From Sword to Scroll
Winner of the 2018 Atlantean Award from the Robert E. Howard Foundation!
Robert E. Howard's swashbuckling heroes strove mightily against fantastic foes and strode boldly across lands steeped in ancient sorcery, court intrigue, and fabulous wealth. In this vibrant traveler's guide, historian Fred Blosser chronicles the people, flora, fauna, and politics of REH's universe.
No Howard creation looms larger than Conan, and there's plenty of Conan in this book, but there's also much-needed coverage of Howard's other square-jawed heroes, including such equally bold though lesser-known adventurers as Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Black Vulmea, and Kirby O'Donnell.
In addition, Blosser examines Howard's wide oeuvre of pulp fiction, from horror and western tales, to his less successful detective yarns.
From Hyborian Age weaponry, justice, medicine, and mercenaries, to the beasts, villains, and nameless horrors of the African jungles, Central Asian mountain passes, and the haunted Texas town of Lost Knob in our own world, you'll experience anew the genius of Robert E. Howard through the tapestry from which he created his pulp masterpieces.

Savage Scrolls: Scholarship from the Hyborian Age

Literature & Fiction

Blosser, Fred

History & Criticism

Pulp Hero Press

Lo, There Shall Be a Beginning
For Tony Isabella, that beginning was July 1963, and a brand-new copy of Fantasic Four Annual #1. Over fifty years later, and after a decades-long career in comics during which he created such iconic characters as Black Lightning, Tony returns to where it all started.
Over 130 comic books were released in July 1963, including Marvel's Avengers and Fantastic Four, DC's Green Lantern and Justice League of America, and a slew of others, from those featuring well-known characters like Archie, Richie Rich, the Jetsons, and Donald Duck, to such obscure titles as Girls' Romances, Konga, Stoney Burke, and Space War.
Tony's reading (or in many cases, re-reading) them all. In this first volume, he's starting with Action Comics #304 and coming up for air with Bat Man #158. In between there's lots of Archie, Mighty Mouse, Spider-Man, Alley Oop, and even Jerry Lewis. Tony analyzes each issue in-depth: the stories, the ads, the creators, and the context, with plenty of anecdotes and production details to satisfy comics fans and historians alike.
Mark it on your calendar: July 1963! It's coming up next.

July 1963: A Pivotal Month in the Comic Book Life of Tony Isabella (Volume One)

Comics & Graphic Novels

Isabella, Tony

Graphic Novels

Hands Like a Howitzer
The "Black Destroyer" Earnie Shavers pulls no punches in sharing his eventful life story, from a run-in with the Ku Klux Klan as a child and championship bouts with Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali, to his retirement from the ring as the undisputed "hardest puncher" in professional boxing.
Growing up in the Cleveland area, young Earnie hung out with thugs and killers, nearly becoming one himself, until sixty-five seconds changed his life: that's how long it took him to knock out his first opponent in the ring.
Ten years later, with dozens of knockouts to his credit, and after a contentious break-up with notorious boxing manager Don King, Earnie made it to the top: a fight with Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden for the championship of the world.
With talent, hard work, and eventually God in his corner, Earnie Shavers lived the American dream from bell to bell, and came out the other side with a helluva story to tell.

Welcome to the Big Time

Sports & Outdoors

Terrill, Marshall

Shavers, Earnie

Individual Sports

How Did Zora Die?
Everyone who knew professional boxer Zora Folley called him a gentleman. Even Muhammad Ali, who fought Folley in Madison Square Garden, withheld his usual pre-fight insults. This true-crime story cracks the cold case of Folley's untimely death in the swimming pool of a sketchy motel.
On a hot July night in 1972, when he should have been home with his faithful wife, Zora Folley instead was partying with his mistress and a shady celebrity hanger-on at a motel in Tucson, Arizona.
He died that night, his head crushed, the only witnesses claiming it was an accident that occurred when the agile ex-boxer slipped and hit his head on a concrete divider in the pool.
The police bought that story. No charges were filed, despite Folley's friends and family suspecting he had been murdered. Then the autopsy report and the police report vanished. A cover-up?
Decades later, a local reporter, Marshall Terrill, picked up the case. His investigation challenged the authorities, opened old wounds, and led finally to proof of how Zora Folley died that long-ago night.
Packed with photos!

Zora Folley: The Distinguished Life and Mysterious Death of a Gentleman Boxer

Hither Came REH...
Winner of the 2018 Atlantean award for Outstanding Achievement, Book from the Robert E. Howard Foundation
From a single, stifling room in a small sagebrush town in central Texas, hunched over a manual typewriter, Robert E. Howard created memorable characters, exotic worlds, and glorious pulp adventures. In this new biography, Howard is firmly established as an important figure in American literature.
Before taking his own life at the age of 30, the precocious Howard was one of the most popular writers of the pulp magazine era of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Recognized today as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and the originator of the sword-and-sorcery genre, he was also a gifted poet and the author of now-classic horror stories, historical dramas, and comical tall tales.
But the gifted and brilliant Howard saw himself as an outsider in the small Texas town where he lived with his father, a physician, and his mother, who battled ill health for much of her life. Constrained by circumstance, Howard put into his fiction the excitement of far horizons that he himself was denied.
David C. Smith, himself a recognized author of fantasy and adventure fiction, here presents the unique story of a young man who defied the odds of his time and place to become a writer whose work is still enjoyed by millions. Smith shows us how Howard fulfilled his readers’ expectations for page-turning excitement while writing with poetic precision and creating archetypal characters that are now part of mainstream American popular culture.

Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Smith, David C.

Arts & Literature

Who Is the Real Indiana Jones? Long before Steven Spielberg filmed the exploits of everyone's favorite fedora-wearing action hero, Indiana Jones' real-life counterparts had ventured across the world in search of archaelogical treasure. Following in their footsteps leads to that most unlikely of all destinations: Hollywood. Heroes and rogues like Egyptologist Howard Carter, the Great Belzoni, Central Asian treasure hunter Aurel Stein, and others like them form the historical genesis of Indiana Jones. Their stories are told here in rich detail, and their lives examined for the cinematic elements that led to the creation of a pop culture icon.With his concluding chapter on the Indiana Jones films, Professor Justin Jacobs comes full circle, examining how history is morphed into our escapist entertainment, and how that entertainment reshapes our view of the past.

Indiana Jones in History: From Pompeii to the Moon

Politics & Social Sciences

Jacobs, Justin M.

Archaeology

When the Sweet Science Turns Sour
Brawls, nudity, riots, sucker punches—sometimes the "gentleman's sport" isn't so gentle. Boxing judge Dan Sisneros has seen both the best and the worst that professional boxing has to offer. In Mat Tales, he invites you into the ring for a few rounds of the worst.
From relative unknowns like Nate Campbell and Pedro Cardenas to monsters of the marquee like Mike Tyson, Roberto Duran, and Lennox Lewis, you'll have a ringside seat to the beatdowns, bloodbaths, and bloopers that have no place in the annals of the sport.
Sisneros tells over thirty of his best stories, spanning fights from small towns across America to the big-time arenas of Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and New York City. It's boxing at its worst—before, during, and after the bell. Be ready for more than a rumble.
If you're looking for a clean fight, you're in the wrong place.

Mat Tales: True Stories from the Bizarre, Brutal World of Pro Boxing

Sisneros, Dan

The Little Studio of Horrors
Bursting upon sleepy 1954 Hollywood like a radioactive mushroom, American International Pictures put its pedal to the metal for the next 25 years, spewing forth cinematic pop culture faster than any other film studio, and steaming up the Saturday nights of its grindhouse fans.
In this well-researched book, packed with over 130 photos, film historian Bruce G. Hallenbeck tells the definitive story of AIP and its low-budget canon of big-screen features, from gothic horror and giant creatures, to beach parties, teenage monsters, and blaxploitation.
Hallenbeck shares behind-the-screen stories, presents cogent summaries and analyses of the AIP films, and examines how AIP's fearless, populist filmmaking ultimately led to its demise at the hands of its better-funded rivals.
Whatever your thing—teenage werewolves, bikini-clad beach babes, amazing colossal beasts, women in prison, Vincent Price, bad-ass muthas, or any of the multitude of other essential characters that inhabit the frazzled edges of American pop culture—you'll find it here, fangs bared (sometimes breasts bared, too), your guilty pleasure until the credits roll.

Rock 'n' Roll Monsters: The American International Pictures Story

Humor & Entertainment

Hallenbeck, Bruce G.

Movies

From Death to Disney
Larry Watkin won the National Book Award in 1937 for his novel On Borrowed Time, about Death imprisoned in an apple tree. From there, after an adventurous stint in the US Navy, he joined the Disney studio, working alongside Walt Disney himself on live-action classics.
Watkin's vivid, introspective account of his life, from joyous boyhood on a rural New York farm to an uneasy retirement riddled with loss and despair, teems with characters both savory and unsavory, and with exploits in locales ranging from the war-torn islands of the South Pacific to the center of cinematic power in Hollywood.
As the screenwriter of such enduring Disney live-action films as Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Watkin has tales a-plenty, never told before, of Walt Disney, in addition to his encounters with fickle movie producers, drunken actors, fellow writers, and death itself.
Written with candor and grace, Watkin's memoir is erudite but energetic, cerebral but salty —a literary encapsulation of the 20th century from the pen of an unjustly forgotten man of letters.

Larry Watkin: A Memoir of an American Man of Letters

Watkin, Larry

Memoirs

In the Beginning
Imagine a time of no email, no internet, no Amazon. You had a phone, but it cost a fortune to call long distance. You bought your comics at the corner drugstore. Were there other comic book fans, somewhere? Sure, but good luck finding them. Then Jerry Bails said: let there be fandom.
Comic book historian Bill Schelly begins his story of comic fandom in the early 1960s, when enterprising pioneers like Bails, Dick and Pat Lupoff, Don and Maggie Thompson, and Roy Thomas pooled their talents to birth a fast-growing community of kindred spirits.
Schelly chronicles the lives of every major indexer, dealer, fanzine publisher, convention organizer, writer, artist, collector, and professional—over 90 in all—who played a role in the nascent fan community. Vintage photos enliven each biography.
For comic book fans of today, spoiled by mega conventions, billion-dollar movies, and endless merchandising, Founders of Comic Fandom is a nostalgic, enlightening trip back to the not-so-long-ago, when a dime bought adventure and the fun had just begun.

Founders of Comic Fandom: A Biographical Who’s Who of Publishers, Dealers, Collectors, Writers, Artists, and Other Luminaries of the 1950s and 1960s

Schelly, Bill

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