[NOTE: Written in 1998 as graduate project in Book History. Several editions have been published since which are not covered below. This version is missing the bibliography.]

“American books constitute packages and I imagine that the same rules which apply to pill boxes and canned food must apply to books…We have three kinds of packages for books–those which attract as flowers attract insects, those which establish their profundity with stern dull covers (since profundity is generally believed to be dull), and finally, those which by illustrations on their jackets indicate or lie about its contents. All of it is a fly catching process.” — John Steinbeck, in an open letter to the Trade Book Clinic, 1951

“Where shall I begin my tale? This one has neither beginning nor end, but only a perpetual unfolding, a multi-petaled blossom of strange botany.” — Endore’s Narrator, The Werewolf of Paris

Perhaps the above quotes best define the evolution of the novel I am about to discuss. Endore’s description of his work–or rather, his narrator’s description of the discarded manuscript he happens across–as a “multi-petaled blossom of strange botany” is no exaggeration; and likewise, Steinbeck’s cynical analogy between readers and insects is not so off the mark considering the tactics the publishers used to make this “strange botany” marketable, tactics which, depending on the audience and the decade, utilized either gaudy sensationalism, dull profundity, or a combination of the two. Given the dichotomy often taking place between text and paratext, it should come as no surprise that the work was destined for obscurity, being neither “Horror” nor “Literature”, comprised of both fiction and nonfiction. This inconsequentially is only exacerbated by the historical separation between high-culture and low-culture that has been synonymous with American literary scholarship in the 20th century. Nevertheless, since its initial publication in the early 1930s, the text has survived, primarily due to the ease with which it fit into the packaging strategies of the pocket paperback presses during and after the Second World War. In the following analysis, I will trace this evolution as it pertains to the paratexts, both authorial and publisher’s.

Brief mention should be made here of the nomenclature created by scholars in order to study those “outer” elements of a text. Philippe Lejeune, in his Le Pacte autobiographique, defines these paratextual elements as “a fringe of a printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of a text.” This idea was further elaborated on by French writer Gerard Genette in his study Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation: “The ways and means of the paratext change continually, depending upon period, culture, genre, author, work, and editon, with varying degrees of pressure.” The paratext, then, can be divided into two areas: the peritext–those elements directly, or physically, linked to the book itself, such as preface, postface, blurbs, synopses, illustrations, dustjacket design, etc.; and the epitext–those elements detached from the physicality of the text but which nevertheless manipulate the reader’s interaction with, and interpretation of, a given text, such as reviews, advertisements, personal correspondence, word-of-mouth gossip, etc. Using these concepts, I will examine the ways in which The Werewolf of Paris changed under these degrees of pressure and how the work’s various manifestations served to manipulate audience interpretation of text.

A Communist Werewolf Novel

With the exception of its modernist intro that establishes a sort of meta-narrative, Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris is a novel set in mid-19th Century France, from around 1850 through the Siege of Paris, and culminating in the Commune uprising of 1871. The principal characters are Bertrand Caillet (the werewolf) and Aymer Galliez (Bertrand’s “uncle”, though they are unrelated), with the plot spending more time on the latter than the former. It can be seen as both a parody of 19th Century European literature (including fake footnotes) and an extension of the new American simplicity visible in the writings of socialist peers like John Dos Passos. The work’s greatness lies in its technique of juxtaposing the lesser inhumanity of the werewolf against the greater inhumanity of industrialized capitalism, matter-of-factly placing Bertrand Caillet’s handful of “feedings” alongside the butchery and mass starvation of the Franco-Prussian War and the slaughter that followed, when the Parisian working classes and National Guard formed an alliance calling itself the Commune and attempted to oust the failed French bourgeoisie. The Communards maintained control of the Parisian government for about ten days, but when the military returned home from the front, they sided with the rich; and in only a week of street fighting, 20,000 men, women, and children of the Commune were murdered by governmental forces, and another 300,000 arrested. In both spirit and organizational zeal, it was to serve as the model for working class insurrections that followed, most importantly the Russian Bolsheviks.

Even by 1933 standards, the novel isn’t remotely horrifying in a conventional sense, as its clearly more concerned with social iniquities and the horrors mankind inflicts upon itself. Not that Endore uses the genre as an empty platform for an overt political message, for there are indeed reports from the 19th Century (most notable in Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1865 treatise The Book of Werewolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition) that tell of a 1st Infantry junior officer named Bertrand, who was accused of desecrating Parisian graveyards and leaving “bodies lying about the tombs in fragments”. Initially the crime was so savage they assumed the perpetrator to be a “wild beast’, hence the author’s portrayal of Bertrand as a lycanthrope. Therefore, the novel’s strengths today lie in its esoteric information on French history and social mores; or, as one horror critic put it, Endore’s “annoying tendency to de-emphasize the werewolf” in favor of “historical digressions” that prevent a “straight-forward, action-packed narrative” (Ball, 5). On the contrary this tendency is its greatest asset, for within these digressions, class injustices are laid bare: the carriage driver who is wrongly convicted, belittled for his legal ignorance by a domineering judge; the foreclosing bankers, who sell off forests to clear-cutters who ruin the topsoil for generations; the selling of zoo animals to enterprising butchers, who offer rich Parisians exotic meats like ostrich, dingo, tapir, and kangaroo; and how, in the end, even Castor and Pollux, the two famous resident elephants, were finally sold to the Jocky Club’s chef for 27,000 francs; or how the Imperial Zoological Society convened to discuss new and affordable cuisine alternatives for the bourgeoisie (“Venison ragout of rats”, “Jugged cat with mushrooms”, “Consommé of horse with millet’), with the dinner ending in the creation of a public-relations campaign entitled “The Rat is Good Food!”

The novel’s ironic sense of humor set it apart from other prior works in the genre, such as Alexandre Dumas’ The Wolf-Leader (1857), George W. M. Reynolds’ Wagner: the Wehr-wolf (1846-47), and H. Warner Munn’s The Werewolf of Ponkert (1925), all of which suffered from an excess of Victorian romanticism, overblown sensationalism, or the odd plot conventions (climax upon climax) of an extended serialized piece of fiction. The Werewolf of Paris becomes the first modern commercially and critically successful attempt in the genre, a “great peak in a sea of mediocrity” (Copper, 138). It also set a new standard for an upcoming generation of leftist horror writers, including Psycho author Robert Bloch, who wrote the foreword to Citadel’s 1992 reissue; and Bloch, unlike many, first and foremost praises the work’s social commentary instead of deriding it as preachy.

Farrar & Rinehart initially published The Werewolf of Paris in March of 1933, with a run of five printings; three in March and two in April. Endore allegedly sold the manuscript outright to Farrar & Rinehart for a total payment of $750, although this could be apocryphal. Since Endore’s previous novel, The Man From Limbo, published by the same house in 1932, had sold poorly, such negotiations are not unlikely given the economic insecurities of the Great Depression. Farrar & Rinehart had achieved moderate success with Endore’s biography of Joan of Arc, The Sword of God: Jeanne D’arc (1931), as well as his translation of German philosopher Max Picard’s The Human Face (1930). Still, for reasons unknown–possibly because the above rumor is true, possibly due to its controversial content–Farrar & Rinehart did not publish Babouk (Vanguard, 1934; the author’s follow-up to Paris), a novel dealing with the famous slave revolt against French imperialists in Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti. Babouk was a critical success but a commercial disaster, and soon after its publication Endore found himself in Hollywood, earning a living as a screenwriter. The success of The Werewolf of Paris was a curse of sorts. It effectively pigeonholed Endore, up until the mid-1950s, as a horror writer; and as a result, most of his initial script assignments contained a supernatural slant. With the rise of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was blacklisted due to his political views, thus facilitating his return to writing, where he had success in 1956 with Simon & Schuster’s publication of King of Paris, a biography of Alexandre Dumas. He continued with biographical novels on Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade, Voltaire! Voltaire! (S&S, 1961) and Satan’s Saint (Crown, 1965) respectively. He died in 1970.

Like several of his contemporaries–one being Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Simon & Schuster, 1935), an archetypal example of the crime novel with an existentialist, anti-capitalist subtext–Endore manipulated genre in a way that was both entertaining and political; and like McCoy, who was forever stamped with the “hardboiled” label, so Endore would be associated with the “school of the macabre” throughout his lifetime. In a sense, this association was unavoidable considering the sheer number of pocket/pulp publications of The Werewolf of Paris between Farrar & Rinehart’s clothbound original in 1933 and Citadel’s trade edition in 1992. Within this sixty-year gap, its physicality went through drastic changes that altered the ways in which readers interacted with the text: certain facets of the novel are exaggerated, others ignored, many deliberately distorted, in order to appeal to the expectations of a given publisher’s target market.

Revolution and Man-As-Animal

In their paratexts, the initial publications of The Werewolf of Paris, both the clothbound Farrar & Rinehart original (1933) and Grosset & Dunlap’s reprint (1934), set themselves apart from subsequent editions in a variety of ways; these include the placement of the work within a historical context, an emphasis on mass social/political instability (as opposed to a latter preoccupation with the Individual, or Individual vs. Victim), and, to a lesser extent, the depiction of the classical Western European lycanthrope known as loup-garou in France, lupo mannaro in Italy, etc. In addition, they are the sole examples of the work as it was designed to appeal to an educated, adult-oriented market.

Upon its release, The Werewolf of Paris was a tremendous success for the newly-founded house of Farrar & Rinehart, who, along with Simon & Schuster, was looking to publish “young authors” and works deemed too controversial by more traditional publishers. Perhaps some of this success can be attributed to the ambiguous role of reading in Depression-era America and how the criteria for selection differed between groups. According to data collected by the Social Science Research Council in 1937, “most men are divided in their allegiance to ‘all other’ magazines, for the most part technical, local, fraternal, or ‘high-brow’, as against detective and adventure stories” while “women prefer “parents’ and women’s magazines and movie, love, and radio” (Waples, 154). The study goes on to say that “heavy readers in modern society are those with little else to do–students, teachers, some housewives, editors, writers, and a few persons of leisure” (Waples, 185).

Obviously one must not assign too much weight to this study, especially in light of the fact that Waples draws a distinction between “an increase in the proportion of good fiction books to ‘other’ fiction books” in his analysis (Waples, 154). Nevertheless, this elitist, lowbrow/highbrow attitude exemplifies the cultural biases inherent in many educated sectors of society against genre fiction that worked on the sensibilities of the “lay” reader, namely, romance, mystery, horror, and westerns; or, as the report’s authors describe them, “the bloodthirsty adventure story and the erotic novel”; incidentally, it is interesting to note that some of the language incorporated in the SSRC report is not unlike some of the milder pulp blurbs seen in future pulp paratexts, such as the assertion that “most thrill seekers want their sensations raw” and “erotic novels are the best vehicles for thrills delivered wholesale” (Waples, 197). It was further asserted that the “stories of wild adventure” served to “compensate the dreariness of daily living” associated with the hardships of the Great Depression, a sentiment reinforced by the parallel success of the “escapist” motion pictures of the time. The SSRC’s report concludes: “Steady consumers of ‘Westerns’ today have been found largely among men of all ages with less than high school education. Their mental maturity is about that of a normal ten-year-old boy, who has not yet developed an interest in sex. Steady consumers of pornographic prints are but slightly more advanced. Both groups predominate among those who suffered most during depression” (Waples, 197). Since they are all believed to fulfill the same escapist function in the face of social disparity, one can safely extrapolate this same attitude to other so-called “sensationalist” or “titillating” genres as well.

First Edition

Despite its success, there is ample evidence embedded in the paratext that The Werewolf of Paris was expected to appeal to this type of “underdeveloped” horror reader, hence the scarcity of its appearance in periodicals reviewing “educated” literature. Other Farrar & Rinehart titles from the same year, such as Anthony Adverse and Always A Grand Duke, warrant a considerable amount of advertising space in The New York Times Book Review, The Saturday Review of Books, and The New York Herald Tribune Books supplement, but The Werewolf of Paris is given a marginal amount of attention, often just a single ad upon the week of its release. At first glance, this gives the impression that, although they wouldn’t mind making a few bucks off of the book as a curio for fringe types and immature perverts (to paraphrase Waples), they do not exactly want to broadcast its publication to the literary establishment at large. Oddly enough, since this lack of promotion continues long after rave reviews and multiple printings, the publisher’s reluctance seems neither profit-driven nor out of fear of critical ridicule; on the contrary, maybe Farrar & Rinehart knew that one of the cheapest and most effective forms of promotion for a novel such as this was word-of-mouth, that “subversive” texts do not promote themselves through educated channels of communication and rely instead on the “fly catching process” bemoaned by Steinbeck, a process which places top priority on an eye-engaging design that will attract the reading public (Gerard Genette’s defines this public as not only the sum of actual readers, but also those who buy, but do not necessarily read, the book.)

The montage on the first editon dustjacket is a visually stunning mash-up, with original illustrations synthesized into a piece of well-known medieval art, all compartmentalized and divided by an L-shaped banner containing the title. De Koven, the designer as credited, created images of events occurring in the novel, a technique typically avoided in the pocket formats of the 1950s and 1960s, where innuendo reigned supreme. These representative illustrations are not, however, displayed in any position of prominence but are instead relegated to the corners and margins of the design. In fact, there are only three images of the traditional loup-garou: two images of wolves and one anthropomorphic transformation scene in the lower left corner. Given this, apart from the “catchpenny” title, there would be no reason for the reader to consider this a text on lycanthropy. If anything, one would assume the work dealt with revolution, medievalism, or the Black Plague. The painting used, Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death (1562), covers roughly two-thirds of the jacket, stretching across the front, the spine, and the back. The carnage is graphic: a horse-drawn cart with skulls driven by skeletons; emaciated dogs looming over discarded children; the dead and dying captured within nets while skeletons steal gold coins from overturned barrels, which becomes an interesting example of symbolic greed ignored by subsequent designers. This gruesome scene segues into another at the center of the spine, with the back portion of the painting showing an army of skeletons massacring a crowd of people, immediately conjuring associations with the Black Death and, if one looks closer and notices the crucifix-embossed shields used by the skeletons, the Crusades. Brueghel the Elder is often compared to Hieronymous Bosch, and the composition and color choices reflected in The Triumph of Death closely mirror the third triptych of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

One original aspect of F&R’s design, when compared to subsequent editions, was the choice to ground the novel visually within a historical context by emphasizing the brutality of revolution and war, not the evils (usually sexualized) of the protagonist. Here, the focus is on the government’s violent suppression of the Commune: the Goya-esque execution scene, the burning skyline, the mob and the crumbling of classical columns, etc. Since the execution scene is the only one of these incidents directly referenced in the text, these illustrations serve to create an atmosphere rather than provide graphic reproductions of actions occurring in the book, an approach that does not reveal too much of the plot for the reader. One only comes away with the impression of a collapsing authority, the attempted overthrow of the State, the blurring between man and animal. This “man as animal” motif is emphasized throughout the text, focusing on psychological duality as opposed to physiological metamorphosis. This paratextual emphasis, more philosophically centered than the cinematic archetypes of the pocket era, visually supplements Endore’s tacit question: Who is more savage, man or werewolf? After Farrar & Rinehart in 1933, this question vanishes from the paratexts, with minor exceptions, until Citadel in 1992.

On the dustjacket’s end-flaps, the eye is immediately drawn to the bold sans-serif type stating “Fourth Large Printing In Ten Days”, an unusual end-flap feature since printing information is normally relegated to the verso of the title page. The decision to include it so prominently, along with a duration of time, strikes me as a device to imply that volumes are flying off booksellers’ shelves quicker than the publisher can print them (this marketing technique was common with Farrar & Rinehart in the beginning, as many of their advertisements in The New York Times Book Review include such bylines.) Immediately underneath this, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is mentioned: “Dracula was a vampire–but Bertrand was a werewolf!” What significance this is supposed to have, if any, apart from associating this text to the former, is unclear. This headline serves as an introduction to a succinct, not-overly-sensationalistic synopsis of the plot, describing Bertrand Callais as “a creature from the hideous depths of demonology”, a line that sounds quite bland compared to the later pulps’ penchant for “flesh-torn corpses” and women “whose bloody wounds were drained by the lips of a man-wolf!”

A series of excerpts from critical reviews fill out the remainder of the end-flaps, including quotes from highly-respected literary sources The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Herald Tribune, and The Saturday Review of Books. I will discuss these in-depth when covering the epitext, but some mention of their basic function should be made here. The publisher manages to squeeze in two more Dracula references via blurbs from The New Yorker (“Mr. Endore has boldly gone after the overrated scalps of Dracula and Huysman’s Las Bas…”) and The Saturday Review (“…If the story of a mere vampire can attain the large popularity attendant on Dracula, Mr. Endore’s record of helpless, wanton wolvery should win a tremendous audience”), both of which assert the book’s similarity, if not superiority, to Stoker’s work. This seems an early instance of what will become a standard marketing tactic in the successive pocket-book paratexts, namely, the publisher’s attempt to form an association in the reader’s/buyer’s mind with cinematic conventions rather than literary ones. Farrar & Rinehart, however, are much more subtle in their evocation of Universal Studio’s tremendously-successful Dracula from 1931 than are the pulp presses, who shamelessly incorporate the iconography of film in order to appeal to their target audiences. This difference in audience, and the lack of a cinematic equivalent to lycanthropy, prevents such marketing tactics from occurring in 1933, a void that will be filled to capacity after the postwar paperback explosion.

The non-Dracula reviews, all relegated to the rear end-flap, vary with regard to their content. For example, The Herald Tribune comments on the text’s philosophical leanings and assumes the target audience’s grasp on European history (“…Builds the medieval legend of the werewolf into a story of Paris in the bloody days of the Commune…Reaches a crescendo of philosophic horror.”) Conversely, World Telegram’s tone is silly and condescending, showing the degree of literary seriousness allocated to lowly genre fiction by the critics (“Alexander Woollcott [writer of New Yorker review] is all a-quiver at this yarn…Brrrrrr–werewolves!”) The publisher’s decision to include a personal mention of Woollcott in the excerpt is interesting, and it clearly indicates an expected degree of familiarity on the part of the reader, who would be expected to understand and participate in this in-joke between literary colleagues.

The final excerpt, from The New York Times Book Review–“The reader who wishes to sup full of horrors will find enough of them in this extremely gory tale”–is perhaps the most significant, as it will be handed down from edition to edition with little to no revision, even appearing prominently on Ace’s front cover in 1962, some thirty years later. In fact, almost all of these reviews will be found scattered piecemeal throughout future pulp paratexts, seldom credited and in various states of abridgement, but typically forming the body of the blurbs themselves. In subsequent editions, it should be noted, the names of individual critics will no longer be included in the recycled reviews, but only the names of their parent publications.

Farrar & Rinehart’s interior peritext introduces elements that will later be condensed and edited in much the same fashion as the critical excerpts. Seldom will another publisher allot such breathing space to the text, donating an entire page to the epigraph, the dedication, and the half-title. The generosity is short lived, for Grosset & Dunlap’s 1935 budget reprint (identical in most respects to the original) introduces the traditional “If you liked this book, then…” section, which I will discuss momentarily. What this original edition does use, however, is the “Books by Guy Endore” device on the verso of the half-title. Four works are listed: Casanova: His Known and Unknown Life, The Man From Limbo, The Sword of God: Jeanne D’arc, and The Werewolf of Paris, all of which, with the exception of Casanova (John Day, 1929), were published previously by Farrar & Rinehart. Although this paratextual device will reappear later, with several additions, its impact here is quite different, as it reinforces impressions of the work’s historical origins by associating it with factual biographies of Casanova and Joan of Arc. Therefore, one would infer by this list, the critical mention of the Siege of Paris, and from the revolutionary images on the dustjacket, that the text has some basis in historical truth.

These historical inferences are further substantiated by Endore’s selection of an epigraph:

These creatures live onely without meats;

The Chameleon by the Air,

The Want or Mole, by the Earth,

The Sea-Herring by the Water,

The Salamander by the Fire,

Unto which may be added the Dormouse, which lives partly by sleep,

And the Werewolf, whose food is night, winter and death.

(AN OLD SAYING)

This is located in its traditional location, that is, the first right-hand page after the dedication but before the introduction. Of the four epigraphical functions outlined by Genette in Paratexts, Endore’s acts primarily as a commentary on the text, as opposed to a commentary on the title, which is “catchpenny” and self-evident enough. The occasional use of the epigraph as a sign of culture, or, as Genette says, a “password of intellectuality”, does not seem to apply here since the saying’s author remains anonymous. One could argue that this lack of attribution could derive from the fact that Endore himself created it especially for the text, as he did the fictional footnotes.

One interesting note concerning the book’s cloth boards: at the beginning of the 20th century, yellow covers were synonymous with licentious French literature; so, in addition to matching the red and yellow color scheme used on the jacket, the yellow boards could also be interpreted as an indicator of content, or as an ironic twist on this color/content association. The remainder of the book’s construction shows signs of Great Depression cost-cutting: the stitching used in the sewn binding is highly acidic and burning through the signatures in places; the paper quality, though far superior than that used for pulp publications, is still dingy and coarse. While many would criticize these inferior materials from a preservationist standpoint, they nevertheless possess an aesthetic which only adds to the archaic, ominous ambience of the work, a work whose storyline is–appropriately enough–structured around the retrieval of a manuscript from a Parisian rubbish pile.

Enter Budget Line

These same qualities carry over into Grosset & Dunlap’s reprint edition in early 1935, which consisted of two printings, one in February, the other in March. Since this printing is not dissimilar to Farrar & Rinehart’s initial trade run, I will not dwell on it extensively here; however, several paratextual modifications warrant mention. First, the book is ¾” smaller than its predecessor, with no adjustments or reductions made for typography or dustjacket design. This results in reduced margins and truncated illustrations on the jacket, with the ¾” divided evenly between top and bottom. This cost-saving measure results in the deletion of designer De Koven’s signature, an oversight that would be of importance if one could actually make out the events occurring on the hideously-reproduced jacket; everything is so dark, grainy, and faded that only those few scenes with high tonal contrast can be deciphered, thus sacrificing, in the reproduction process, not only the intricacies of the artwork, but also the vital information relayed to the reader through these illustrations.

Second, although the jacket’s illustration is (in theory) identical, the end-flaps have been altered to suit this new printing’s audience, which is, judging by some paratextual hints, both the horror lover and the romance reader. One major difference is the publisher’s synthesizing of the critical reviews into a single blurb, with only the New York Times Book Review’s (now attributed to simply the New York Times) used in full. Indeed, the “sup full of horrors” quote takes precedence over the others in less than a year; and although others will resurface, this review perseveres as the authoritative opinion for decades. The amalgamated quotes retain some of the language (“Commune”, “gory days of the siege”), but apparently those deemed too wordy for the bargain printing’s target market are deleted (“phosphorescent”, “ensanguined”). Along these same lines, which could be argued as a “dumbing down” of the text, the single quote that acknowledged and praised the work’s “philosophical crescendo” has been removed, thus impressing upon the reader that the text is nothing more than the tale of a “man by day, ravenous beast by night”, another soon-to-be archetypal, paratextual line that introduces sexual overtones into the publisher’s marketing strategy.

Another departure between the original edition and Grosset & Dunlap’s reprint is an increased emphasis on Dracula, both explicit (Bram Stoker’s) and implicit (Universal Studios’). Only one of Farrar & Rinehart’s more subtle allusions is duplicated in toto for this edition: the “Dracula was a vampire…” headline remains in its prominent position underneath the title on the front-end flap. The publishers, however, obviously feel this reference to be insufficient, so an advertisement for Dracula fills the rear-end flap, with, oddly enough, absolutely no emphasis placed upon the Grosset & Dunlap printing of that work. This is an interesting paratextual device, and I believe it to be an early forerunner of what will become the predominant marketing strategy for this book in the postwar era, namely, the suggestive association of the text with its cinematic counterpart, not to be confused with the “novelization” of a film. The same 1937 Social Science Research Council study I mentioned earlier takes note of this fact, reporting that “changes in popularity of authors like Buck, Dickens, Dumas, Tarkington, and Wells are largely explained either by the filming of their novels or by the date of a recent bestseller” (Waples, 177). Granted, when set against the shameless incorporation of film iconography inherent in the pocket editions, these allusions seem mild; but nevertheless, without the enormous success of Universal Studios’ Dracula in 1931, I seriously doubt the publishers would have devoted an entire end-flap to the work without at least marketing its own edition of the book, as they do so blatantly in the posterior peritext.

Judging from other parts of its peritext, it is a safe assumption that Grosset & Dunlap appealed, at least in this instance, to working-class women readers. On the recto and verso of the page preceding the rear flyleaf are advertisements directed at this audience. The recto, headlined “Romances of the Modern Girl”, offers “a list of books by well known writers of romance stories for the modern girl”, such as Puppy Love, Blonde Trouble, Sinless Sin, and Marriage a la Mode. The verso is more specialized, restricting itself to “Novels of Vida Hurst”, all of which are listed on the previous page, albeit without synopses. These Vida Hurst synopses are relatively uniform in their romanticism, with many emphasizing sacrificial love (“Here is the absorbing story of a girl’s battle for a love she considers dearer than life–a story thousands of girls will weep over as their own experience”), the dangers of diverting from convention (“The story of a girl who thought love more powerful than society–more important even than marriage”), and plenty of love-conquers-all idealism; I will, however, leave the interpretation of Second Hand Lover’s description that “Janice found there were no thrilling men out of bondage” to the reader’s imagination.

In this context, the advertisement for Dracula on the rear end-flap exacerbates the atmosphere of romanticism through its use of language, bringing to mind the sensual undertones of the text, “the mystery of its unfolding and the suspense of its climax”, as opposed to the horror associations one might conclude if viewing the advertisement singly, or in conjunction with the allusive headline on the front end-flap. Thus, this exemplifies how paratextual meaning can change when parts of the peritext are combined, or separated, from one another. One gets the impression from such double meanings that the publisher put a great deal of thought into their marketing strategies, incorporating techniques designed to attract several types of “insects”, depending upon both the intake, and the order of intake, of these paratextual devices.

Transitional Editions

In many ways, Pocket Books’ 1941 publication of The Werewolf of Paris is a paratextual milestone, exhibiting unique characteristics that do not appear again in any subsequent edition of the novel. It is an important transitional link in studying the publishers’ shifting emphasis from inhuman behavior by men acting as if possessed by wolves to the straightforward, less ambiguous one-werewolf/one-victim motif that will dominate the paratexts for more than thirty years. Thus, while adhering to the classical European conception of le loup-garou, Pocket Books simultaneously ushers in the novel’s pulp era, setting new standards for its paratext that will be adopted and modified in a variety of ways by the postwar presses, all of which eliminate the attention to detail so prevalent in this edition.

Given the origins of Pocket Books, this paratextual attention to detail is evidently intended to canonize the text itself. Pocket Books, founded in 1939 by Robert De Graff, was the first American mass-market paperback company to strike a balance between production and profits, a success due primarily to a combination of timeliness, clever marketing, and De Graff’s altruistic ideals of inexpensive literary salvation for the masses.  Its only serious predecessor had been Modern Age Books in the mid-1930s, who, due to mismanagement, esoteric titles, and lackluster marketing, was unable to achieve commercial success. To reduce overhead, De Graff instituted the incongruously-named “perfect binding” (a cold glue process previously implemented by Penguin in the UK) and the Perma-Gloss lamination technique for covers. He also reduced the size of the format by a 1/2 -inch vertically, borrowed the original plates whenever possible, and increased print runs to ten times that of the typical cloth run (Davis, 39). De Graff’s selection process consisted of scouring the The New York Times Book Review and buying up the rights to as many bestsellers as possible, no doubt the method used to acquire The Werewolf of Paris.

Pocket Books’ success was immediate, and this phenomenal growth rate had much to do with their magazine/newsstand distribution model, which also included department stores and pharmacies. By the Spring of 1941, total sales had reached 8.5 million units, with Lost Horizon, Wuthering Heights, and The Good Earth topping the list (Davis, 43). New titles were announced in clusters of fifty, and it is within this second series, from 50-100, that Paris makes its paperback debut, at #97.

Unfortunately, later that same year, Endore’s novel, along with Appointment in Samarra, became the first casualty of paperback censorship due to complaints from readers and distributors alike (Davis, 43). The exact motivations behind this decision are difficult to ascertain, although it’s safe to say that it probably has something to do with the sexual relations between the priest and the young servant girl, i.e. the protagonist’s mother and father. Pocket’s quick compliance to pull the title should come as no surprise since they were an aspiring, young press unwilling to spark any controversy at this early stage in the game, before they had solidified their place in the publishing industry. First and foremost, it is safe to assume that, although Pocket’s target market was the literary-minded middle and lower classes “on the go”, they undoubtedly failed to take into consideration the fact that adolescent could easily obtain these books due to their 25-cent price point and, for those who couldn’t afford it, their “pocketable” size. This oversight was only exacerbated by the broad dissemination of Pocket paperbacks via magazine/newspaper channels of distribution, as opposed to trade hardbacks’ reliance on booksellers. All of these factors could have contributed to De Graff’s decision to delete the title from the company’s catalog. Since no reports of censorship surround the original 1933 release, whose content was identical, one may conclude that this ease of accessibility for the young–and their exposure to this “unholy union”– was the primary cause for the public outcry.

De Graff’s “altruistic” desire to provide fine literature at reasonable prices is reflected in his selection of the first one-hundred Pocket releases, which range from previously canonized classics to more modern authors, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck; in fact, it is not unlike the roster of clothbound reprint publishers then carving out their own niche, like Modern Library or Triangle Books, with perhaps a few more classical erudite titles thrown in to round things out. However, the buying public, and therefore the distributors, did not share in De Graff’s enthusiasm concerning the canonization of Endore’s novel, making it very clear that works containing such licentious and vulgar subject matter would not be allowed to enter the paperback pantheon alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Twain.

Although it does not overtly make any claims at canonization, as Triangle does two years later, Pocket’s design nonetheless reflects this adult-oriented target market, through both its exterior, and, even moreso, its interior peritext. The exterior contains visual references to both historical context and the loup-garou, and also utilizes straightforward language that is more concerned with the accurate representation of content as opposed to the deceptive sensationalism. Notre Dame, the visual cue used to convey setting, is famous enough to be recognized by the average reader, in lieu of the Eiffel Tower’s anachronistic absence. This edition marks not only the final concrete visual example indicating location, but also the last representation of the loup-garou, and the sole example of this archetype as an illustrative centerpiece. The victim makes its debut here as well (one of the rare instances on which a man fulfills this role), pinned under the foot/paw of the predator. This configuration (victor on top, victim on bottom) will be reintroduced into Avon’s 1951 edition, with an added emphasis on sexual dominance which I will discuss momentarily.

The second important contribution to the exterior peritext is the inclusion of an extended synopsis on the back cover, written in a fashion that is both a throwback to the mid-1930’s paratext and a departure towards the sensationalist blurbs used to sell the mass-market manifestations. “The two most exciting legends of the human race are the Vampire Legend and the Werewolf Legend” is an obvious comparison to Dracula somewhat exhausted by earlier hardbacks. However, other uses of language are interesting. For example, the publisher attributes the quality of the novel itself to Endore’s research efforts (“…and now, after a thorough research of the werewolf legend through the ages, Guy Endore has written a horror story to stand beside Dracula”), in addition to mentioning dates for the Prussian siege and the Communards’ insurrection (“…during the days of the siege of 1870 and the Commune…”). Perhaps one factor leading to its eventual censorship was the succinct manner in which the synopsis spoke of the relationship between “a peasant girl and a priest”, obviously unaware of the controversy this may cause in conjunction with the availability of the cheaper format; ironically, they decline to elaborate on the specificity of what they describe as the “grotesque and unmistakable sign of the werewolf”, which is later spelled out in no uncertain terms by several sexually-laden pulp editions.

Even more so than the exterior, Pocket’s interior peritext contains several unusual devices, all of which function primarily as canonical tools. The first can be found on the verso of the half-title and the recto of the title page, where Pocket Books Edition (on the verso) and The Werewolf of Paris (on the recto) are printed in a similar typeface and enclosed within identical borders, thus giving the impression that they are both of equal importance, that the publisher shares an equal responsibility with the author. Pocket further asserts its authority by stating underneath its “title”, the space occupied by “Guy Endore” on the title page, that “This book is NOT a digest or condensation of the original. It is the COMPLETE book.” It is interesting that Pocket Books stresses “Complete and Unabridged” as a major selling point while the succeeding publication of Paris, by Avon in 1951, emphasizes “Newly Revised and Edited” in their marketing strategy.

The second interior device appears on the verso of the half-title and is entitled “The Printing History of The Werewolf of Paris”. This supplies the reader with an in-depth breakdown of the novel’s publication thus far, providing month, year, and print run for Farrar & Rinehart, Grosset & Dunlap, and the current Pocket version. In conducting my research for this study, information regarding the book’s initial printing history was virtually non-existent until I located this comprehensive list, and this strange attention to detail affords the Pocket edition with a certain stately feel that reinforces the publisher’s justification for canonizing the work.

The last piece of interior peritext, and arguably the most important, is the closest The Werewolf of Paris ever gets to an anthumous postface–an autobiographical “About the Author” section immediately following the novel’s conclusion. Considering the incredibly small amount of public information available on the author, this three-page profile provides the reader with a considerable amount of insight, not only on his personal life, but also into his authorial intentions. Endore writes: “The writer’s task is to amuse, to interpret, to exhort. It is my aim to do all three together, whenever possible, in the form of novels, short stories, biography, etc.” He continues on with comments directly linked to the social-political slant of the text: “For my part I have not yet decided which is worse, the muted miseries of peace and industry, in which there are some spoils to be distributed, no matter how unjustly, or the clamorous horrors of revolution where success is hazardous and the spoils are nil.” In summing up, Endore admiringly states: “In politics I tend towards communism and the establishment of the classless society.” Although this admission no doubt came back to haunt him during the McCarthy witch hunt, its sincerity and lack of waffling qualifiers is refreshing. Paratextually, it serves to intensify the novel’s leftist political lens for the reader, a lens employed tenfold for the follow up Babouk.

These comments alter textual interpretation in various ways, perhaps less so since they are postface, not preface; however, the intent behind its inclusion is curious, as the postface can no longer effectively perform what Gerard Genette maintains are the two main functions of the preface: holding the reader’s interest and guiding them by explaining why and how they should read the text. Genette observes: “If the first function is not fulfilled, the reader will perhaps never have an opportunity to reach a possible postface; if the second function is not fulfilled, it will perhaps be too late for the author to rectify in extremis a bad reading that has already been completed” (Genette, 123). The fact that Pocket Books did not incorporate this paratextual device into all of its publications only confuses matters and leads one to believe that they did so whenever possible and affordable, and perhaps when the device could act as a canonical tool for the text itself.

The second transitory edition of The Werewolf of Paris, published in October 1943, approaches the canonization of the work much more explicitly, preying upon the audience’s fear of cultural inferiority by manufacturing the desire to build a comprehensive modern library. Triangle Books, a division of Doubleday, specialized in 39-cent hardback reprints that, according to the full-page advertisement on the back cover of the dustjacket, bring the reader “new, cloth-bound editions of famous books by authors of international reputation at a price never before thought possible. Here are real library editions–not small or expurgated books–with colorful, newly designed jackets, and printed complete from the expensive plates of the original” (Triangle’s emphasis). This publisher’s blurb is interesting for several reasons. First, it attacks the substandard quality of the mass-market editions while simultaneously adopting those substandard aesthetics: the garish jacket design, the sensationalist blurbs, the shoddy construction, etc. The emphasis on the abridgement practices of “small or expurgated” books, which are not worthy of a “real library”, is somewhat irrelevant since the success of Pocket Books had already facilitated a movement away from that practice, giving little credence to their accusations. Finally, Triangle’s tireless quest to attain the “expensive plates of the original” is quite humorous in light of the fact that Grosset & Dunlap’s reprint claimed that their reduced price was due in part to the use of these same pricey plates.

Since this interior peritext is identical to the original (except for the extremely acidic paper), Triangle’s jacket design offers the most vivid paratextual clues as to publisher intention and target market. Directly above the quote already discussed, an illustration shows “today’s family” of avid readers, voraciously partaking in their extensive library of Triangle editions–their true password into intellectualism and cultural modernity–while dialogue bubbles emphasize the diversity of the selection. All of the middle-class stereotypes are present: the financially-obsessed father (“Yes, it’s mighty satisfying to own good books at such a low price”), the mother preoccupied with familial behavior (“Reading has become our family’s most popular pastime”), the collegiate son with the Cub-Scout vocabulary (“Boy! Look at these top notch mystery and adventure stories!”), and the romantic star-struck daughter who automatically associates literature with film (“I like these love stories–and books on which ‘hit’ movies are based”).

This explicit cinematic association, the first of its kind, is no coincidence, especially when examined in conjunction with the newly-renovated jacket design of which Triangle boasts so proudly. Here we see an extension of the predator vs. prey motif initiated by Pocket two years earlier, with two significant alterations: first, the premier of the female victim and sexual subjugation; and second, the rejection of the loup-garou in favor of the “wolfman”, an archetype owing more to American 20th-century pop culture than European folklore. Indeed, the visual cues used to convey setting are quickly vanishing from the paratext, with only apparel (Bertrand’s top hat and cloak, the woman’s beret) and architecture (European facades, cobblestone streets) remotely indicative of France, thus showing Triangle’s inability to completely divorce the novel from its geographical context, a reluctance not shared by subsequent mass-market publishers throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

A Shifting Archetype

The paperback  explosion following on the coattails of Pocket Books’ phenomenal success ushered in an endless string of pulp Paris’s that specialized in sensationalism, marketing sex and/or violence, and often both, to a less-literary and perhaps proletarian audience. In these mass-market editions, the aesthetics of cinema–particularly promotional materials–dominate over those of literature, with garish design and illustration more closely resembling the paratextual equivalent in that medium (one-sheet posters, lobby cards, etc.) than the work’s forerunners from the 1930s. Several factors give rise to this change. First, De Graff from Pocket Books and his early competitors had their origins in book publishing, which meant that they naturally adopted the conservative marketing strategies associated with those parent organizations, albeit with slight modifications for level of readership. On the other hand, the mass-market publishers who fought to get in on the postwar paperback action were almost exclusively from the magazine industry, naturally embellishing their editions of Paris with all of the eye-catching contrivances they could manage without crossing the line into censorship, a line that had apparently blurred to inconsequentiality since the outcry over Pocket’s edition in 1941. Gone were the altruistic intentions of these earlier pioneers, as insincere as they might have been, for now it was purely a game of profit, plain and simple, with no symbiotic relationship between text and paratext necessary. In fact, the dissonance occurring between this text and paratext is precisely what makes these editions fascinating. The Werewolf of Paris was by no means alone in this dissonance, although it can be argued that it lent itself quite easily, like so many others, to sensationalist paratextual representation, all the more so because of its catchpenny title and controversial content.

To cover the sensationalist aesthetics used by each individual mass-market publisher would be a lengthy and excruciatingly repetitive task. Therefore, for purposes of this study, I will examine only a handful of distinctive characteristics that act as vital links in understanding the evolution of the paratext. Suffice it to say that between the years 1951 and 1963, Paris saw no less than four pulp manifestations: Avon (1951), Studio Publications (Toronto, 1952) Ace Books (1962), and Panther Books (U.K., 1963). I will focus primarily upon the first two, Avon and Studio, as they contain the most interesting–and sometimes bizarre–paratextual devices.

Over ten years had transpired since Pocket’s aborted attempt to publish the novel and much had changed in the paperback industry, especially the intensity of the competition. The very elements which resulted in retraction in 1941 were now expounded upon and made into selling points, making Pocket’s paratext harmless and benign by comparison. Naturally, there was no shortage of lawsuits to go around. Pocket Books, who struggled to maintain their quasi-highbrow standards among a sea of scantily-clad women, won the suit against Avon which stipulated that the latter could not use the word “pocket” anywhere on its cover, nor could it continue to stain its edges red. “Complete and Unabridged!” had long ago become the standard, making its constant appearance all the more irrelevant. Oddly enough, in 1951, Avon opted for a different approach in its marketing campaign, proudly proclaiming “Specially Revised and Edited!” instead. My first impression–that this was simply a positively-slanted euphemism for “Condensed and Abridged”–proved misguided after I examined the content of the deleted passages. It is difficult to ascertain exactly who edited what and for whom. According to a piece of correspondence between Guy Endore and Rinehart & Company, dated November 1950, all of the publisher’s rights, title and interest on The Werewolf of Paris, The Man From Limbo, and The Sword of God were turned over to Endore per his request, although the two accompanying works were never reprinted; perhaps Endore’s initial letter would clarify the reasons behind this request, but I could not uncover it for this study. Nevertheless, it could be assumed that he wished to edit the novel especially for Avon, a publisher known in the paperback industry for its stringent maximization of page space. The verso of the title page states “Published by arrangement with the Author” but no indication is given regarding the editorial decisions, thereby tacitly distributing this responsibility equally between author and publisher.

Although it is not my intention to examine the textual, or non-paratextual, changes made to this edition, a few words should be said about the deletions since such attention is drawn to them in the paratext. Apparently Avon, unwilling to bore its audience with historical facts and esoteric information on 19th-century France, edited out any passages that did not contain scenes involving violence, sex, and/or the werewolf; I say that Avon and not Endore instigated this mainly because all subsequent mass-market editions revert to the original 1933 text. Since only about a third of the book actually centers around Bertrand Callait, this results in sizable deletions, dropping the book down to a scant 188 pages from Pocket’s unabridged 325, thus resulting in a version that conforms more closely to the conventional horror novel. The above-mentioned Zoological Society dinner is heavily edited, as are the political aspects of the novel’s final third. Gone, too, are the lengthy sections in which the narrator quotes from Aymar Galliez’s (the “uncle”) manuscript on Bertrand, sections which comprise some of the most lyrical passages in the novel. In a sense, the publisher could have been trying to compensate for the fact that the hyperbolic language used in the blurbs completely distorts the reader’s expectations of the writing style, which is so drastically different when compared to the language in the paratext.

The second important modification made by Avon can be found on the page following the title but before the introduction, a section entitled “Principal Characters”. Here, descriptions are given of the book’s five major characters in a style consistent with the exterior blurbs: for example, Bertrand Chaillet (sic) is summarized thusly: “Illegitimate son of an ungodly union, he was accursed by horrible longings–and a series of mutilated corpses showed his method of satisfaction!” (Avon’s emphasis). Although this technique is used in both drama and screenwriting, primarily as a tool to help the reader visualize the final product, in this context it attempts to influence reader expectations while simultaneously compensating for the dryness of Endore’s writing style. The italicized “clencher” attached to each description immediately conjures up the booming, dramatic voice associated with the most prevalent motion picture paratext–the trailer, or “teaser”, shown before a film.

Thus, with Avon, cinematic associations begin to dominate the paratext, not only in the area of language mentioned above, but also with regard to illustrative and design decisions. In 1941, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr. in the lead, was an enormous success and went on to spawn countless sequels and spin- offs (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943], The Three Stooges Meet the Wolf Man [1944], etc.) In hopes of cashing in on this success, publishers began adopting the “wolfman” archetype established by Hollywood as the new standard, thus abandoning Endore’s mythological loup-garou–the human fully transformed into a wolf–in favor of the anthropomorphic, extra-hairy individual in ripped clothing. Although Triangle’s 1943 edition first showed signs of this major switch, they at least kept some of the visual cues to indicate Paris as a center of action, unlike Avon, whose cover bears little resemblance to Paris; not surprisingly, it looks a lot like the swampy setting for the Lon Chaney Jr. film, with willow trees hanging overhead and rings expanding from the pool of water in the background. According to the note in the interior cover, however, this is “the artist’s interpretation of Bertrand in his monster form, with one of his victims, La Belle Normande, after striking her down in the Bois de Boulogne!!!”  When one compares this to the blonde woman (also in a red dress so presumably the same scene being portrayed) smoking indifferently on Triangle’s jacket, not under the werewolf but standing upright–and perhaps defiant–before him, it is easy to see the emergence of the objectified sexual victim as a marketing tool.

The second significant mass-market edition, released by Toronto’s Studio Publications in 1952, takes this sexual subjugation one step further while incorporating design elements that will reach their full potential some forty years later. The cover avoids showing the werewolf and instead only shows the victim: a woman, who resembles a Tennessee Williams’ heroine, clinging to a doorway in her slip, staring off to her left in horror at something unseen (the film adaptation of Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire had premiered the preceding year). This in itself would be an odd addition to the novel’s paratextual history, but what really pushes this edition into its own is the strange enlargement and duplication of the victim’s terrified expression as a backdrop, or as “wallpaper”, for the scene itself. In fact, Studio Publications goes to such an extreme to reduce the novel to pure sexual sensationalism that they leave the realm of folklore lycanthropy, defined as a supernatural, physical state of being, and inadvertently cross over into early psychology’s notion of lycanthropy as a mental disorder, completely divorced from any physiological transformation. This shift in focus conjures a great deal of ambiguity as to the identity of the werewolf, blurring the distinction between predator and prey (Is she staring at the werewolf? Is she the werewolf?), an uncertainty only clarified by the inclusion of the “he” in the cover’s blurb (“Enslaved by loathsome desires, he reigned as Satan, in a city not easily shocked by sin”). Again, an allusion to the setting of Williams’ Streetcar, New Orleans.

Another fascinating effect is how this instability carries over into the text itself: the paper is cheap, the type splotchy and smeared, as if applied with an ink stamp, with many of the letters reproduced as blurry double-images; both the dedication and epigram are ignored, and many “metatextual” footnotes are arbitrarily deleted; and yet, all of these things, as intrusive as they are, only add to the intense feelings of uneasiness, giving the reader the impression that the book was printed on contraband equipment, in a rushed state of panic, as if death were at hand during the print run.

This psychological slant, and the avoidance of the wolfman archetype, makes Studio’s edition a unique paratextual event that admittedly had little influence on subsequent publishers. Both Ace, in 1962, and U.K.’s Panther Books (Fig 15&16), in 1963, revert to the earlier Avon formula, with the exception of Panther’s use of a male victim instead of a woman, which is hardly revolutionary. Ace, obviously confusing vampires and werewolves, illustrates Bertrand with fangs, pointy ears, cape, and a widow’s peak, an allusion to Dracula that seems more the product of an incompetent illustrator than a regression to an older marketing strategy.

After this run of mass-market editions, The Werewolf of Paris sinks into obscurity, not resurfacing until the mid-1970s, in England, and remaining out of print in the United States until 1992. By the time the book does reappear, Endore is dead, thus laying the groundwork for the posthumous preface that, arguably more than any other element, affects reader interpretation of a text.

The Allographic Paratexts

The two most recent editions of The Werewolf of Paris finally show signs of the inevitable retrospective homage that is so common among books with long printing histories. Both Sphere and Citadel, in 1976 and 1992 respectively, include what Gerard Genette calls “allographic prefaces” by authors in their paratexts, each with its own agenda and personal motivations. Sphere’s is a curious addition to the line-up in that it is the only version that associates the novel with another author as part of the title, in this case, The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, of which Paris is Volume 2. The illustration on the cover is a revamped version of Avon’s 1952 edition (wolfman, swamp, full moon, female victim), with the exception that the illustration is now framed within a circle covered with symbols of the zodiac. Apparently Wheatley is the author of many novels, which are offered for sale on the last page of the text, along with other volumes in this series, thereby giving his editorial selection quote a bit of credibility, provided you know who he is. This type of highly specialized publication, which would only appeal to an audience who either knew Wheatley, knew Endore, or who was curious about what type of “satanic” reading would be considered “occultish”.

The first thing that strikes the reader, especially those unfamiliar with Wheatley, is the arrogance with which he, or the publisher, plasters his name everywhere. As always, the novel begins with a self-reflexive section entitled Introduction, in which Endore establishes his “doctoral researcher” narrator and details the discovery of the manuscript which forms the foundation of the story. Wheatley confusingly places his own preface immediately under the Introduction heading, which causes his preface to blend directly into Endore’s text. The two-page preface itself merely summarizes the first half of the novel, ending with a “but I’ll let you find out the rest” conclusion that leaves one wondering why the preface was included at all. The remainder of the paratext is nothing extraordinary, with cliche language (“unholy union”, “man by day, wolf by night” etc.) and advertisements for both Wheatley’s own works and other books in the Library of the Occult. Oddly, Wheatley, a proponent of British imperialism with a hatred of the working class, makes no mention of the Commune or the book’s leftist leanings.

On the other hand, Citadel’s edition includes a canonical forward by Robert Bloch and incorporates design elements that combine both the chaotic man-as-animal motif, from the original 1933 Farrar & Rinehart edition, and the psychological duality that worked so effectively for Studio Publications in 1952. Bloch, whose novel Psycho formed the basis for Hitchcock’s film of the same name, discusses Endore’s life, the novel’s printing history, and the non-horror elements that have been virtually ignored in the pulp paratexts up to this point. Personal information, including his accidental meeting with Endore in Hollywood and his blacklisting, is incorporated into his analysis of the text, thus giving it a much more human feel than Wheatley’s superficial synopsis of the storyline. The discrepancies surrounding the facts of Endore’s life are apparent here, as Bloch mistakenly gives the author’s blacklist-era pseudonym for his birth name (he was born Samuel Goldstein, but following his mother’s suicide, his father changed the family name to Endore in an effort to eradicate the past, and possibly as a buffer against American antisemitism). Many of these inconsistencies were only clarified with the publication of Alan Wald’s “The Subaltern Speaks”, an analysis of Endore’s Babouk which appeared in the The Monthly Review in April of 1992; to my knowledge, it is the only scholarly analysis of any of the author’s works, its strengths lying primarily in Wald’s examination of Endore’s personal papers at UCLA. These small discrepancies aside, Bloch’s forward goes to great lengths to undo the years of sensationalism that have stigmatized The Werewolf of Paris since its first edition state, placing an emphasis first and foremost on the “savage combination of misanthropy and lycanthropy”, the way it “soars beyond the supernatural or the purely psychopathological” (Bloch, 1).

In addition, these observations are augmented by Bloch’s brief overview of the author’s works, most notably his first little-known novel The Man From Limbo (1930), and the two psychological mysteries, Methinks the Lady (1945) and Detour at Night (1959). With the latter texts, Bloch mentions Endore’s interest in Freudianism, an interest elaborated upon by Brian Stableford in Magill’s reference work Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983), where, in the full-page entry dedicated to the novel, Stableford notes the relationship between Methinks and Paris, asserting that the werewolf itself is the embodiment of the unleashed Id, aspects of the text which went mainly ignored in 1933 reviews.

Citadel’s sophisticated design reflects those new psychological interpretations, showing simply an upper row of teeth–human teeth, it should be noted, and not animal canine teeth, a change which marks a return to both Farrar & Rinehart’s original “anonymous societal victim” motif and Studio’s aforementioned focus on psychological duality. Perhaps more importantly, Citadel emphasizes the ambiguity between chaos and order, between man and animal, that was first and foremost in the original edition’s paratext. On the other hand, Citadel contains residual effects of the novel’s mass-market history, the most prominent being its use of Ace’s plates and the blood splattering effects on the back cover that are somewhat reminiscent of Avon’s bloody-footprint-to-pawprint design. Still, the minimalism is quite impressive in light of the constant onslaught of sex and misrepresentative blurbs that cluttered the prior editions for decades, and it admirably leaves much to be discerned by the reader’s imagination.

The notion that an author being “pocketed” is a sure sign of canonization is somewhat misleading, depending on the publisher and whose canon you are speaking of. If simply the number of pocket printings of an author’s work was the sole criterion for entering into the canon, The Werewolf of Paris would no doubt be a contender; however, the fact that it refuses to conform to the preconceived expectations of the various audiences, both Horror and Literary, means that perhaps it will languish in obscurity forever.