Arkham House

From a desperate act of preservation to a defining force in modern horror, Arkham House began with August Derleth's determination to keep H. P. Lovecraft in print after the author's death in 1937. When major publishers balked, Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded their own press, named it for Lovecraft's fictional Arkham, and risked personal finances to publish The Outsider and Others in 1939. That landmark volume proved there was a real audience for weird fiction, and the press soon expanded to champion Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and other masters of the uncanny. Across its early years, Arkham House grew into a distinctive home for supernatural, detective, fantasy, and science-fiction writing, launching imprints such as Mycroft & Moran and Stanton & Lee while struggling with rising costs, shrinking print runs, and the precarious economics of small-press publishing. Its books and bibliographies document a carefully curated legacy of cosmic horror, dreamlike fantasy, occult lore, and dark poetry, while The Arkham Sampler offers a vivid, intimate record of a literary movement in motion. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.