The first quartet of books to bear the imprint of Arkham House--published from 1939 to 1944--though getting off to a slow selling start with the initial Lovecraft title, had by the end of 1943 gained such momentum that it was obvious that few if any of these books would be left for sale by the end of 1944. _The Outsider and Others_ took four years to sell out its only printing, and actually, what with overhead and other costs, it took approximately that long to return our initial investment. But by 1944 it was manifest that there was a distinct--if relatively small--market for collections of weird, fantastic, science-fiction short stories, and I determined to publish as many such collections as possible, with emphasis on the hitherto unpublished, but not scorning works long out of print. Pushing ahead, I commissioned Frank Utpatel, the Wisconsin artist who had done the illustrations for Lovecraft’s _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_ in 1936, to design a house colophon. This made its first appearance in our next book, Donald Wandrei’s _The Eye and the Finger_. In addition to this title, three other Arkham House titles appeared in 1944; they were Henry S. Whitehead’s _Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales_; Clark Ashton Smith’s _Lost Worlds_, and _Marginalia_, by H. P. Lovecraft, with contributions by others. By the end of 1945, the Arkham House list had been augmented by the addition of my own Something Near; Robert Bloch’s _The Opener of the Way_; the first Arkham House fantasy novel, Evangeline Walton’s _Witch House_; J. Sheridan LeFanu’s _Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories_; and _The Lurker at the Threshold_, a novel suggested in notes and fragments written by Lovecraft, finished by myself. The year 1945 was also the year in which Arkham House introduced two allied imprints--Mycroft & Moran, specializing in off-trail sleuthing tales, the first of which was my own _“In Re: Sherlock Holmes”--The Adventures of Solar Pons_, a collection of pastiches of Sherlock Holmes published at the urging of Vincent Starrett, who wrote the introduction for the volume, and Ellery Queen, who was to write the introduction for the later _The Memoirs of Solar Pons_; and Stanton & Lee, which concentrated on reprints or on collections of comic cartoons, principally those by the late Clare Victor Dwiggins, and which made its bow with Dwig’s _Bill’s Diary_, the Derleth-Dwig juvenile for pixilated adults, _Oliver_, _the Wayward Owl_, and a new printing of my Scribner novel, _Evening in Spring_, from the Scribner plates. The Mycroft & Moran imprint came straight out of the Holmes canon--from Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s illustrious brother, and Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London. The house colophon was designed as a deerstalker by Ronald Clyne. Stanton & Lee took rise from the names of two friends, one an employee; its colophons were designed by Howard Wandrei--which appeared only in _Evening in Spring_--and by Ronald Clyne.