If you ask sword-and-sorcery fans what their favorite anthology series is, the answer you’re most likely to get is Swords Against Darkness. Coming at the end of the S&S boom in the late ‘70s, in only three short years editor Andrew J. Offutt produced five volumes of the series. The contents hold up well today, which is no surprise, considering talents like Poul Anderson, Tanith Lee, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ramsey Campbell contributed original fiction to Swords A.D. The question remains, why didn’t the series go on longer?

I recently came across a copy of the fanzine Space and Time #56 (dated July 1980) which might provide a clue. While perusing the letters column, I discovered a missive from Offutt venting his frustrations with Zebra Books, who had just published the fifth volume of Swords Against Darkness. Offutt wrote, in part: 

“I was never sent one copy of #5, much less a box full so I could send every contributor the four copies I have made standard…

“It is a monstrous, painful embarrassment. I learned the book was for sale, in print, when someone handed me a copy to sign at the World Fantasy Convention, back in mid-October [1979]. In mid-November, none having arrived for me (contract calls for 75 copies), I wrote Roberta Grossman at Zebra… Saw her on the 30th November. No books came.

“On 16 January I called her. Absolutely ghastly; what a ghastly insensitive uncaring publisher; what constant anguish and embarrassment to me—because I love putting together my anthologies. She said there were no copies left in the warehouse! None. All sent out. (Jesus—where? Barcelona? Zamora?)

“She told me they’d send me some as soon as they had returns from the stores… I pointed out that the book has been out for three months, and since there have been no returns in that quarter of a year, maybe, just maybe the stores were selling some. Since they had not sent any books back unsold and since ‘we’ didn’t have any more to ship, obviously we’re past due for a 2nd printing, I said. Oh no, she said. Obviously poor li’l Andy doesn’t understand.”

While Offutt may have gotten overly melodramatic in expressing himself, his gripe with Zebra and Grossman was legitimate. To forget to tell the editor the book is on store shelves is one thing, but failing to send contractually-obligated copies to him (and by extension, all twelve of the contributors) is certainly unprofessional. Perhaps this sheds some light on why Swords Against Darkness V was the final volume in the series. Was Offutt too fed up with Zebra to continue working with them? Evidently the series was selling well, so lack of public interest couldn’t have been the reason for its cancellation. Eventually Swords A.D. V received a second printing in the early eighties (I don’t know exactly when, but considering the reprint included ads for Mike Sirota’s Ro-Lan series, it would probably be either 1980 or 1981).

Offutt wasn’t the only author to butt heads with Roberta Grossman. In an interview for the DMR Blog, David C. Smith complained that she bungled the promotion of his novel The Shadow of Sorcery, and retitled it without his permission. “Roberta seems almost to have deliberately sabotaged stuff, and to this day I wonder if she was simply inept and out of her depth or just another body that was there to take up space,” Smith said.

Elsewhere in Offutt’s letter to Space and Time, he wrote that Grossman “is the one who loses the unsolicited mss you poor devils send in, among other things. Desktop like the Queens Garbage Dump.” It makes me wonder how many of those lost manuscripts deserved a better fate. Maybe, if Zebra had employed a different editor, we would have been able to read some of them in Swords Against Darkness VI or VII.

D.M. Ritzlin founded DMR Books in 2015 with the aim of revitalizing sword-and-sorcery literature. DMR’s publications include reprints of classic material by authors such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as brand-new collections and anthologies by some of the finest fantasy writers active today. A collection of his own stories, Necromancy in Nilztiria, was released in October 2020. Nilztiria is a world of adventure and strangeness, peopled by lusty heroes and callous villains. The thirteen sword-and-sorcery stories presented in Necromancy in Nilztiria place the emphasis on sorcery and mix in a touch of gallows humor. Click the cover for more information.