In 1953—with tongue firmly in cheek—editor Anthony Boucher provided readers of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the lowdown on August Derleth:

Mr. August Derleth is the literary agent in this country for such writers as Stephen Grendon, H. Russell Wakefield and Lyndon Parker, M. D. Dr. Parker is the Boswell of that modern master of the science of deduction, Mr. Solar Pons, the famed consulting detective of 7B Praed Street, London. Mr. Derleth has marketed three volumes of the Doctor’s accounts of his friend’s triumphs: In Re: Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Solar Pons and Three Problems for Solar Pons (all published by Mycroft & Moran)—a criminously delightful trio that any reader will, as Vincent Starrett say, “accept with enthusiasm.”

Boucher was himself a well-known critic and mystery writer. Starrett had become a leading authority on the world-famous literary detective, Sherlock Holmes. And Derleth was Wisconsin’s most prolific regional writer and publisher.

What resonated with readers, however, was the inference here—and in the new story “The Adventure of the Snitch in Time” (recalled with the help of science fiction writer Mack Reynolds)—that Solar Pons is Sherlock Holmes, just as Dr. Parker is Sherlock’s sidekick Dr. Watson . . .

Adding nuanced meaning to a question Derleth asked when publishing the Pons collections of stories under his own M&M imprint:

“Do You Know Solar Pons?”

If this doesn’t ring the bell, go back and read my earlier post on this site: The Mystery of the Milwaukee – Chicago – Sauk City Connection

Then you will know why Solar Pons—as does Sherlock Holmes—has his own legion of fans who seek out the Derleth detective’s earliest appearances in the American wood-pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s . . .

And collect Derleth’s M&M books, known as the Pontine canon—collect even the publishing ephemera associated with those books.

Literary people know all about ephemera—in this case, almost anything related to a press, or imprint, items with a limited lifespan not offered for sale to the public. Advertising. Giveaways. Those that do the collecting are the diehard fans, and usually it is the paper items they collect.

As for Pontine ephemera, check out what my partner Don Herron posted only a few years ago:   http://www.donherron.com/rediscovered-further-pontine-ephemera/  Don concluded his blog by noticing, “Yeah, I guess the ephemera collecting game is once more afoot…”

And so it was.

In fact, it had been afoot for a long time.

Way back in 1985, Mycroft & Moran and Arkham House collector—the House being Derleth’s more famous publishing imprint specializing in supernatural fiction—Phillip T. Mays and bookseller-publisher Roy A. Squires issued a little chapbook bibliography, The Phil Mays Collection of Arkham House Ephemerae: A Descriptive Listing.

Combining the two imprints made sense, because Derleth usually included M&M within Arkham’s more famous Stock Lists and bulletins. Almost immediately the little items listed in Squires-Mays began to sky-rocket in price, a large contingent of Arkham or Derleth collectors wanting to find and add each and every one to their collections.

A difficult task to complete with so many of the pieces genuinely rare—with little or no knowledge of the quantities originally printed, or how many now survive.

Mays included two advertising pieces Derleth used to promote only M&M titles: the first a postcard that announced “— a new Mycroft & Moran book, coming December 12, 1952 . . . Three Problems for Solar Pons”; and then a brochure that blared, “Coming Late in 1955! The Return of Solar Pons.”

At this point you might ask why these ephemera pieces are important . . .

To which I would respond by asking, “How well do you know Solar Pons?

That’s because I’ve sampled the little treasures of interesting information one can find buried in the ephemera. For example, from—and only from—the Mays find could I deduce the true story behind the small and unusual Three Problems book—unusually small compared to earlier collections in that it contained only three of the detective’s adventures.

Yes, a little digging turns up the fact that Derleth published this book in the 50’s when small publishers were struggling for sales against changing tastes and the rising costs of doing business following World War II—who wouldn’t think Derleth wasn’t merely responding to these operational realities?

The ephemera pieces suggest otherwise—a motive perhaps historically significant . . .

The very moment Derleth decided he would mirror in pastiche the entire Sherlock Holmes canon produced by Arthur Conan Doyle, who had once brought the Holmes canon to a temporary end, interrupting it after chronicling twenty-six adventures.

Derleth introduces Three Problems sadly, proclaiming that “These are quite possibly the last Solar Pons pastiches I shall write,” for reasons he blamed on new activity within the Doyle estate…

Three brought the total of Pons adventures in print to exactly 26.

Coincidence? Perhaps there was a coded message in the utterance Derleth is known to have begun making: “I think Doyle had, and so Derleth must also have”. . .

A message of intent which explains how the meaningful title for the next volume of Pons chronicles series was decided; mimicking that of Doyle’s third Holmes collection, it would be The Return of Solar Pons.

None of this is to say that Derleth, a cagey publisher with excellent business sense, didn’t make at least one adjustment to cope with a softened market: he trimmed his initial order of Three Problems, estimated (if we believe the colophon) to have been 2,000 books, down to 990—probably the exact number of patrons who had routinely purchased the earlier collections.

We learn as well from the M&M ephemera Mays listed another tantalizing, behind-the-scenes, bit of data. How otherwise would we know that the collection Derleth planned to follow The Return had, for a short while, The Problems of Solar Pons as its working title? Only from the ephemera do we learn this, a “lost title” apparently undreamed of by Sheldon Jeffery–or else it would’ve been with the others he included under that heading in The Arkham House Companion (1989), a reference book covering every AH and M&M title published, or merely considered.

Perhaps so that it wouldn’t be confused with Three Problems, the already announced Problems of Solar Pons was retitled The Reminiscences of Solar Pons prior to publication.

The Mays listing of Derleth’s AH and M&M ephemera gave completists a great start for finding the game, but new finds made it evident almost immediately that his collection had not been complete.

Finally, about sixteen or seventeen years later, my friend Don Herron jumped in. He wanted to refine the Mays list—compile a new one that would be up-to-date, definitive, and otherwise as useful as it possibly could be.

On the sidelines, I agreed to help.

It would be Don’s list, but I supplied every new item I could reasonably, authoritatively, corroborate the existence of, even if not all of the needed information was at my disposal.

One of these was another strictly M&M piece, which the reputable New York bookseller Lloyd Currey listed in an old catalog—it was a variation of the Mays “Do You Know Solar Pons.”

All I had for the description was an excerpt from the actual piece, a quotation used in the piece that Currey used to promote it:

“If you liked Sherlock Holmes, you will not want to miss Solar Pons, The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street. . . .” In Re: Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Solar Pons, The Memoirs of Solar Pons, The Return of Solar Pons, The Reminiscences of Solar Pons. Includes two pages devoted to offset reviews of the Pons saga from various sources – Starrett in his Books Alive column, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. “Under the imprint of Mycroft & Moran. Order without delay from your bookseller or Arkham House: Publishers. . . .”

It was enough for us to include it in the new list. And today, validating our decision, I located one, and now own the actual piece.

“Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years” by Don Herron was published in 2002, in Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine.

Since then, however, Don & I both are aware there is game still afoot. But not even he knows about the two additional brochures I found, which raise the “Do You Know Solar Pons” series to a total of four.

For Derlethians and Sherlockians—especially for Arkham House completists—here is my updated list of the ephemera Derleth devoted exclusively to Mycroft & Moran:

1952: POSTCARD.
Arkham House Announces.
“— a new Mycroft & Moran book, coming December 12, 1952. . . Three Problems for Solar Pons. . . .”

1953:
“The Memoirs of Solar Pons: A Unicorn Selection—Coming Next Month.” Unicorn Mystery News V3n12 (c. 1953): 10-11.

1954: LETTER w/M&M letterhead.
“Solar Pons joins me in wishing all friends of his as well as the Master, his best on the occasion of the Master’s Centenary!”
Signed by August Derleth, “Sebastian Moran” and “Mycroft Holmes.”

1955: BROCHURE.
Do You Know Solar Pons?
“Coming Late in 1955! The Return of Solar Pons.”

1961-63: BROCHURE.
Do You Know Solar Pons?
“If you liked Sherlock Holmes, you will not want to miss … The Reminiscences of Solar Pons.”

1965: LETTER w/Deerstalker (M&M) letterhead.
Dear Reviewer:
“The Casebook of Solar Pons brings to 56 the total number of Pontine tales in print — the precise number of the Sherlock Holmes stories in short length.”

1965: BROCHURE.
Do You Know Solar Pons?
“If you liked Sherlock Holmes, you will not want to miss … The Casebook of Solar Pons.”

c. 1966: BROCHURE.
About Solar Pons.
A 57th story, The Adventure of the Orient Express, was published (1965) in chapbook form … The Candlelight Press also published in 1965 Praed Street Papers.”

1971: CABINET CARD w/Roy Hunt illustration of Solar Pons & Dr. Lyndon Parker.
“All thanks for your order … We expect to publish [Chronicles] in October.”

Is the foregoing all the game there is to find that is exclusively Mycroft & Moran ephemera?

Maybe, if we recall that announcements for the first two books in the Pons series—In Re: Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Solar Pons—were adequately covered in Arkham House pieces, and that those published after 1967—Mr. Fairlie’s Final Journey, The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians and A Praed Street Dossier—were announced in Derleth’s house-magazine, The Arkham Collector.

Maybe, but the likelihood is there’s more game afoot . . .

John D. Haefele submitted this article.

© John D. Haefele. All rights reserved.

Mr. Derleth did it differently. This month he had 20,000 stamps, the same size as a postage stamp, printed each with his own picture on it. Above the picture it says: SAC PRAIRIE SAGA … and below it, it says, with simple eloquence: AUGUST DERLETH. These stamps Mr. Derleth is affixing to letters which he sends out and he has given sheets of them to Sauk City merchants with the request that they affix them to whatever mail they happen to be sending out during the holidays. Just like the Tuberculosis seals, you know. (Betty Case, Capital Times, November 28, 1939)

More than a decade ago, I wrote the short article “The Branding of Arkham House” to explain the reason behind the never-duplicated cachet surrounding Wisconsin author August Derleth’s publishing venture Arkham House: Publisher, which has lasted longer than three quarters of a century and is present yet today.

Primarily a marketing concept, branding is the continuous process of imbuing a specific company’s products or services with unique meaning in the minds of customers and reviewers. Derleth did exactly that remarkably well with Arkham House, as any aficionado of the imprint knows already, for which even the least among the company’s published ephemerae are sought and collected, commanding high prices.

Without this understanding about the dynamics of branding, Derleth’s unexplained subtleties—he was a personality known more for his lack of this quality, especially as a younger man—have come across as self-aggrandizing or self-promoting, rather than his sincere effort to make indelible and desirable the things he believed and was willing to stand up for.

In Derleth’s view, his entire world was connected—his writing (fictional, historical, political, pastiche, verse, nonfictional, reviews), his publishing (Arkham House, Mycroft & Moran, Stanton & Lee), his literary venues (Scribner’s, Prairie Press, Candlelight Press), even his milieu (Sauk City-Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin River, Place of Hawks)—which he represented and which represented him.

Perhaps instinctually, Derleth made even the most common elements in his life a part of this effort. I’ve already described, for example, the mystique of the Christmas cards he sent to neighbors and correspondents early in his career:

A Derleth Christmas card

Derleth conducted his business on papers featuring the imprints of his publishing ventures, but he adorned letters written to friends and other associates with carefully selected illustrations, usually made from woodcuts fashioned by J. J. Lankes, Frank Utpatel, and other artists: “I wonder whether you could do for me a spring woodcut … an evening scene, new moon, with perhaps a plowman coming from his field or in the field—something   that is the essence of the country of past time, rather than the mechanized country of today” (Derleth to Lankes: 8 Oct. 1958). Here’s a different example:

Utpatel

Derleth unfailingly represented the Wisconsin prairie landscape and lifestyle during the season in which he was writing, much to the amusement of his close epistolary friend H. P. Lovecraft—the now-famous writer of cosmic weird tales—whose personal thrift required that he use every inch of available space for written content only, despite having developed a microscopic script. Since then other Lovecraftian fans have guffawed at Derleth’s odd consistency in this regard.

The curious thing is how many of these letters are extant, perhaps a majority. They were treasured and saved, and today they are sought and collected. Indeed, there is an active market for all Derleth’s correspondence, with the letters having artistic headers trading for $50, $100, even more apiece—well above those without, despite having equivalent content.

Indeed, there was synergy that developed between all that was Derleth and everything that comprised Sauk City-Prairie du Sac. Together, August Derleth and his towns became greater and were something of a Wisconsin brand. Derleth strove hard to put both on the map.

Which brings me to Derleth’s infamous Cinderella stamp pictured above, about which Case concluded, “Anyway, other men have blasted their way to fame when other means failed, so why not August?”

Cinderellas are privately produced labels that are the standard size and shape of United States postage stamps. They range from Christmas and Easter Seals to exhibition labels, even the once ubiquitous S&H green stamps.

Cinderellas were common during the halcyon days of the U. S. Post Office. Book club stamps were not unusual. While many are common, those which were privately produced in limited numbers can be little-known and very rare.

Did Derleth purchase his Cinderella stamps? Perhaps they arrived as adjunct to his Guggenheim Fellowship of 1938, finalized sometime in 1939, awarded with the intent and purpose he should continue writing his Sac Prairie Saga.

Derleth’s Cinderella commemorates, unmistakably, his long-range “plan to tell the story of Sauk City and its twin village, Prairie du Sac, in a sequence of approximately fifty books, combining novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, journal extracts, and miscellaneous prose under the collective title of the Sac Prairie Saga” (Derleth).

Or perhaps he just felt the need to celebrate and so put to use a small amount of his Guggenheim funds, which he also used to stock his library and to bind newspaper comic strips. One description of the stamp reads:

The “stamp” is brown in color, printed on yellowish paper. The design is 24mm high by 18½mm wide. It is gummed, and to satisfy the curiosity of the philatelists among us, it is perforated 12½ . (“August Derleth Stamp”)

It is likely that other of the town residents who had grown up with Derleth, after they saw the stamp, responded much like Betty Case.

So much for mutually beneficial synergy…

I first became acquainted with the stamp many years later, as I searched for any Arkham ephemera. A fellow collector I knew well boasted he found a postcard with an unusual stamp and sent me a scan. The card read:

                        Dear Mr. ——–,

                        This note will acknowledge your payment for one
                        copy of H. P. Lovecraft’s THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS,
                        which we will ship to you within a week or ten
                        days.

                        Sincerely,

                                                                                     August Derleth

And here’s what it physically looks like:

Card with top (recipient) cropped off

Featured on the left, without the slightest explanation, was the first Derleth Cinderella stamp I had ever seen—but not the last.

The second Cinderella appeared to me only in an online image (but does prove that at least one Wisconsin business had circulated the stamps Derleth provided, if only wryly on communication addressed to Derleth himself).

Not until this year, 2018, did I finally discover a great example I could procure—the best I could hope for—for which I paid dearly, though eagerly and without buyer’s remorse. My “Outsider postcard” is not only in crisp, perfect condition, but it is addressed to the famous artist Hannes Bok (both to be subjects of a later post).

These “Outsider postcards” should raise questions among Arkham House collectors. Should this item be on the official list of Arkham’s publishing ephemera, which is heartily collected? It commemorates the first issue of the publisher’s most famous book. There were no more than 300 of these created, probably fewer (but not much fewer) based on pre-publication sales, all worded similarly but addressed individually and essentially meeting the same criteria as the pre-publication announcements in the Mays or Herron lists.

Don Herron will know…

On a more basic level, are they desirable? That is the litmus test, and here is how I know they are:

After years of never sighting, or seeing for sale, a Derleth Cinderella stamp, an individual stamp finally popped up for bidding on eBay in 2004. I put in a healthy bid but lost.

Another turned up in 2007. I placed a large bid this time but lost again.

August Derleth died in 1971. His daughter April, who had been living in Place of Hawks and managing the publishing business, passed in 2011. Not surprisingly, some interesting items became available, including what appeared to be a full sheet of the stamps that turned up for auction on eBay in 2010. Guns blazing, I was outbid nonetheless.

In 2012, a block of four still in one piece went up. (I wondered if the previous winner was now selling his loot in lots.)

Yup, I lost yet again!

No doubt at all that Derleth’s stamp is a desired collectible. If you think I’m crazy, put in your own bid the next time, should you have the opportunity.

John D. Haefele contributed this article.

Works Cited

“The August Derleth Stamp.” Unattributed. August Derleth Society Newsletter Vol. 10, no. 4 (1981)

Case, Betty. “Day by Day.” [Madison] Capital Times (November 28, 1939)

Derleth, August. “August Derleth.” Book of Catholic Authors. Walter Romig, 1960.