a very real sense, as well as in his own concept of himself, an outsider in the twentieth century--the book was being made ready for publication, Donald Wandrei was reading proof, and labels were being printed for shipment of copies. Advance-ordered, prepaid copies of the book were offered at $3.50 the copy, in contrast to the published price of $5.00 for the omnibus, of which 1,268 copies were delivered to me in late 1939.