Rediscovered: De Camp the Fan

Autograph Hound Saturday yet again, and we bring our old pal L. Sprague de Camp back with another John Hancock. He also does the weirdest personal “I” that I (imagine a regular I) recall offhand. De Camp of course mightily messed up the Lancer Conan series back in the day — in terms of lit content, with his and Lin Carter’s additions to “the saga.” The books themselves did extremely well in the marketplace, since they had Conan yarns by Robert E. Howard and a bunch of great covers by Frank Frazetta. The Lancers put me on the road to where I am now by demanding I write “Conan vs. Conantics” back in 1976. De Camp loved REH’s Conan tales and wanted to write something similar. His Achilles heel was that he never grasped that the Sword-and-Sorcery genre didn’t have to serve as superficial entertainment. And so REH wrote “Beyond the Black River” and de Camp typed out a lot of crap. The copy on display is a recent addition to the Brian Leno Library. He’s right about de Camp’s backlist not…