Incredible as it may seem to today’s ardent searchers for that first Lovecraft collection, orders at $3.50 the copy came in very slowly. By publication, only 150 prepaid orders had come in. To the sum thus collected, Donald Wandrei added $400.00; the remainder of the not small sum was lifted, much to the horror of the local bankers, from my loan (though it was soon replaced--not out of earnings from sales, but out of my personal income from various writing projects). The book did not lack publicity; our venture was given generous space in the _Publishers’ Weekly_ and other trade media, though it was so thoroughly ignored locally that even today, after two decades, not one in fifty persons in Sauk City and the area of the village could identify Arkham House if asked to do so by an outsider. _The Outsider and Others_ sold with discouraging slowness. Nevertheless, it seemed to me, judging by the enthusiasm shown by buyers, that there might be a market for small editions of books in the general field of fantasy, perhaps with emphasis on the macabre or science-fiction. To that end, I prepared early in 1941 a slender collection of my own best stories in the genre and submitted them, according to my contractual obligations, to Charles Scribner’s Sons. Up to this time there had been no thought of publishing through Arkham House the work of anyone but H. P. Lovecraft; it remained for William C. Weber of Scribner’s to suggest that my collection, _Someone in the Dark_, ought properly to be published under the Arkham House imprint, since a specialized house could very probably do better with such a book than could Scribner’s. After much soul-searching, I took Weber’s advice, and brought out _Someone in the Dark_ at $2.00 the copy. This had the additional effect of keeping the Arkham House imprint before the public eye while other Lovecraft works were in preparation. When the initial costs of the second Arkham House book were met before those of _The Outsider and Others_, I began to explore the possibility of publishing further books in the field. Despite the fact that because of his induction into the U. S. Army, where he served four years, Donald Wandrei was forced to sever all but the most cursory connection with Arkham House in 1942, that year saw publication of the third Arkham House title, Clark Ashton Smith’s _Out of Space and Time_, at $3.00 the copy. The three-dollar price seemed to be the most satisfactory one; the publishers could honestly show that $2.00 was too little, and readers had complained that $5.00 was too much for a book in 1939--though some of those same plaintiffs, having refused _The Outsider and Others_ at $5.00, paid $25.00 and $35.00 for it ten years later, even $50.00 and $65.00. Yet the $5.00 price had to be maintained for the omnibus collections, and in 1943 the second Lovecraft omnibus, _Beyond the Wall of Sleep_, was published in an edition limited by wartime restrictions to but 1,217 copies.