Just read the rest of this thread and your questions will be answered.

Scott

Scott, I've already read the entire thread. What I do not know is:

What are the contents of Tales of India & Ivory? Some sort of CAS tales, I assume. But which ones? How are these tales distinct from those published in volumes 1-5? Will it be a slender little volume, or will its page count approximate the page counts of the previous 5 volumes?

Thanks!

Quoting another thread:

Quote:

Tales of India and Irony contents:
Introduction by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger
The Animated Sword (unpublished)
The Malay Crise
The Ghost of Mohammed Din
The Mahout
The Rajah and the Tiger
Something New
The Flirt
The Perfect Woman
A Platonic Entanglement
The Expert Lover
The Parrot
A Copy of Burns
Checkmate
"O Amor Atque Realitas! Clark Ashton Smith's First Adult Fiction" by Donald Sidney-Fryer

Geoffrey Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Scott, I've already read the entire thread. What I
> do not know is:
>
> What are the contents of Tales of India & Ivory?
> Some sort of CAS tales, I assume. But which ones?
> How are these tales distinct from those published
> in volumes 1-5? Will it be a slender little
> volume, or will its page count approximate the
> page counts of the previous 5 volumes?
>
> Thanks!

It will be slimmer than the others. TII was originally to be issued as a "bonus" trade paperback given free to people who subscribed (advance ordered) the CAS set from Night Shade Books. (We set these stories apart because they are mostly non-fantastic or juvenalia, and are thus of lesser interest.) So many people have expressed an interest that we're expanding it to include "The Infernal Star," Smith's uncompleted WT serial; "The Dead Will Cuckold You," a play in blank verse set in Zothique; and two stories that CAS gave to E. Hoffmann Price, who rewrote them and published them under his name in SPICY MYSTERY STORIES (but he gave CAS 60% of the proceeds, and CAS asserted authorship, so we're including them). We also hope to include Don Fryer's biographical essay "The Sorcerer Departs." It will also be a hardcover uniform with (but not part of) the Collected Fantasies. Subscribers will still receive it without charge, and Ron and I are willing to drive to SF to sign their copies as well.

Hope that this helps. We're waiting for the Smith Estate to get back from the holidays for the approval.

Scott

Martinus and Scott, thank you very much. :)

Hi Scott
Many thanks. Peace and love.

It's a shame you can't include the slim volume of CAS essays from 'Planets and Dimensions'. While some of it is culled from letter columns long since gone, missives like 'Fantasy and Human Experience' and 'Horror, Fantasy, and Science' give us terrific insight into the man's thoughts on story, craft, and why he wrote what he did the way he did.

Also, all his letters, please.

MarciKiser Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It's a shame you can't include the slim volume of
> CAS essays from 'Planets and Dimensions'. While
> some of it is culled from letter columns long
> since gone, missives like 'Fantasy and Human
> Experience' and 'Horror, Fantasy, and Science'
> give us terrific insight into the man's thoughts
> on story, craft, and why he wrote what he did the
> way he did.

:) We're working on this. Will discuss once things are finalized.

Scott

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Also, all his letters, please.

Most of CAS' letters are replies to people asking about copies of his books or the availability of carvings. There's a lot of repetition. Besides the Arkham SELECTED LETTERS, which contains the absolute cream of his letters, Joshi and Schultz have published the correspondence with George Sterling, and are preparing the correspondences with Lovecraft and Samuel Loveman. I think that Schultz has also prepared the letters to and from R. H. Barlow as well.

Scott

Got my copy of CAS5 on tuesday. My selfish indulgence was to have it
sent overnight-delivery from an order placed on monday - the advertised
first day of sales on Amazon.com.

I am very happy to recieve it and it appears to be just as expected.
I thank Mr. Conners and Night-Shade Books for their many efforts to
bring this volume to fruition. I am aware that there have been or will
be many criticisms of both the text as well as the principles involved
in publishing it. Me, I will be busy reading and much of that material
will be new to me. I have deliberately *not* read some of the stories
previously so that I might get into the entire corpus rather than chasing
stories willy-nilly over the last couple years - as some here have done
before the five volumes now out were available. I hope they are satisfied
with Night-Shade products. I know I am.

Thx.!

Cathexis

asshurbanipal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Scott
> Many thanks. Peace and love.

Same to you. Merry Christmas.

Scott

Got volume 5 as well! Thanks to Scott and the Nightshade Crew!

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> We have received it here at headquarters. I
> confidently predict that certain people in the
> wacky world of Robert E Howard fandom will have a
> fit when they read Richard Lupoff's introduction.

It's a little late for me to mention this, but I am a member of the "wacky world of Robert E. Howard." I've contributed two articles about him to critical anthologies, am a member of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, and have been asked to serve on the editorial board of The Dark Man. I'm on several REH forums, and the only one where Dick's introduction was discussed was on the REH Forum at Conan.com. Somebody picked up your comment. When Dick's remarks were printed there, the response was "... That's it? That's what we're supposed to have a fit about? This is just shoddy researching and opinionating [sic], not MVO-level mythologizing. The way the ED folk were talking you'd think they were talking about 'Superman on a Psychotic Bender'." (He refers to a hostile NY Times review of SKULL-FACE AND OTHERS, showing that the 'Gray Lady' was full of crap at least as far back as the 1940s.)
Experts and scholars like Don Herron, Mark Finn, Rusty Burke, and others have found that the only way to combat the widespread misinformation out there about REH is to confront it aggressively and put out the facts as opposed to the legend, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE not withstanding. Lovecraftians had to do the same thing for many years. CAS lived long enough to have escaped much of the pernicious mythology surrounding his comrades. I'm sorry if you think that this is "wacky."

BTW, ED readers might find my essay for Darrell Schweitzer's ROBERT E. HOWARD READER of interest. It is "WEIRD TALES and the Great Depression," and it examines the finances of the "Unique Magazine" in the early to mid-1930s, using editor Farnsworth Wright's letters to CAS and Derleth to determine just how far behind in paying its writers WT fell after the 1933 bank holiday. It's published by Borgo Press (and has a truly wretched cover!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 1 Dec 10 | 11:08PM by Scott Connors.

This is good to know, Scott, but I was not referring to Howard scholars like Herron, Burke, Finn, Louinet, Coffman, et al.; and I doubt Jojo was doing so. I recall others like the gentleman who threatened James Van Hise that he would hunt him down and beat him the next time he was in Texas over some slight he believed Van Hise had committed to either Howard's memory or the Howard community; or those who took exception to some of the scripting in a recent Howard comic adaptation and, again, were threatening to find the artist in question and slap some sense into him; or the response in some quarters to one line in Arnie Fenner's introduction to AND THEIR MEMORY WAS A BITTER TREE; etc., etc. Scholars keeping the record straight is one thing, but some of the arrested adolescents who flock around them, beating their breasts and carrying on as if they must seek bloody vengeance over every deviation from the accepted "script" is another.