Our selection at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.

April 30-May 3, 2026

RBMS conference June, 2025

A focus on popular fiction with selection of interesting material relating to our areas of focus. Included in the list are a number of bound sets of pulp magazines, several that would be ideal for institutions. The first three which Weird Tales, Strange Tales and Strange Stories represent the major portion of weird fiction published in magazine format before the end of World War II, with Weird Tales extend a number of years beyond. Major genre authors contributed here, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton and many others. We also have a complete file of Doc Savage in bound volumes. Also featuring a wide range of pulp magazine, books, and amateur magazines.

Tartarus Press at Thirty-Five
by Boyd White

In 1990 while studying architecture, Ray Russell founded Tartarus Press with the intention of publishing a few booklets for friends and fellow enthusiasts of the work of Arthur Machen, Ernest Dowson, and John Gawsworth. Now firmly inits third decade, Tartarus Press has firmly established itself as one of the most important publishers of literary supernatural fiction, an endeavor that not only includes landmark figures in the genre such as Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman, but also highly regarded contemporary writers such as Reggie Oliver and Angela Slatter. Tartarus Press is also noteworthy for issuing significant collections of supernatural fiction by authors typically regarded as mainstream literary figures, including Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edith Wharton. The press’s extensive bibliography is further bolstered by the inclusion of authors of fantastic fiction from the European tradition such as ETA Hoffman, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Schwob, and Gustav Meyrink

The tradition of supernatural fiction that Tartarus Press has championed begins with late 19th century writers, notably Machen and M. P. Shiel, rather than established practitioners of the classic British ghost story, such as J. H. Riddell or Amelia B. Edwards, or the antiquarian ghost story, such as M. R. James. Russell and Parker’s editorial choices trace Machen and Shiel’s lineage through early 20th-century masters of supernatural fiction, including Oliver Onions, Walter de la Mare, Christopher Blayre, Nugent Barker, William Harvey Fryer, and L. P. Hartley. Although writers such Onions and de la Mare are certainly known for their ghost stories, these authors bring a deep level of psychological sophistication, metaphoric complexity, and unsettling ambiguity to their work, an approach that Russell and Parker see as culminating in the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman. This is equally true of the American practitioners of the weird tale whose work Tartarus Press has published, whether they are early authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving, or late 19th-centruy or early 20th-cenury writers such as Ralph Adams Cram, Edna W. Underwood, and Henry James.

Tartarus Press’ interest in having audiences rediscover past masters of the genre whose work is underappreciated has been characterized by the inclusion of previously uncollected or unpublished fiction by these authors. The press’ first hardcover book, Chapters Five and Six of The Secret Glory (1991), consists of two chapters excluded from the original publication of Machen’s novel in 1907. The press’ first major collection of Machen’s fiction, The Ritual and Other Stories (1992), contains previously uncollected weird tales from the author’s late period, including “Johnny Double” and “The Dover Road.” Russell and Parker’s affection for the highly unique works of Sarban, the pseudonym of John William Wall, has resulted not only in reissues of his three books from the 1950s, but also in the discovery and publication of four entirely new novellas, “The King of the Lake,” “Number Fourteen,” “The Sacrifice,” and “The Sea-Things.” While Tartarus Press’ two-volume Robert Aickman’s The Collected Strange Stories (1999) is watershed event in the contemporary reappraisal of Aickman’s significant body of work, the publication of Aickman’s The Strangers and Other Writings in 2015 adds an entirely new chapter to our understanding of the author. Consisting of previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry dating from the 1930s to the 1980s, the collection contains six unpublished short stories, most notably “The Stranger,” “The Coffin House,” and “The Disciple of Plato,” which are now included in the New York Review of Books Classics’ selection of Aickman’s fiction, Compulsory Games (2018).

As impressive as Tartars Press’ efforts with classic authors of supernatural fiction have been, the press’ has achieved further distinction by discovering and publishing significant, interesting contemporary writers who continue to develop and extend the genre, authors Russell and Parker consider Machen and Aickman’s heirs. Even a cursory glance at Tartarus Press’ bibliography reads like Who’s Who of contemporary weird fiction, an enormous range of award-winning and critically lauded authors. In Violet Veils (1999), Mark Valentine’s first full-length collection, introduces readers to the Connoisseur, an aesthetical detective in the mode of Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, whose outré adventures are also chronicled in the follow-up collection, Masques and Citadels (2003). Mark Samuels’ only book from Tartarus Press, his second collection of short fiction, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003), is significant for the title story, his first excursion into the horrific legacy of Lilith Blake and her cursed book, The Reunion and Other Stories, a mythology comparable to H. P. Lovecraft’s and Samuels’ primary focus for the rest of his career. World-Fantasy-Award winning author Angela Slatter created the cathedral-city of Lodellan, the setting of numerous short stories and novels, in her debut collection, Sourdough and Other Stories (2005), which Tartarus Press followed up with The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (2015), and The Tallow Wife and Other Tales (2021). After publishing collections with various small publishers such as The Haunted River and Ash-Tree Press, Reggie Oliver, one of the most lauded writers in contemporary supernatural fiction, found a permanent home at Tartarus Press, which has not only reissued Oliver’s first four books but also published six further collections, including Flowers from the Sea: Thirteen Stories and Two Novellas (2013) and A Maze for the Minotaur and Other Strange Stories (2021). Rebecca Lloyd’s debut collection, Mercy and Other Stories (2014) was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and her recent novel, The Child Cephalina (2019), is one of the finest supernatural novels of the past twenty-five years, a Gothic with an entirely new approach to the classic Victorian ghost story. Tartarus Press’ greatest coup, however, might be the publication of Andrew Michael Hurley’s debut novel, The Loney, in 2014. A contemporary classic of folk horror in the tradition of The Wicker Man, Stephen King has praised The Loney as “an amazing piece of fiction,” and the work remains one of the sought-after titles issued by the publisher.

Tartarus Press’ commitment to developing and expanding the audience for classic and contemporary supernatural fiction is reflected in the numerous books of criticism and literary biography the press has begun to publish in recent years. Avid book collectors and bibliophiles, Mark Valentine and Ray Russell have shared their love of obscure authors and forgotten books in Valentine’s Haunted by Books (2015), A Wild Tumultory Library (2019), and Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and Russell’s The Past Lives of Old Books and Other Essays (2020). Tartarus Press has collected the critical writings of the late Roger Dobson in The Library of the Lost: In Search of Forgotten Authors (2015) and the late Joel Lane in This Spectacular Darkness (2016), as well as publishing several groundbreaking critical biographies of important supernatural fiction writers, such as Valentine’s Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban (2011) and Russell’s Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography (2022). Literary Hauntings: A Gazetteer of Literary Ghost Stories (2022) is a particularly invaluable reference book issued by the press, a collection of 271 entries that identifies and describes the actual real-life locations behind some of the most important British and Irish classic ghost stories. The quality of these volumes, as well as the demand for them, is evident from these titles all being out of print upon publication.

Now in its thirty-fifth year, Tartarus Press has as rich a legacy as a publisher of weird fiction as Arkham House did in its heyday in the United States. The design of the books and the high quality of the material routinely attracts the attention of reviewers such as Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, Tim Martin of The Telegraph, and Damien G. Walter of The Guardian. As Russell and his partner Rosalie Parker state in an April 2010 interview for Speculative Fiction Junkie, “We’ve always worked on the theory that if we like a book then hopefully there will be others who share our taste. Quality is our only criteria for classic or contemporary fiction. There’s no great mission, although we do specialize in subtle, supernatural and psychological fiction. In theory, a full collection of Tartarus Press books should give a pretty comprehensive overview of the genre.”