in
Literature & Books
—
31 Years in the Red: How Arkham House Published Lovecraft & Bradbury Without Making a Dime
Founded in 1939 to preserve H.P. Lovecraft's work, Arkham House published literary giants like Ray Bradbury. Fueled by founder August Derleth's own money, the legendary horror press incredibly operated for over three decades without a single profitable year, a true labor of love.
A Legacy Built on Passion, Not Profit
Imagine launching the career of an author as iconic as Ray Bradbury. Imagine being single-handedly responsible for saving the entire literary legacy of H.P. Lovecraft from being lost to pulp magazine obscurity. Now, imagine doing all of that while losing money every single year for thirty-one years. This isn't a cautionary tale; it's the unbelievable true story of August Derleth and Arkham House, the publishing imprint that became a cornerstone of weird fiction through sheer force of will.
A Promise to a Dead Friend
When H.P. Lovecraft died in 1937, he was virtually unknown outside a small circle of correspondents and pulp fiction fans. His cosmic horror stories were scattered across various magazines, at high risk of fading into nothingness. Two of his friends and fellow writers, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, refused to let that happen. After being rejected by major publishers, they took matters into their own hands. In 1939, they founded Arkham House with one primary goal: to publish Lovecraft's collected works in a durable, hardcover format that would preserve them for future generations.
Publishing Stars, Accruing Debt
Their first publication was Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others, a massive collection printed in a small run of just 1,268 copies. The book was beautifully made but sold slowly, taking over four years to go out of print and saddling the new press with debt. This became the publisher's operating model. Derleth, a prolific writer himself, funneled the income from his own work into Arkham House to keep it afloat. The press attracted a stable of genre-defining talent, publishing the first books of Ray Bradbury (Dark Carnival, 1947), Robert Bloch, and A. E. van Vogt, alongside works by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. They were curating the canon of 20th-century horror and sci-fi, all while operating as a passion project rather than a business.
Thirty-One Years of Struggle
While a paperback boom in the 1960s brought Lovecraft to a massive new audience and increased interest in Arkham House's high-quality hardcovers, the press itself remained a break-even enterprise at best. The dedication was immense, but the financial return was non-existent. In a 1970 interview, a year before his death, Derleth laid the stark reality bare after more than three decades of work:
The fact is that in no year since it was founded has Arkham House shown a profit.
It was a stunning admission. For thirty-one years, one of the most important publishers in speculative fiction hadn't made a cent of profit. It survived solely on Derleth's personal subsidies and his unwavering belief in the literary value of the work. It's a legacy that proves some of the most important cultural contributions aren't driven by financial gain, but by an obsessive, beautiful, and utterly unprofitable love for the art itself.