This post is brought to you by the upcoming collection of young Arthan stories, Bearshirt #5: The Beacon House, the fifth book in the series by G. W. Thomas. Arthan encounters many strange monsters as well as interesting people as he wanders the forest in his teen years. The last tale, which I just finished, is a 19,000 word novella called “Descent”, in which the bear-man faces off against a race of scientists called the Smoulderers. These strange mages have dug a giant mine to get at something arcane and dangerous lying at the bottom. Only a were like Arthan has any hope of retrieving the secret. It’s a fun way to end this collection of six tales. Keep you eyes peeled for a free sample “Green With Envy” coming soon.
Sword & Sorcery paperbacks after 1965 is a rapidly expanding publishing category that takes the average year from four or five publications to dozens a year by 1978. This explosion in S&S was fueled first by Donald A. Wollheim’s unauthorized version of The Lord of the Rings then by Lancer’s reprinting of the Conan stories. But what of the years before 1965? What did a Conan fan do before 1966?
The paperback was one of the technological results of World War II, like the ball point pen and liquid soap. These conveniences, first developed (sometimes by accident) for the military, hung on after 1945 for household use. Ball point pens meant you didn’t have to have a fountain inside your pen that leaked or exploded. Liquid soap worked great on dishes. Paperbacks also filled this role, being easier to carry than Pulps. The end of the Pulps was written on the walls of 1945. The paperback was the future.
Sword & Sorcery as a sub-genre, or even Fantasy as a larger grouping, was not found frequently in the 1950s. This was the post-War era of Science Fiction. Paperback publishers were experimenting with new lines like Fawcett’s Gold Medal and ACE’s Double series. Detetectives, Westerns and Romance dominated. The first true S&S book I can locate, in paperback remember, not hard cover or in a magazine, was Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard /The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett (1953) by ACE. This Conan tale got selected from the hard covers of Gnome Press because it is the only novel. Leigh Brackett’s story is space opera but with a similar energy and a good match. Conan the Conqueror originally appeared in Weird Tales (December 1935-April 1936) as “The Hour of the Dragon”.
In 1960 Dell did a paperback of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1960) to capitalize on the Broadway success of Camelot. The cover is a photo from the play. Despite seeking a different audience, this book would still have appealed to Fantasy fans first. They would do this again in 1963 with The Sword in the Stone to hijack some of Disney’s film version popularity. Not Sword & Sorcery but you couldn’t be picky.
Lancer Books enters the scene in the 1960s but not with Conan first. Their first S&S book is the paperback version of The Dying Earth (1962) by Jack Vance which first appeared in hard cover in 1950. This collection has the advantage of being seen as Science Fiction by some readers though this is debatable. Such camo was necessary in the 1950s if you wanted to get published in the SF mags. Only story in the book was published in a magazine, “Liane the Wayfarer” in Worlds Beyond but most were not, suggesting there was little market in 1949-50. Many of the stories have become Fantasy classics after the fact as has the entire series. I don’t think Lancer had any thoughts on Conan this early on.
It was ACE Books that started the next S&S/SF series with the first two volumes of Andre Norton’s Witch World. These were Witch World (1963) and a year later The Web of Witch World (1964). Again the scent of SF is strong at the beginning with the hero Simon Tregarth doing a portal Fantasy entrance into the tale, coming from a world like ours and paying a scientist to send him into another reality with a machine. (Robert E. Howard used the same idea in Almuric, published after his death in 1939. There are other examples of it, too, in Weird Tales.) But Andre Norton wasn’t that interested in the ray guns and the story quickly becomes one of swords and magic (but always with a hint of SF).
Three Hearts and Three Lions (1962) by Poul Anderson was published by Avon. Unlike The Broken Sword, which would have to wait for the 1970s, this classic portal Fantasy got a paperback. This book appeals more to SF fans more than Anderson’s classic Scandinavian tales.
Jack Williamson’s The Reign of Wizardry (1964) was reprinted by Lancer. This novel is one of John W. Campbell’s anti-Fantasy Fantasies from Unknown (March-May 1940). Like Three Hearts and Three Lions, the philosophy behind this novel is more that of an SF writer than a Fantasy one. The cover, which may be the first Frazetta cover for a Fantasy novel, looks more like a Horror novel. The subtitle “A Classic of the Unknown” also sells this. Frazetta would paint his most famous Conan covers for Lancer two years later.
Just a nod here to DAW’s primary artist here: Jack Gaughan, who did those first The Lord of the Rings covers as well as Witch World and others. Jack style, along with others like Gray Morrow, set the look of ACE’s Fantasy books. This was a great way to signal to readers that this was more of the good stuff.
I’m sure I’ve missed a title or two, so let me know.
Conclusion
1965 was the year that everything would change. Donald A. Wollheim, editor at ACE, found a loophole that allowed him to publish The Lord of the Rings in paperback in the US. Something Tolkien never wanted to do. JRRT wanted his books to remain in dignified hard covers only. But those pesky Americans! With the unauthorized version out there, Tolkien’s publishers had little recourse than to reclaim their copyright with their own authorized edition. And this sparked the Heroic Fantasy explosion because it sent every publisher who wanted to get in on the action to their slush piles to look for anything that resembled Tolkien. It is fair to say that 1965 is our line in the sands of time.
Lancer would get the Conan rights about this time and start re-selling Robert E. Howard with L. Sprague deCamp’s help. Belmont-Tower, Manor, Zebra, Bantam, Signet, NEL, most paperback companies offered something for the Fantasy fan. Not all of it was good, but for those starved for more Tolkien, it was a treasure trove. It would give us some lowest-common-demoninator books but also the Ballantine Fantasy Series. Donald A. Wollheim, who started things off with that first ACE Double then LOTR, went on to create his own paperback company, DAW Books in 1971. And not surprising, Andre Norton, who he published in the early 1960s, joined him, leaving long time publisher ACE. DAW Books, with its yellow-trimmed covers, continued this paperback (and later hard covers) tradition into the next century. Don Wollheim simply doesn’t get enough credit for making things happen.
Next time…1965 and the Gates Open
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
Good analysis
It is funny for me because those first books with the hint of Sci-Fi to sell has always kept me from trying them out.