Rediscovered: The “Lost” Dustjacket for Feast of Fear

Creeping up on Halloween, I might as well get into the spirit with a bit about a dustjacket showcasing one of the many weird carvings crafted by horror and fantasy great Clark Ashton Smith. My bookman pal Paul Dobish and I were talking about something bookish, which brought to mind a first run dustjacket on an Underwood-Miller book. I realized that he might not know about it, and Dobish is deep into that kind of thing — he discovered that the boards on the Arkham House first edition of Stanley McNail’s poetry collection Something Breathing featured three variants for the cloth covering. First he learned there were two shades of green, and kept at it until he found a third. A fourth? If it exists, Dobish stands most likely among people I know to stumble across the discovery. I only know about the first run jacket because I ghost-edited Feast of Fear, interviews with bestseller Stephen King. You’ll find a small credit line that acknowledges I “compiled” that 1989 collection. And as an…