As editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu and of a series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, Robert M. Price has been a major figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and fandom for decades. In 2015 Price received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to Lovecraft scholarship. At the same event he was pretty much excommunicated from the Lovecraftian movement. A life-long fan and author of sword-and-sorcery, RMP edited the 2018 S&S anthology, The Mighty Warriors, as well as the forthcoming Flashing Swords! #6 from Pulp Hero Press.

I met Sam Moskowitz in the mid-Eighties. Imagine my startlement one afternoon when I answered the phone and it was the Great SF Historian himself! What the heck was he doing wasting a call on a fan punk like me, time that could have been better spent on a phone-sex call? Seems he was familiar with my efforts at Lovecraft scholarship and felt like I might be worth a shot as a speaker for the Bergen County Science Fiction Association. It went well!

Meanwhile, I had somehow come into contact with the great Steve Fabian, who was somehow willing to do covers for some of my Cryptic Publications. Steve soon did me the honor of inviting me to the monthly meetings of the Reliquarians, an informal gathering of veteran SF fans and pros, including Joe Wrzos, Steve himself, and Sam. We were like the famous Futurians, only we were devotees of "the days of future past." There were many tall-but-true tales told there, like the time Lester del Rey protested his wife's dyeing her hair by dyeing his beard green! And then there was the Futurians' wife-swapping sessions, but I guess that's none of our business...

Sam knew everything about fantasy and science fiction. He actually had a copy of every single book ever published in the field, all crammed into his Newark home. (Once I actually stumped him: he had never heard of Roger Elwood's anthology Flame Tree Planet.) Of course, he had added a few titles of his own, classic anthologies and 4 issues of a revived Weird Tales (in which he once called August Derleth's bluff, his warning not to reprint a Lovecraft story, and met with no repercussions). I asked him to autograph a stack of his anthologies. He did, adding notes about the history and back-story of each collection. There's a historian!

Sam was eventually diagnosed with throat cancer and had to have his larynx replaced with a mechanism. Thereafter, he sounded like a robot--which actually seemed more appropriate than his natural speech! It was just like his book, The Coming of the Robots!