Sandy Ferber has a long and appreciative review of Jack London’s prehistoric work Before Adam (1907), read in what sounds like a nice 2000 edition from Bison Books. The review has many spoilers, but is also a fine summary if you’re not all that likely to read the book.

As many pulp historians will know there was quite a crop of such stone-age books and stories during this period, and from many of the leading writers. Late in the day R.E. Howard broke into print with such a tale, “Spear and Fang”, and Lovecraft remarks that Howard was a perceptive admirer of Jack London.

But melodramatic grunt n’ weep Stone Age tales have never been something that’s greatly appealed to me, and I guess I prefer a mix of the specific and a grand sweep of history. As such I’ve enjoyed Mithen’s non-fiction door-stopper After the Ice and I find authentic “through the ages” re-creations of prehistoric life interesting in art. There’s a wealth of stamp and card-art of this type, most of it seemingly from inter-war Germany which had a large industry in quality colour-card printing, and which you can today find flowing through eBay…

Anyway, at the end of the review Ferber notes that…

I see that Dover has also put out a book of Jack London’s short stories dealing with the fantastic, entitled, uh, Fantastic Tales.

It’s actually from the University of Nebraska’s trade books imprint, Bison Books, who also re-published Before Adam. Turns out to be a limited edition from 1998 in their Bison Frontiers of Imagination series. The hardback is nudging toward silly prices, but the paperback is still affordable on Amazon though it doesn’t appear on the Bison website.

I then discovered that Fantastic Tales used to be titled Jack London’s tales of fantasy (1975). As such it is now on Archive.org to borrow, alongside The Science Fiction of Jack London: an anthology; and The Science Fiction Stories of Jack London, all books with what looks like quite a bit of crossover in their contents. This non-doggie side of London’s work thus seems quite manageable, and I may well get around to it one day.