The Outsider and Others. Collected by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei.

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First edition, sole printing, of the first omnibus edition of Lovecraft's fiction, in the striking dust jacket by the celebrated fantasy illustrator Virgil Finlay. The book was critically hailed for its selection of the author's best stories, from "Dagon" to "At the Mountains of Madness". It also includes his final revised version of "Supernatural Horror in Literature", among the finest literary analyses of the genre's history. Arkham House, named after Lovecraft's fictional New England city, was founded by the late author's friends Derleth and Wandrei to preserve his serialized stories in this hardback edition. Their labour of love marks "the beginning of serious specialist publishing of fantastic fiction in America" (Bleiler). The print run comprised 1,268 copies, and no subsequent edition was published. Provenance: from the substantial occult library of the Arkham House collector and military historian Dr King Lawrence Parker Jr (1929-2006), featuring his Cthulhu-inspired bookplate on the front free endpaper. Parker earned his PhD in military history at Columbia University for his 1970 thesis "Anglo-American Wilderness Campaigning 1754-1764: Logistical and Tactical Developments". Bleiler 1040; Currey, p. 324; Joshi, Eighty Years 1; Joshi, Lovecraft I.A.15; Locke I, p. 143; Nielsen 1. Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, buff endpapers. With dust jacket by Virgil Finlay. Light bumps and rubbing, contents clean; unclipped jacket bright overall, a little rubbed, shallow chips to ends and corners, a couple of short closed splits to folds: a near-fine copy in like jacket. Seller Inventory # 170807

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