REHupa

On August 19, the Robert E. Howard fan community lost one of our towering figures with the passing of Donald M. Grant.  Between 1965 and 1990 Don published 33 Robert E Howard titles, mostly in deluxe, illustrated hardcover editions.  If you count three second editions that differed substantially from the firsts (the second editions of A Gent from Bear Creek and The Pride of Bear Creek featured Tim Kirk illustrations, while the firsts were not illustrated, and the second edition of Marchers of Valhalla was illustrated by Marcus Boas, while the first had been illustrated by Robert Bruce Acheson), he published 36 unique REH books, more than any other publisher.  He was the first to give Howard the deluxe, illustrated treatment, and thus laid the groundwork for later publishers.  In fact, Marcelo Anciano, the major force behind the Wandering Star books (which directly led to today’s Del Rey editions), has always acknowledged that Grant’s edition of The Sowers of the Thunder (1973), superbly illustrated by Roy G. Krenkel, was his inspiration for the Wandering Star Robert E Howard Library of Classics.

Having been involved in specialty press publishing since the 1940s, Don launched his own imprint, Donald M. Grant, Publisher, in 1964, and one of his first projects was the publication of Howard’s novel A Gent from Bear Creek, in photo offset from the original Herbert Jenkins (1937) edition.   He followed this in 1966 with The Pride of Bear Creek, which included many of the Breckinridge Elkins stories from the pulps which had not been utilized for the novel.  Then in 1968 Grant published Red Shadows, the first collection of the Solomon Kane stories, masterfully illustrated by Jeff Jones.  In 1970 came Singers in the Shadows, the second collection of Howard’s poetry (following Glenn Lord’s Arkham House collection, Always Comes Evening) — Don would publish two other poetry collections, Echoes from an Iron Harp (1972) and Shadows of Dreams (1989) — and over the next nine years he published 26 Howard books, at least one every year, with five titles each year in 1975, 1976, and 1979.

In 1974 Don launched his Deluxe Conan series, with People of the Black Circle, illustrated by David Ireland.  He would publish eleven titles in the series (each book including only one or two stories) before he ran out of steam.  In 1981 he struck an agreement with Stephen King to publish the Gunslinger stories, and that series soon seemed to become the primary focus of the publisher.  He published only seven more Howard titles between 1981 and 1990.  Two of these, though, were among the most important he issued: Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir, One Who Walked Alone (1986) and Howard’s own semi-autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (1990).  These books have contributed greatly to our understanding of Howard as a person, as well as a writer.  Mrs. Ellis’s book inspired two of her students to create a screenplay which, through sheer enthusiasm and persistence, they were able to see realized as the award-winning film, The Whole Wide World.

In the early 1990s, REHupan Steve Trout discovered that the Solomon Kane stories in Grant’s Red Shadows had been altered, apparently in an attempt to remove some of Howard’s, shall we say, “politically incorrect” wording.  An entire paragraph of fevered Aryanist boasting had been removed from the end of “Wings in the Night,” and most of the other stories set in Africa had been subjected to the red pencil.  Steve’s findings were later published in The Dark Man and The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard, and became one of the rallying points for the “Howard purists,” those of us who wanted to see Howard’s work presented as he himself wrote it, without editorial emendations by others.  (Our previous bugbear was the intrusion of de Camp, Carter and Nyberg into the Conan series.)  When I later learned that Marcelo Anciano, who had just joined REHupa, was planning to publish an illustrated volume of Kane stories, I offered to assist with the restoration of texts, which is how I came to find myself the series editor for Wandering Star.

Don has taken a lot of heat for those editorial revisions to the Kane stories, but I find it hard to blame him too much.  He certainly had precedent for making changes to Howard’s texts, given what had been done with the Conan stories, and in the late 1960s America was really struggling with race relations.  Don told me that he had made the changes with the best of intentions, feeling that the stories of Robert E. Howard would stand up quite well without the racially charged language.  Even though I have made the decision to present Howard’s work as it was written (or first published, if originals are not available), believing that current readers are capable of understanding that the 1920s and ’30s were a different time, I have wrestled with the question enough myself that I find it hard to fault Don for making the decision, in a year that had seen the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and ensuing riots, to revise the stories to remove what he saw as hurtful stereotypes.

I only got to meet Don in person once, at a convention (I don’t recall which), and we corresponded sporadically.  He struck me as an extraordinarily nice gentleman, and that impression is reinforced by what I’ve heard from those who knew him better.  In the books he published he has a legacy that will last for quite a long time, and we are fortunate that so many of those were books by and about Robert E. Howard.  The sheer quantity and quality of those books (nearly all of which I am proud to have in my library) must erase any doubt that Don was genuinely an ardent fan of REH, and ranks among those who have done the most to preserve and promote Howard’s literary efforts.

Note: According to Ethan Nahte, memorial donations in Don’s honor may be made to: TideWell Hospice and Palliative Care, 5955 Rand Blvd., Sarasota, FL 34238