Hi.

I've been a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft's writing for a long time, but I just recently discovered Clark Ashton Smith and got The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith. I'm REALLY loving is stories and I know I will want to get more. I would like to buy a really comprehensive collection of his stories. I'm especially eyeing Lost Worlds and Out of Space and Time. As for price, if it's a really large collection I think I'd be willing to pay a maximum of $50 (maybe you could talk me into more).

Thanks!

THE EMPEROR OF DREAMS is quite comprehensive.

Lost Worlds and Out of Space and Time can be found in OOP Panther paperbacks for little enough investment. Otherwise, I would recommend getting the Neville Spearman UK editions in hardcover for about your maximum for each. I have those, and except for the dustjackets they are an exact reproduction of the original Arkham House, which today are rather pricey editions. Of course, there will never be anything like the five volume Collected Fantasies at Night Shade Books... Then again, if you have an iPad, there exists epub editions of those.

That looked quite good too.

The Collected Fantasies sounds really good and is pretty cheap on kindle, however I read that there is no table of contents which sounds really annoying. Also I REALLY prefer to have a hard copy. I found I can get the hard cover versions of both Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds for about a total of $40. So between LW&OoSaT or Emperor of Dreams what do you suggest?

I was not all that happy with the selection for EMPEROR OF DREAMS myself. Fortunately, both OUT OF SPACE AND TIME and LOST WORLDS are currently available as part of the University of Nebraska's Bison Frontiers of Imagination trade paperback series. Also, please do not overlook the recent paperback selection from Penguin, THE DARK EIDOLON, which is a splendid introduction to Smith's stories, prose poems, and verse.

The kindle Collected Fantasies do have working table of contents (now anyway) and are certainly worth the price. Easier to carry around. How about buying them and then buying the hard covers as your finances permit? ;-)

Both are great in their own way.

PerspectiveDesigns Wrote:
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> The Collected Fantasies sounds really good and is
> pretty cheap on kindle, however I read that there
> is no table of contents which sounds really
> annoying. Also I REALLY prefer to have a hard
> copy. I found I can get the hard cover versions of
> both Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds for
> about a total of $40. So between LW&OoSaT or
> Emperor of Dreams what do you suggest?

That's a great idea! I don't think I could live without a table of contents. I'll probably buy the kindle editions now, and in the future I can get Lost Worlds and Out of Space and Time. Thanks for all the help everybody!

jimrockhill2001 Wrote:
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> I was not all that happy with the selection for
> EMPEROR OF DREAMS myself.

But there is a quite a lot of it. You could rip out "The Theft of Thirty-Nine Girdles" and some admittedly even worse stuff and still have a huge number of stories left. I understood the original question to be about comprehensiveness.

Uh oh! A friend with the extra large kindle for large print (not the Fire, the black and white one) says the TOC is still not in his. It is in my paperwhite. It would appear to depend on what kindle you have.

If EMPEROR were the first Smith collection I had encountered, I would have been happier with it, because it is by no means a bad collection; I simply do not find it as strong as several others. As it stands, however, the arrangement of stories by publication date is misleading, and I thought Smith did a better job selecting his best in the first two Arkham volumes than Jones did. I do not mind "The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles" at all, but I did find the addition of juvenilia at the end of the volume less than welcome.

Well right now I have the oldest type of kindle which probably wouldn't have the TOC then. But next year I'm planning on getting either a Kindle Fire or some other tablet which should be able to use the TOC.

I can confirm that the TOC does exist for the collection, but it doesn't work on everything. It works on my Kindle Paperwhite but it does NOT work on the kindle app for iPad. I doubt this will ever change considering the publisher seems to have up and disappeared. At least it's there for some of the versions, though. I dismissed these ebook versions a while ago because the samples I had downloaded didn't have the TOC and have since been slowly collecting the hardcover versions at a pretty high cost. Ah well, still happy to have the hardcover editions of course. :)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 18 Apr 14 | 01:03PM by taoofjord.

Yeah. I kind of hate having a book only in e-book form. I'll probably just collect them really slowly.

My eBook copies of The Collected Fantasies contain table of contents. However, I had to manually fix mine using eBook software (Sigil). For some reason when I'd select a story from the contents, it would take me to the story after the one I selected! 'Twas annoying . . .