Ballantine's World of H.P. Lovecraft Boxed Set (1971): The Way Madness Lies

Another rare paperback four-volume box set of Lovecraft tales. The covers, by Spanish fantasy artist Gervasio Gallardo, are elaborate landscapes of surreal nightmare: perfect for illustrating HPL's "Dream Cycle" stories. Gallardo painted many of the covers for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line which began in the late '60s and featured the genre's giants: Lord Dunsay, James Branch Cabell, George MacDonald, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, and Arthur Machen.

 

 

 

A collector could find most of the titles in this line for sale on eBay and Amazon, but I myself never see these HPL Ballantine books on used bookstore shelves. I think that an obsessive would be able to, after some hard and dedicated work, amass every Ballantine Adult Fantasy volume, perhaps even in mint condition, but that way madness lies...

That's Unpossible!

 

 

Arthur Machen Born Today, 1863

A towering figure in weird fiction, Arthur Machen (who died in 1947) was an influence and an inspiration for many of the writers I've covered here at TMHF: Lovecraft of course, and the whole circle of Weird Tales folks like Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long, on up to King, Straub, Campbell, T.E.D. Klein and Karl Edward Wagner. And while Machen's output is out of my self-defined era of "vintage" horror fiction, these wonderful paperback covers most certainly are not! These collections date from the 1960s to the early '80s, American and British editions, with covers highlighting various lurid and sensational aspects of the Welshman's superb tales. They're are all highly collectible paperbacks as well; I've lost one or two over the years and have not yet replaced them.

These top four paperbacks are from Pinnacle in the 1970s, two reprints of two volumes. Robert LoGrippo is responsible for the garish, blood-drippy covers from 1976. The fifth Pinnacle paperback is from 1983 and contains all the stories from the two-volume set. Can't even recall which one(s) I owned, and I haven't reread even "The Great God Pan" in over 15 years. Surely it is one of the seminal tales of classic horror.

In 1972 the highly-regarded Ballantine Adult Fantasy line published The Three Imposters (1895). This novel - with Boschian art again by LoGrippo - in episode form includes two of his most influential stories, "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder." Below you can see the British paperbacks with those titles, from Corgi in the mid-'60s; love the covers by Josh Kirby.

 

Two more British paperbacks from Panther - a publisher known for putting out lots of horror fiction - dated 1975, with eye-catching occult cover art from Bruce Pennington.

H.P. Lovecraft Paperback Covers II: In Madness You Dwell

Let's continue, shall we, with more terrific (and terrible) cover art for various vintage paperback editions of H.P. Lovecraft. It's addictive - I can't get enough! And I'm certain you guys can't either. And if there are any Lovecraft novices out there, these covers give you only the slightest glimpse of the dread and nameless horrors that await all humanity should we venture too far from our placid islands of ignorance. So gaze upon them affrightedly, and despair...

H.P. Lovecraft Paperback Covers: Draining You of Sanity

On this, the 120th anniversary of the birth of the greatest and most influential horror writer of the 20th century, I present a small portion - a very small portion - of some of the amazingly gruesome, sometimes ridiculous, and indeed, sometimes inaccurate, H.P. Lovecraft paperback covers.