If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by the Swords of Fire anthology series, with the fourth book due in Summer of 2026. Like the three previous collections, this one will feature four longer Sword & Sorcery adventures with one being “The Dragon God”, a Sirtago & Poet tale set in a country much like Japan. This is by Jack Mackenzie, of course. There is also the next adventure of Bradik the Slayer by M. D. Jackson, “The Star of Kanshalsus”. One of the other two tales is a new Arthan the Bear Man story, “The Twilight War” featuring an army of mercenaries versus giant spiders. And to round out the four, “Between the Dragon and His Wrath” by Will Parker. For the previous anthologies, go here.
Precusors
Dell was a long-standing publisher of books and comics until 1976 when it was acquired by Doubleday. George T. Delacote Jr. started the publishing business in 1921. They embraced paperbacks in the 1940s along with just about everybody else. Both in books and comics, they did plenty of media tie-ins (like Thief of Baghdad based on the 1961 film) and family-friendly stuff. Fantasy fiction was not on their radar until T. H. White brought Arthurian drama back into the spotlight when his books were turned into the 1967 film Camelot. Dell’s children’s line published Rosemary Sutcliffe’s historical adventures but not kids’ magical stuff. Fantasy was there at Dell but only in very small doses.
In the late 1960s, Lancer Books was raking in the coin with Sword & Sorcery, namely with reprinting the Conan saga. Other publishers that would also follow included ACE Books, Zebra Books, Manor Books, Belmont-Tower Books, Pinnacle Books and Bantam Books. This kind of cash must have caught Dell’s interest for they managed to nab Robert E. Howard’s other sword-swinger, Bran Mak Morn, adorned with their first Frank Frazetta cover. Before Bran, they had published Robert Silverberg’s Sword & Planet novel Conquerors From the Darkness (1968) but the Paul Lehr cover does nothing to draw in the S&S fan, despite it being a first class heroic fantasy book. (They probably wanted it because Silverberg was now an award-winning SF author.) Whatever their opinions on S&S, Dell was ready to join others in the race for sword coin.
Lin Carter & Flashing Swords
Lin Carter was the man in 1970. The new Ballantine Fantasy Series at Ballantine Books was doing well. Dell got Carter to edit a new anthology series. (He tells how the idea was proposed at World Con in St. Lois in 1969 and Gail Morrison, editor at Dell, snapped it up.) Flashing Swords was not the first S&S anthology, (those started in 1963 with L. Sprague de Camp) but it was perhaps the first BIG anthology. Four novellas of all-new material from top hands, a smashing cover by Frank Frazetta, how could it fail? The second half was published just months later.
Having a successful anthology with Dell, Lin sold them on a trilogy of books with The Black Star (1973) being the first volume. Sales must have been poor despite another cracking Frazetta cover, and the later two books were never written. I often wonder what these lost books would have given us? Lin may have recycled the plots into other books?
Michael Moorcock
An author who did much better in sales was British writer, Michael Moorcock, who had the Count Brass and Eternal Champion books at Dell. These were reprinted regularly. Dorian Hawkmoon and Elric appeared at Lancer in the US and Mayflower in the UK. They would be reprinted at DAW in the later part of the 1970s. Like with Conan and Bran Mak Morn, Dell had to settle for a lesser member of the Moorcock multiverse.
L. Sprague deCamp
While not exactly Sword & Sorcery, Dell did try to get something similar from L. Sprague de Camp with reprinting some of the Harold Shea novels. This series was written in the 1940s for Unknown and John W.Campbell and pokes fun at heroic fantasy, almost an anti-Sword & Sorcery. Not to my taste but an Esteban Maroto cover would have sold this to unwary fans.
Other S&S Books
There were other books, of course. Phyllis Eisenstein started her Alaric series with Born to Exile (1978), Piers Anthony reprinted his Fantastic serial from 1969 in Hasan (1977), an Arabian Nights style Fantasy, John Jakes collected the shorter Brak stories in The Fortunes of Brak (1980) with illustrations by Douglas Beekman, and Jakes and comic giant, Gil Kane, wrote their own version of King Arthur in Excalibur! (1980). This was a year before John Boorman’s 1981 film appeared. No novelization of Excalibur was published, perhaps because the Jakes-Kane book was still selling?
Post Sword & Sorcery
The Sword & Sorcery flood ended early for Dell, while it raged on at ACE Books, Bantam and elsewhere. Lancer Books died in the flood, expiring in 1977. Dell did not give up on Fantasy altogether, returning to publishing children’s fiction like Lloyd Alexander’s excellent Prydain series, and the occasional one-off like Richard Ford’s Quest For the Faradawn (1982) and the anti-fantastic Arthur Rex (1978) by Thomas Berger. These last two were Fantasy books for non-Fantasy readers.
Conclusion
Dell, like all the rest, chased hot book genres and categories. Sword & Sorcery was one of these for about a decade beginning around 1968. Some categories like Science Fiction are more consistent and longer lasting. Dell had been publishing Horror novels for years but doubled down on that field in the 1980s, burning out the Stephen king crowd along with the rest of the paperback publishers. (But that’s another story!) Book publishers milked those cows dry, and would drop a failing genre like a flaming turd. Some authors, like Michael Moorcock, who published in both SF and Fantasy were above this fray. Moorcock is Moorcock. Others came and went with the winds, writers like Ben Haas as Richard Meade, throw off a few S&S titles then go back to writing Westerns.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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