Kevin's Watch

Even before SRD hit the scene with really only Tolkien, almost single handedly, keeping the genre afloat ol' Lin Carter helped to revive interest in fantasy in America. Yes the same Lin Carter who mopped up the unfinished Conans with L. Sprauge deCamp. I saw him on a late night local New York talk show in early 1970 promoting The Ballentine Books Adult Fantasy Series. Ballentine initially reprinted The Hobbit and LOTR in the 60s in popular paperbacks but, aside from Lewis' Narnia books (viewed primarily as children's books, at the time), very little was known about classic fantasy and the few available contemporary writers.

Carter, hired as the series editor, educated the audience on three of the original masters of modern fantasy: Lord Dunsany, William Morris & E. R. Eddison. He was also promoting Dreamquest of the Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft. Dreamquest sounded so weird and cool and Eddison's The Worm Oroborous sounded so intense that I immediately went out and bought them (before I ever read Tolkien) and have remained hooked on the genre ever since...Here is the original series list of authors, with the books I have read. I highly recommend The Kai Lung stories, they are very magical and endearing (but very hard to find).

*William Morris--The Wood Beyond the World vols 1&2, The Water of Wonderous Isles, The Well at the World's End.
*E.R.Eddison--The Worm Oroborous, Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, The Mezentian Gate.
*Lord Dunsany--The Charwoman's Shadow, The King of Elfland's Daughter, Beyond the Fields We Know.
*James Branch Cabell
*George MacDonald--Lilith
*C.K. Chesterton
*Katherine Kurtz
*Ludovico Ariosto--Orlando Furioso (which is basically The Song of Roland)
*Ernest Braman--Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, Kai Lung's Golden Hours
*Evangeline Watson--Songs of Rhiannon
*Hope Mirrless--Lud in the Mist
*Mervyn Peake--Gormonghast, Titus Groan
*William Hope Hogston--The Nightland vols 1&2, The Boats of the "Glen Carig"
*Hannes Bok--The Sorcerer's Ship, The Golden Staircase
*Fletcher Pratt
*Peter S. Beagle--The Last Unicorn
*David Lindsay--Voyage to Acturus

Awesome, danlo! I've picked up quite a few of these pb's over the years, but hadn't realized that they were a concerted publishing effort.

One of the best things about them (apart from the stories themselves) is the freaky-deaky 70s cover art for some of these titles--the Eddison, Dunsany, and Peake in particular.

I've read a few of these, and I, too, am old enough to recall when they were first published.

Carter did an excellent job. Say what you will about his relative writing skills, the man did love fantasy and worked tirelessly to promote it.

Ah, the memorable, and sometimes great, Lin Carter.

It's a pity his editorial skills were so narrowly developed. He was quite able to identify the best fantasy that had been published in the previous 100 years, and he had a knack for presenting it to the public in a lively and engaging way. But alas, he does not seem to have had a similar genius for finding new books. (Katherine Kurtz was not his discovery, but Betty Ballantine's.)

New books were what his bosses at Ballantine wanted; new books were where the money was. In the end they sacked him and replaced him with the del Reys, who delivered new books by the hundred, even if the vast majority of them were rubbish.

Really, mass-market paperback was the wrong format for his Adult Fantasy series. At the time, paperback publishers lived and died by their monthly rack slots, and except for bestsellers, the typical shelf life of a paperback was exactly 30 days. Not the best way to build up a readership for neglected authors whose work deserved to stay in print.

It's a pity they didn't publish fiction in trade paperback back then, because that would really have been a much better medium for Carter to work in. I've always missed his imprint, and wished he had the clout to keep those books permanently in print, as he wanted to do.

I'm probably going to try to find those Kai Lung novels if you specificaly recommend them in that company. Some damn good reading in that list, which is why I really appreciate lines like Fantasy Masterworks and SF masterworks who reprint classic novels and series, good stuff in those series too.

I consider Dreamquest of the Unknown Kadath to be fantasy but it does include a few of the "Other Gods", like Nyarlathotep, that form parts of the "Cthulhu Mythos" that many consider horror. Indeed, Ballentine and Carter were also responsible for reviving H. P. Lovecraft's work which was, pretty much, languishing in obsurity except for some badly edited and serialized stories in Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, back in the 1930s. So they essentially "reanimated" (pun intended) the horror genre, as well, back then and introduced writers that corresponded with Lovecraft or were actively writing stories inspired by the "Mythos Universe".

All part of the fictious Arkham House publishers, graduates from "Miskatonic University" such as: August Derleth (some have lumped Hogston here too-his works are quite weird), Francis Bellknap Long, Clifford D. Simak, Oliver Onions and the outstanding "proteges" such as Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Anton Wilson. Of course Wilson went on to write the immortal Illuminatus! trilogy with Robert Shea and such amazing "layman" quantum excursions as Schroedinger's Cat and the Cosmic Trigger books.