About a week ago, I received this email from ERB, Inc., the limited liability company established by Edgar Rice Burroughs on March 26, 1923:

“On this day one hundred years ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs founded his own company and became the first author to incorporate himself. Today Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., is still owned by his heirs; operates out of Tarzana, California, on the property of Mr. Burroughs’ former ranch; and is actively engaged in promoting his legacy and licensing the rights to his works of wonder and imagination.”

You can read the whole thing here.

When Burroughs established that LLC, it was a seismic event in the publishing business. No author, in the entire history of fiction, had possessed the temerity and sheer balls to strike out on his own, casting the complex network of agents, editors and publishers aside, demanding that they deal with him on equal terms.

ERB could do so because he had the whip-hand. His creations, especially Tarzan, were a cultural phenomenon. The whole English-speaking world had gone mad for Tarzan. ERB’s fast-paced amalgam of H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London had hit Anglophone culture right in the sweet spot. Texans named a town after the Jungle Lord and Stalin expressly forbade the import of Burroughs' 'dangerous' novels.

Ol' Ed spent much of the '20s using his LLC to negotiate movie deals and license Tarzan for everything from bread to lunchboxes. I suppose there are those who can accuse him of 'selling out', but Burroughs had a wife and children to support. Add in the years of want and poverty before he finally achieved success and I don't blame him at all. Burroughs never put on any airs in regard to being a 'literary' artiste. His fans were his customers and he wrote for them. It’s a pity that more SFF authors don’t have that attitude today.

It took Burroughs awhile before he got the publishing arm of ERB, Inc. rolling. Tarzan the Invincible, the first book published by ERB, Inc., hit the bookstores in 1931. Up to that time, A. C. McClurg & Co. were the exclusive American publishers of Burroughs’ fiction in hardcover. ERB even kept the cover art for Tarzan the Invincible ‘in house’, with a dustjacket painting from his son, Studley Burroughs. Despite the nepotism angle, both Studley and his brother, John Coleman Burroughs, were actually competent, pulp-style artists. I should do posts on them at some point.

Where was the classic ERB illustrator, J. Allen St. John? Despite the solid work from Studley, ERB couldn’t resist bringing back his ‘favorite artist’ for Tarzan and the City of Gold in 1933. St. John would paint numerous covers for ERB, Inc. during the next decade.

ERB, Inc. publishing rolled strong throughout the 1930s and then slowed down considerably during World War II, since Ed was serving his country as the oldest U.S. Army war correspondent ever. Burroughs had saddled up with the Seventh Cavalry during his youth and he re-enlisted after Pearl Harbor.

ERB, Inc. published about twenty titles in 1948, the most up to that point. Burroughs died in March, 1950—almost exactly twenty-seven years after he established his LLC. ERB, Inc. entered a long period of hibernation afterwards, publishing-wise. That situation created a void which enabled the ‘Burroughs Boom” of the 1960s, during which Don Wollheim at Ace Books published many Burroughs titles with Frazetta and Roy Krenkel covers.

ERB, Inc. restarted in 2015, leading off with a deluxe edition of Back to the Stone Age. Since then, they have set about reprinting all of ERB’s tales, many of them with dynamic Joe Jusko covers. In addition, they have published truly excellent pastiches like Carey’s Swords Against the Moon Men and Geary’s John Carter: Gods of the Forgotten.

What will the next century hold for The House That ERB Built?

You can check out a full publishing history of ERB, Inc. here.