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astounding science-fiction. A limited edition of 1,000 copies at $3 each sold out completely by mail order from that single mention!
    Inundated with orders, Hadley didn't even begin to know how to go about handling them. In desperation he appealed to Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, a former science-fiction author who had some familiarity with publishing procedures. Esh-bach bailed him out and the book went into an elaborate illustrated second printing which cost almost as much per copy to print as it sold for. Years later the book would see still a third printing under the auspices of F.F.F. Publishers, Brooklyn, but in the meantime Eshbach threw up his hands at Hadley's economics and withdrew.
    Borrowing Hadley's list of The Skylark of Space pur-chasers, he formed his own publishing company, Fantasy Press, leading off with Smith's The Spacehounds of IPC and eventually printing all ten remaining novels Smith had then written, among other titles. So popular were the Smith books that at one point Fantasy Press took the six volumes in the Lensman series, titled them The History of Civilization, bound them uniformly in half-morocco, boxed them, and sold the set for $30.
    The spate of book publishing firms specializing exclusively in fantasy that sprang up after World War II may be at-tributed in no small measure to the success of the Smith titles. Scores of pulp-magazine classics were immortalized in hard covers under the imprint of such firms as Shasta Pub-lishers, The Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc., Gnome Press, The Avalon Co., and New Era Publishers, in addition to Arkham House, which had been established by August Derleth before the war. Most of them perished when the big trade publishers began to schedule science fiction seriously in the early 1950's. The excitement accompanying revision of novels for book publication, plus the implied prestige of hard covers, distract-ed Smith's attention from the fact that Children of the Lens, which began in the November, 1947, astounding science fiction, was being presented with something less than the customary fanfare. It was the first Smith novel that rated less than two covers in that magazine. The advance notice was a masterpiece of casualness: "The November cover will be a Rogers cover—he's working on it now. It's for ... something called . . . uhumm ... oh, yes! 'Children of the Lens' by an author we haven't heard from since he stopped making edible powders for doughnuts and started making the more active kind about December, 1941.
    "Doc Smith is back."
    The novel failed to have any special impact. It didn't matter. Smith was too busy working on his books to notice and remained so for the next ten years revising his novels for book publication. When Fantasy Press, virtually with its dying gasp, passed on The Vortex Blaster like a literary baton to be distributed under the Gnome imprint, all of Smith's magazine serials but one, The Galaxy Primes, had found their way between boards.
    While Smith's books, the past ten years, had sold comfort-ingly well, they had been reviewed with a great deal of condescension as period pieces. This bothered Smith, who now was determined to prove that he could emulate the current vogue. Campbell at astounding science fiction was then partial to stories with a strong element of what he termed psi phenomena: stories of teleportation, telekinesis, telepathy, levitation, and extrasensory perception. Smith built The Galaxy Primes around those elements with a dash of naughtiness and considerable "way out" dialogue to prove he was no back number. It didn't set well with Campbell, who rejected it, but it was serialized in three installments begin-ning in the March, 1959, amazing stories. Smith settled back for the reaction. It proved considerably less than enthusias-tic. Popularity frequently carries obligations. A fan named E. Everett Evans had been among Smith's most ardent boosters. In his fifties, Evans determined to become a writer and succeeded. Among his