Xenograffiti Read Online Free Page B

of pastiches featuring Julian West, Bellamy’s protagonist.
    But the response to Haggard was very different: instead of sequels, we have satires and parodies. Altogether, nine of these books were published in 1887, when the author reached the peak of his popularity. The true number of these works, and the correct information concerning the editions and authors, has long been confused by their relative scarcity and unavailability. No library or private collection appears to have a complete set. And although they received wide circulation at the time they were published, most were printed in cheap paperback form and printed on very poor quality paper; copies of the American editions which survive are generally brittle, yellowed, and crumbling.
    The confusion is compounded by similarities in titles between the American and British books, and by the erroneous assumptions of scholars and bibliographers that the British and American volumes are the same. Everett F. Bleiler, writing in his The Checklist of Fantastic Literature , states:
    The authorship of the parodies is debatable. The Library of Congress attributes all five parodies [ He , It , Bess , King Solomon’s Wives , and King Solomon’s Treasures ] to John De Morgan (born 1848), an American writer of historical romances and juveniles, who was later to write many paperbacks for Street and Smith. The British Museum lists only He , in the large-paper edition, and attributes it to Andrew Lang and Walter H. Pollock.... J. E. Scott, in his bibliography of H. Rider Haggard, on the basis of a letter from E. Vizetelly, the British publisher of King Solomon’s Wives , to the British periodical Sketch , attributes King Solomon’s Wives to Sir Henry Charles [actually Chartres] Biron, a British jurist.... It seems obvious from the sources quoted above that the Library of Congress attribution of these two titles [ He and King Solomon’s Wives ] to De Morgan is erroneous; and that Lang, Pollock, and Biron were the true authors.
    But this is not obvious at all, and is, in fact, an unjustified assumption. Actually, all of the attributions cited by Bleiler are correct, for there are two different books with the title He , and two different versions of King Solomon’s Wives . This becomes obvious when one compares the bibliographical data for the books.
    The British edition of He , by the Author of It , King Solomon’s Wives , Bess , Much Darker Days , Mr. Morton’s Subtler, and Other Romances , was published by Longmans, Green early in 1887; it consists of 119 pages of very large type. The American version, He: A Companion to She, Being a History of the Adventures of J. Theodosius Aristophano on the Island of Rapa Nui in Search of His Immortal Ancestor (no attribution of authorship), was issued in April of 1887 by Norman L. Munro, three months later than the Longmans edition, in 213 pages of very small type; both of these books are included in They: Three Parodies of H. Rider Haggard’s She , edited by R. Reginald and Douglas Menville (New York: Arno Press, 1978).
    King Solomon’s Wives; or, The Phantom Mines , by Hyder Ragged [ i.e ., Biron], was published by Vizetelly & Co. of London in 1887 in 125 pages of large type. King Solomon’s Wives , by the Author of He , It , Ma , Pa , etc. [issued anonymously], was released by Norman L. Munro in 1887 in 239 pages of small type. The Munro edition was written by John De Morgan. The issue is confused further by the fact that the Munros later reprinted the Vizetelly book in one of their other series, the Seaside Library, in 100 pages of small type, complete with original pseudonym and subtitle. The Biron version has been reprinted in the anthology King Solomon’s Children: Some Parodies of H. Rider Haggard , edited by R. Reginald and Douglas Menville (New York: Arno Press, 1978).
    In addition to the two Munro books cited above, De Morgan also penned three other parodies for this paperback line: It: A Wild, Weird History of Marvelous,