Publication of the initial LeFanu collection, of stories long out of print in America, marked the beginning of Arkham House’s importation of titles from abroad. Since many of the best writers in the genre were British, it seemed to me necessary to add to our list such names as would bring prestige to the Arkham House imprint. Thus, the year 1946 witnessed publication of four British importations--Algernon Blackwood’s last book of new work, _The Doll and One Other_; A. E. Coppard’s _Fearful Pleasures_; H. Russell Wakefield’s _The Clock Strikes Twelve_, and an omnibus reprint of four novels--William Hope Hodgson’s _The House on the Borderland and Other Novels_; as well as three books by members of the Lovecraft circle of writers who, like him, contributed primarily to _Weird Tales_ in earlier years--Frank Belknap Long’s _The Hounds of Tindalos_; Robert E. Howard’s _Skull-Face and Others_; and Henry S. Whitehead’s _West India Lights_, together with the first Arkham House science-fiction novel, the popular _Astounding Science-Fiction_ serial, _Slan_, by A. E. Van Vogt. The year 1946 was in a sense a year of publishing instruction. It was not until that year, for example, that I finally learned what the average size of a printing ought to be--not 4,000, which some of our books had run, but 2,000, with occasional printings of up to 3,000. By that year the limited space in my home was being taken up by Arkham House stock, despite the fact that books sold rapidly. The experiences of that year also demonstrated conclusively that a small publishing business like Arkham House could afford very little overhead. Indeed, had it not been for the pouring into Arkham House of $25,000 of personal income from my writing over the first ten years, the House could not have survived. I had come to publishing without any previous experience, other than a limited editorial stint with Fawcett Publications, with which I had been associated briefly in 1930-31; and I had to learn step by step, often painfully, invariably expensively. In 1946, production costs had begun to rise also, still further cutting into any possible profit margin, since the price of Arkham House books remained fixed. Nevertheless, despite increased costs of publication, Arkham House in 1947 released Lady Cynthia Asquith’s _This Mortal Coil_; Ray Bradbury’s first distinguished collection, _Dark Carnival_ (later revised and issued under the Ballantine imprint as _The October Country_); Carl Jacobi’s _Revelations in Black_; my own anthology of fantastic and macabre poetry, _Dark of the Moon_; Fritz Leiber Jr.’s _Night’s Black Agents_; and, under the Mycroft & Moran imprint, William Hope Hodgson’s _Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder_, a far more comprehensive collection than the British edition of almost forty years before, since it contained three new stories, two never before printed, discovered among Hodgson’s manuscripts by his sister.