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The Hour of the Gnome
an article by, Roy Thomas
By now, nearly everybody knows the story by heart:
For several years during the Great Depression of the 1930's, the pulp-magazine Weird Tales published a series of stories written by Texas fantasist Robert E. Howard and dealing with a brawny, brawling barbarian hero named Conan the Cimmerian - a series which crystallized and epitomized (at one and the same time) the genre known today as sword-and-sorcery.
Then, beginning in 1966, the now-moribund Lancer Books brought out a series of paperback editions of Howard's Conan tales, as well as new ones added to the saga by the likes of L. Sprague decamp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg, to the eventual tune of some three million copies.
In between the 1930's and the late 60's, Conan was totally forgotten, except by those handful of pulp-magazines collectors who hoarded stacks of old Weird Tales issues in the shadow-haunted inglenooks of dust-filled attics.
True or false?
False.
For, while it's true enough that the so-called mass audience lost almost total contact with Conan for nigh two decades following Howard's untimely death in 1936, the Conan stories were accessible - at least to a few thousand new readers - during the 1950's. Imagine if you will: Conan the Barbarian, alive and kicking during the dull-as-dishwater decade of Ike the Benign.
The man who kept the Howard/Conan torch murkily ablaze during those difficult years was named Martin Greenberg.
He did it with a phenomenon called Gnome Press.
Let's go back a bit in time, to 1947.
A young soldier named Martin Greenberg is mustered out of the service - milling about a bit, uncertain of the future, looking for something to do, a business to go into. Aforesaid M. Greenberg is also a science-fiction and fantasy fan, whose literary appetites during the years of World War Two were sated (at least in part) by magazines sent him from the home front.
Now, a civilian once more, Greenberg begins to forage about in used-book stores and such places, searching for issues he missed while in uniform, or for favorite stories he'd like to read again. Other people, it would seem, are also searching for the short stories which appeared in s-f pulps such as Astounding, Amazing, etc., for a few short weeks on the all-devouring newsstand, only to be gobbled into limbo if not picked up for very rare hardback anthologies. For prices of back issues are high, at least by 1947 standards.
Then, the proverbial light-bulb blinks to life over his head.
The idea and the man have found each other.
After one false start with a partner, Martin Greenberg founds Gnome Press in 1948 - a small (one-man, really) company dedicated to preserving the best of recent science-fiction between hard covers at a reasonable price (say, $2.50 or so).
The list of Gnome's flagship titles is impressive, to one who treasures vintage s-f classics: Sands of Mars, an early novel by Arthur C. Clarke, who would, after 2001: A Space Odyssey, rival even Bradbury as an s-f writer known to the general public; Judgment Night, Northwest of Earth, and Shambleau and Others, all by woman fantasy-author C.L. Moore, and three of the most prized volumes in Ye Editor's personal collection; The Starmen by Leigh Brackett, then in between her scripting of Philip Marlowe movies (and from The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye is a long way, baby!); Asimov's unforgettable Foundation Trilogy, a true landmark of fantasy right up there with Tolkien and Herbert's Dune; not to mention The Mixed Men by A.E. van Vogt, still another master of the field. And, one of Gnome's first originals: The Camelian Cube, jointly authored by Fletcher Pratt and one L. Sprague decamp.
Oh, it's an impressive list - and to it were added collections of short stories as well, edited by Martin Greenberg, rocket expert Willy Ley, and others.
Around this same time, John Clark, editor of Startling Stories ( a member of that vanishing breed, the pulp magazine), suggested to Greenberg still another group of stories well worth preserving for posterity: the Conan and Kull adventures by Robert E. Howard.
More than a decade earlier, Clark (along with co-writer P. Schuyler Miller) had authored a fan-published Probable Outline of Conan's Career (published in toto in Savaget Tales #2, after 35 years in limbo); what's more, he and Miller had been proselytizing every other fantasy fan in sight ever since the 1930's. Greenberg read a few of the old pulp tales, was duly captivated - and the Conan Project was born.
Conan the Conqueror came first, in 1950, even though it features what are chronologically the hero's later years, largely because Conqueror (original title: The Hour of the Dragon) was the only novel-length Conan tale ever written, and because Greenberg wanted to use it to get the hook into his readers but good. The cover drawing the was by comic-book artist John Forte and showed Conan in full armor, wielding a gleaming blade.
'Twould seem that Greenberg was well-advised to publish Conqueror first, for the several thousand copies of the first (and only) edition sold well.
Unfortunately, the following several books fared rather less well.
The second to be released, again doing injustice to chronological order, was 1952's The Sword of Conan, with a jacket design by Greenberg's associate, David Kyle (who also did an exquisite map for the book's interior covers). The cover's design was simple: a giant sword taking the place of the "T" in "The," and a miniscule battle scene: Conan and sword-bearing lady against a friendly-looking dragon, while two horses gallop riderless into the distance. Since this volume contains the demi-epic Red Nails, adapted in Savage Tales #2-3, the lady is doubtless meant to be Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, though by rights both horses were residing within the dragon's belly by that time. Since the drawing is quite small, however - and rendered nigh-invisible to boot by being printed blue-against-black-against-green - the point is academic.
The next Gnome volume was The Coming of Conan in 1953 - and yes, Virginia, that was the source of Ye Editor's title for the first landmark issue of Marvel's own CONAN comic-book. Coming sported a beautiful cover illustration by Frank Kelly Freas, the selfsame talent who painted covers for MAD for years and who now breathes life into each and every cover of CRAZY Magazine, with science-fiction illoes and designs for NASA sandwiched in between. Freas' Conan is a joy to behold: Conan in his gigantic mirth phase, the laughing but lethal barbarian, guffawing his way into your heart as he aims his gleaming broadsword for your jugular. An artistic triumph, especially when framed against Kyle's map of the Hyborian World. (Gnome's cover artists, incidentally, were mostly recruited by Greenberg's art director, a man with the unlikely name of Washington Irving van der Poel, from among the illustrators who worked for the prestigious Galaxy magazine.)
The fourth Gnome offering was Conan the Barbarian (and right on again, Virginia, the Gnome book was the source of the title of Marvel's mag). The cover of this 1954 edition was designed by the famous s-f artist Emshwiller (who generally signs his name "Emsh"), again in his manic phase and this time looking very, very Greco-Romanesque. Perhaps too much so for those readers who were interested in fantasy, not history - though the drawing itself is fine.
Still, these three Gnome Conans failed to sell as well as had Conqueror a few years earlier. Perhaps the trouble with them was that they were collections of short stories, while Conqueror had been a full-blown (if exceedingly episodic) novel.
Readers may have been put off especially by The Coming of Conan, which is a strange if likable volume compounded of letters by Robert E. Howard and his mentor H.P. Lovecraft on the subject of sword-wielding Cimmerians; Howard's Hyborian Age essay, which formed the pseudo-historical background for his Conan and Kull stories; the Informal Biography of Conan by Miller and Clark; two stories and a poem concerning King Kull, who had been sort of a rough draft version of Conan; and finally (about halfway thru the book's 200 pages) five stories about Our Hero himself. All in all, it's an admirable collection, intelligently done for the connoisseur or completist, but perhaps a bit stand-offish for the more casual reader who was more interested in Conan than in his creator and/or predecessors.
A bit like Savage Tales itself, as a matter of fact. So sue us both!
Perhaps Coming's format had nothing to do with the book's problems, though,' since Sword and Barbarian, each composed simply of four or five long Conan stories with virtually no extraneous matter, sold equally slowly. Oh, eventually they sold out, and have by now become $10-$15 collectors' items (when they're available at all); but meanwhile, an inadequate supply of precious metal was filling the coffers of M. Greenberg. Or his printer.
And printers are traditionally reluctant to accept crumbling pulp-magazines and cajoling promises in lieu of coin-of-the-realm.
Coming in Savage Tales #5: Of Collaborations of Kings - the second and concluding installment The Hour of the Gnome.
