Who co-founded Arkham House with August Derleth?

Donald Wandrei co-founded Arkham House with August Derleth. The two writers established the press in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 to preserve H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction in hardcover.

After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Derleth and Wandrei tried to interest established publishers in a memorial collection. When those attempts failed, they decided to become publishers themselves. Their first book was The Outsider and Others, a large Lovecraft collection printed in an edition of 1,268 copies.

Arkham House took its name from Arkham, the fictional Massachusetts city appearing in many Lovecraft stories. Its carefully produced books helped move weird fiction beyond its pulp-magazine origins. Derleth later broadened the list to include writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury and Algernon Blackwood.

A common mix-up is to identify one of Arkham House’s authors as its co-founder. Farnsworth Wright edited Weird Tales, while Howard and Smith were important Lovecraft-circle figures, but neither co-founded the press. Wandrei also helped edit Lovecraft’s Selected Letters and briefly served as Arkham House’s editorial director after Derleth died in 1971.