This was the book that started it for me, at age 11. A 1971 ‘schools’ paperback called The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror, published by Scholastic Book Services of New York in December 1971. Somehow it had made its way to England many years later, and the editor Margaret Ronan had presumably selected the stories for suitability for children (the introduction was apparently by Margaret Sylvester, who as a 15-year old girl had corresponded with Lovecraft in the mid 1930s). It was the first horror book I had read, and — despite its dreadful cheapness in both its production and the price pencilled inside it — I took a whole hour deciding to buy it or not…

A dreadful cover suggesting vampires, though I guess publishers had to ‘start where people are’, back in 1971. And vampires were the hot ticket, back then. But after that taste of Lovecraft (“Colour out of Space”; “The Outsider”; “Shadow over Innsmouth” and others) I hunted down the UK Panther paperback collections — with their superb covers — on the second-hand bookstalls of the local markets.

Panther paperbacks cover gallery after the jump…

I think I was warned off Derleth by hints in the introductions and by these two:

I did have the two Clark Ashton Smith volumes though, on the cover-recommendation by Lovecraft, though I’m not sure I ever got far into them:

Then at about age 13 I found the stories of Robert E. Howard, also from Panther Books, who was greatly enjoyed:

And then onto the two main Panther collections of Ray Bradbury:

Thank you, editors and cover-artists of Panther Books. You educated a generation in the fantastic. Why did I not get them free from the public library? I vaguely seem to remember that such pulpy macabre fiction was not deemed fit for children to read, in that time and place. So, thank you also to the used book sellers of the markets of Birmingham.