My introduction to horror fiction was through Robert E. Howard. I began reading his horror in collections such as The Book of Robert E. Howard and The Howard Collector. Then I moved on to H. P. Lovecraft and then the Lovecraft Circle. My horror reading still tends to be Weird Tales centric. Personal favorites include Donald Wandrei, Manly Wade Wellman’s Weird Tales fiction, Weird Tales period Ray Bradbury, and Carl Jacobi.

I first read Carl Jacobi (“The Pit”) in the the anthology Weird Tales #1 (Zebra Books, 2^nd printing 1983) in late summer 1983. I lucked out in April 1984 when Phantom of the Attic on South Craig Street in Pittsbugh had the Jove reprint of the Arkham House collection Revelations in Black. I devoured that in shorteorder appeciating Jacobi’s precise prose in the short story format. His stories were traditional with Gothic atmosphere. They read like horror stories. He was one of those strong second stringers for Weird Tales magazine in its hey day that added to the later legend.

“Revelations in Black” is a classic vampire story. It is haunting. Most vampire fiction anthologies contain the story. Jacobi was not prolific. He produced a steady number of high quality stories for pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. He was an excellent writer of tropical adventure fiction in addition to his weird/horror.

I bought the Arkham House Jacobi collection Disclosures in Scarlet in 1986 from Sheldon Jaffrey who was a book dealer. I remember also getting Josephy Payne Brennan’s Stories of Darkness and Dread. Both the Brennan and Jacobi titles were still in print at the time.

A few years after that, I picked up the Arkham House collection Portaits in Moonlight at Dawn Treader Books in Ann Arbor, MI. Finally, a few years back, I picked up the Arkham House edition of Revelation in Black.

Here is the list of stories in Revelation in Black and the original magazine appearances:

Jacobi makes for excellent October reading.