Edited by Leo Grin | Illustrated by Andrew Cryer | 40 pages

This issue was printed in two editions. The deluxe edition, numbered 1–75, uses a black linen cover with foil-stamped midnight blue text. The limited edition, numbered 76–225, uses a midnight blue cover with solid black text.

Contents

• “Conventions and Condolences” by Leo Grin (Editorial)
• “Sailor Steve and the Dane” by Amy Kerr (poem)
• “Down the Rabbit Hole” by Brian Leno
• “A Tale of Two Pulp Shows” by Morgan Holmes
• “Requiescat in Pace: Leon Nielsen, 1937-2007”
• “Requiescat in Pace: Alton McCowen, 1931-2007”
• “The Lion’s Den” by Donald Sidney-Fryer, Darrell Schweitzer, Ed Gobbett, Morgan Holmes (letter column)
• Contributors

Notes

DELUXE COPIES DESTROYED: 7

LIMITED COPIES DESTROYED: 57

Features a long travelogue of the 2007 REH Days festival in Cross Plains, trip reports for both the 2007 Windy City Pulp Show and PulpCon 2007, several notable REH obituaries, poetry by Amy Kerr, the Lion’s Den letters column, and more.

Excerpts

The champ was a fool, mouth covered in drool, as Costigan laid him flat.
A haymaker punch for his bloody lunch, and now he snoozed on the mat.

— from “Sailor Steve and the Dane” by Amy Kerr

“Have you been here before?” one of the Project Pride ladies asked me, smiling.
“Well, yeah,” I answered, “I’ve been here before. But it was forty years ago.”
Her smile faded, and I could see her questioning my answer. “This wasn’t here forty years ago,” she said, and then added, “I mean, the house wasn’t as it is now.”
How well I knew that….

— from “Down the Rabbit Hole” by Brian Leno

Right after picking up my name tag, I had a bit of luck as the Meachem brothers (Girasol Collectibles) had lucked into a large collection of Adventure and Short Stories. In a few minutes, I was able to finish up my search for some Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur tales. Brodeur was a philologist at Berkeley in the mid-twentieth century. He wrote about Beowulf, and his translation of the Prose Edda was standard for decades. He was aware of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics” and approved heartily. Brodeur also had a series in Adventure in the 1920s about Cercuman, a troubadour swordsman in twelfth-century France. I now have all the stories! What makes this series interesting to me is how much Brodeur’s medieval France reminds me of Howard’s Aquilonia.

— from “A Tale of Two Pulp Shows” by Morgan Holmes

What may be relevant to Gary Romeo’s article on the Fathership of Sword-and-Sorcery is an essay by Jorge Luis Borges called “Kafka and His Precursors.” Borges discusses three authors (one of them Lord Dunsany, intriguingly enough) who have nothing in common with one another — or didn’t until Kafka came along. Similarly, I doubt that any critic would have seen anything in common between, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, Dunsany, and E. R. Eddison until Robert E. Howard came along. We also owe to my arch-nemesis Don Herron the genuine insight that precursors of Howard also include the hardboiled writers, including Dashiell Hammett. Certainly no one would have drawn a link between Hammett and Dunsany or Eddison before the advent of Howard.

— Darrell Schweitzer, writing in The Lion’s Den