Five days after Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth’s colleague, Donald Wandrei, wrote to his fellow writer to inform him of the author’s passing. Derleth wrote back, insisting to Wandrei that they work together to publish Lovecraft’s work. After Charles Scribner’s Sons refused to publish the collection of stories Wandrei and Derleth put together, the two borrowed a name of one of the fictional New England locales in Lovecraft’s stories and formed Arkham House to publish the manuscript themselves. Arkham House had thirteen hundred copies of The Outsider and Others printed for five dollars (or $3.50 if preordered). They advertised in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines. The book sold poorly, and only one-hundred fifty preorders were filled, but Derleth and Wandrei nevertheless believed a market for Lovecraft’s fiction existed. Arkham House emerged in an era when science fiction and fantasy was relatively unknown. In 1941, Derleth published a collection of his own short stories, Someone in the Dark, at two dollars a copy, in an effort to keep Arkham House alive.

By 1942, Derleth was left to manage Arkham House by himself as Donald Wandrei was drafted into World War II. That year, Derleth published Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time and a second collection of Lovecraft stories, Beyond the Wall of Sleep. The press run was limited to 1,217 copies due to World War II restrictions. When copes of Beyond the Wall of Sleep sold out in 1944, Derleth’s beliefs about the market were affirmed, and he decided to broaden the mission of Arkham House—in addition to preserving Lovecraft’s writing, Arkham would exclusively publish unknown authors from the weird fiction genre and out of print titles. The first to join the ranks were the rest of Lovecraft’s confidants: Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard. Between 1944 and 1945, Derleth brought in Henry S. Whitehead, Evangeline Walton, and J. Sheridan LeFanu, as well as completed Lovecraft’s short story, “The Lurker at the Threshold,” from the author’s notes.

Arkham’s two imprints, Mycroft and Moran and Stanton & Lee, existed only briefly in Arkham’s history. The former, named after characters in Sherlock Holmes stories, was devoted to publishing Derleth’s “Solar Pons” series, which were Derleth’s Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Stanton & Lee published a children’s book written by Derleth and illustrated by Clare Victor Dwiggins entitled Oliver, the Wayward Owl.

H.P. Lovecraft Bookshelf, by Cybea

Arkham House was never financially stable in any of its sixty-five-plus years. In 1946, Derleth acquired Algernon Blackwood, H. Russell Wakefield, and A.E. Coppard, but his house operated consistently in the red; in order to keep the company afloat, he would funnel the income from titles he authored into Arkham House’s shrinking profit margin. “The fact is that in no single year since its founding,” wrote Derleth in Thirty Years of Arkham House, “have the earnings of Arkham House met the expenses, so that it has been necessary for my personal earnings to shore up Arkham House finances.” Despite the publisher’s many financial hardships, Derleth’s Arkham House survived its competitors, who rose up after Derleth brought weird fiction to the public eye: Gnome Press (1948-1962), Fantasy Press (1946-1951), and Prime Press (1947-1951) included. Only Advent Publishers (1956) and Mirage Press (1967) continue to exist alongside Arkham today.

Before the 1950s threw a wrench into the operations of independent publishers, Arkham House was known for the quality of its hardcovers and binding (the house did not issue a paperback until 1979), as well for its publisher’s perspicacity for acquiring new talent. In 1947, Derleth published Ray Bradbury’s first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival. Happy to have his writing see the light of day, the unknown Illinois writer said of Derleth, “I’m grateful to August Derleth for changing my life and giving me hope.” Like the first edition of The Outside and Others, the first edition of Dark Carnival, which sold for three dollars in 1947, is now worth thousands of dollars to collectors. In addition to Bradbury, Arkham House was the first to publish A.E. van Vogt, E.E. Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Isaac Asimov in hardcover, and Derleth was the first to introduce American audiences to British science fiction and fantasy novelists L. P. Hartley, Cynthia Asquith, and William Hope Hodgson. But by the twentieth century’s fifth decade, large publishers like Doubleday and Scribner decided that it was time to capitalize on Derleth’s nascent niche market. They grabbed up many of Arkham’s star authors (including Asimov and Bradbury), forcing Arkham House to scale back its titles. Unable to compete, Derleth focused on publishing Lovecraft’s many letters during the 1960s in lieu of more titles.

H.P. Lovecraft's Grave, Michael Stephens

Throughout the sixties, Derleth anticipated the death of Arkham House and the death of the market for small, independent publishers. He invested over twenty-thousand dollars of his private funds into the company during this period, until his death at sixty-two in 1971.

In 1999, Baen Books instituted the policy of buying all electronic rights in contracts with its new authors. Unlike its major competitors, the house pays its authors a handsome 20% in royalties for its eARCS (electronic Advance Reader Copies) and individual e-book sales. (Writes Weisskopf on the company's community messageboard Baen's Bar: "There is a complicated formula for calculating the e-book royalty Baen pays, known only to the Mysterious Marla […] Authors and agents do get the formula, but only if they can tell me or Marla the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow!") Since then, Baen Books has acquired the work of many classic science fiction authors, including Fritz Leiber, Orson Scott Card, Peter Straub, Dan Simmons, L. Sprague de Camp, and Larry Niven.

The Last Centurion

Jim Baen's insistence that his e-books be free of format restrictions, an insistence that echoes Stewart Brand's observation, “Information wants to be free,” underscores the company's belief that electronic publishing technologies should empower the end user. For example, Baen Books does not offer any of its titles in PDF format: "What [PDF] does is generate files […] that are extremely opaque to standard word processing software, so that if, for example, you downloaded Time's table of contents, you would be stuck with that appearance: no changes allowed, or possible. Can't change the margins, can't change font sizes, can't grab text for pasting, can't anything." Instead, Baen sells printable, multi-format, DRM-free e-books through its fifteen-dollar WebScription service, which puts out electronic galleys of novels undergoing editorial development at Wake Forest for readers to purchase before the novels appear in print. The WebScription package includes at least four new novels that are released in portions as editorial development approaches the print publication date. These e-books are available in HTML format before the novel is published; once the print version is released, Baen releases the WebScription bundle in MS Reader, Palm, Psion, Rocket eBook, and Rich Text format. In addition, Baen sells individual eARCs—complete, unedited manuscripts of novels in development—for fifteen dollars well in advance of even the WebScription release dates (more than five months pre-publication). The price of eARCs decrease as the novel comes closer to its publication date, recognizing that readers’ demand for the unedited manuscript wanes as the fully-edited version nears completion.

30 Years of D&D by WOTC

WotC recounted much of D&D's history in 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D began when Dave Arneson met Gary Gygax at a gaming convention and produced "The Fantasy Game," a modified miniature wargame that became First Edition D&D in 1974, when Gygax formed his company, Tactical Studies Rules. The game spread among members of Gygax's International Federation of Wargamers, until copies reached colleges across the country. From 1975 to 1976, The Strategic Review was TSR's official newsletter.

Dragon Issue #1

The way news of D&D spread in 1976 is like the way pass-along readership works in magazines today: by word of mouth. TSR succeeded as a company because it fostered a devoted fan base for its products: in 1976, TSR became the owner of GenCon, a massive convention that in 2006 had over 85,000 attendees. Also in 1976, The Strategic Review became The Dragon. The premier issue featured a goofy teal dragon on its cover and the melting reptilian letters that would serve as its title font for the next twenty-six issues. A "Conversation with Fafhd & the Mouser," by renowned American fantasy author Fritz Leiber, was the main feature story. The issue's thirty pages were printed in black and white, with incredibly small type and few drawings. Compared to the robust illustrations of issue #359, The Dragon #1 looks quaint, though in 2002, collectors priced it at $800. On the topic of these "early days," recent editor Erik Mona writes that the game had a strong root in medieval history and a fondness for canonical fantasy authors. "You could get away with an eight-page article about the origin of shields and their use through the ages," writes Mona, "because D&D predated computer games and there was not yet a cottage industry for D&D novel fiction."

Forgotten Realms Map by Ed Greenwood

In the next years, the game took off. The Dragon had a staff of five, and D&D was grossing over one million dollars each year. Total paid circulation of the magazine leapt from 20,155 to 48,119. In the early eighties, a laughable Satanism scare fueled by fundamental Christians fouled D&D's name in the media when fundamentalists accused D&D of being responsible for the disappearance of a college student. Though the incident's connection to the RPG remains to this day unsubstantiated, detractors argued that the game's inclusion of demons in its Monster Manual proved the game's "occult ties." Not surprisingly, the eighties were D&D's heyday: Dragon's highest paid circulation, 118,021, was in 1984. By the late eighties, TSR Hobbies translated D&D into fourteen languages, founded the Roleplaying Gamers Association, and made legends of fantasy writers Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, who wrote the Dragonlance Saga adventure modules and novels.

Time of Twins

When TSR faced financial troubles in 1987, a Chicago businesswoman named Lorraine Williams bought control of the company. During the next decade, TSR would enter its most profitable era. At the same time, Dragon discovered D&D's most iconic campaign setting, Forgotten Realms, through long-time fan and contributor, Ed Greenwood. Just as J.R.R. Tolkien breathed life into Middle Earth, Greenwood mapped out the fantasy continent Faerûn, set on an Earth-like, medieval world called Abeir-Toril. This setting first appeared in Dragon #30 and later was incorporated into the D&D Core Rules. But even in 1989, with TSR's sales topping $40 million after the release of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the company's downfall was right around the corner. Erik Mona writes that after TSR ousted "vocabularian" Gygax, the company's material was written by "whatever English majors happened to live within twenty-five miles of the TSR headquarters at Lake Geneva and were willing to work for the company's legendarily scrooge-like salaries." He names Kim Mohan and Roger E. Moore as editors who were crucial to Dragon's creative development. But because of an eventual lack of interest in the magazine on the part of Moore and later editors, "the whole franchise seemed to flounder. The air was rapidly escaping from the balloon, and Dragon started to suck. It got really bad in the early to mid-nineties... when TSR stopped publishing in 1996, Dragon stopped publishing too."

TSR's woes were due to several product marketing blunders and financial troubles with TSR's distributor, Random House. Coupled with its inability to pay shippers, presses, and warehouses, as well as competition from rival companies such as Games Workshop and WotC, TSR shut down. Inevitably, Lorraine Williams sold TSR to Five Rings Publishing Group, a gaming company that arranged to be purchased by WotC, without Lorraine's knowledge, at the same time Lorraine signed away TSR. Shortly thereafter, WotC's visionary, Peter Adkison, involved himself in the redesign of D&D, Third Edition, which WotC released in 2000. Adkison intended to diversify TSR's portfolio of games while at the same time making D&D's rules more amenable to the video game industry. It was only a matter of time before WotC would become the veritable Microsoft of RPGs.

Dragon #316

In 2000, three years after WotC became a subsidiary of Hasbro, WotC licensed the magazine to Lisa Stevens, CEO of newly formed Paizo Publishing. Dragon's design was undoubtedly strongest under Paizo's stewardship. Just over one-hundred pages, the monthly issue of Dragon cost $6.99. Yearly subscriptions were $39.99. Paizo created some of the most visually stunning issues in Dragon's history; the polished art in these issues can be traced back to Peter Adkison's decision to free D&D from the 80's and introduce more "realism" into D&D's art. Dragon hybridized the dynamism of America's top comic book publishers with the sleeker, more abstracted style found in Japanese animation. The consistency of this style helped WotC solidify the D&D brand, which Dragon exemplified. Amber E. Scott, Dragon's freelancer, enjoyed many "happy hours" gaming at Paizo. "Inside the office it was like Willy Wonka's factory taken over by Cthulhu. The ‘guys' are endlessly creative, endlessly energetic, and endlessly, gleefully, twisted... They love their jobs: their cubicles are plastered with old magazine covers and timelines, plushies and action figures and statues cover all available surfaces, and the meeting room with its big office table and whiteboard holds boxes and boxes of Dwarven Forge modular terrain for impromptu dungeon-building. Being in the office made me feel as if I were sucking up creativity through the air, by osmosis."