New Auto-Biography Variant Discovered Burroughs wrote about his cross-country trip in a Republic Motor Truck in 1916, when he and the family drove from Oak Park, Illinois to Los Angeles, California, camping along the way. The truck company invited him to write the narrative, and they published it in a 250,000 copy edition, without charging for distribution. 

For many years, ERB collectors had only known about the first edition bound in suede with dark brown satin endpapers (pictured below left), until Bob Zeuschner published a facsimile edition (center) as a souvenir for the 1996 Dum-Dum in Tarzana. But a new and previously unknown variant edition recently came to light in Bob Barrett’s collection, bound in illustrated cardboard covers (below right). 

We speculate that the suede covers would be comparable to a “Deluxe” edition reserved for special people, while the cardboard edition would be comparable to a “Trade” edition made for the general public. All three of these variants are pictured here.

— A Tour of Pellucidar — The 2010 ECOF gathering will take place June 4-6 in the Baltimore area and Shenandoah Caverns, Virginia. If you wish to participate, please email your name and email address to John Tyner at tyner@taliesan.com (phone (301)468-2146) so he can provide you more information as it is available. 

For the out-of-towners, as in the past, there will be some limited availability for housing in a few Panthan homes. For those wanting hotel accommodations, we suggest that you may wish to use the Hilton Hotel in Rockville, familiar to those who came to the 2006 Dum-Dum/ECOF, as it is at the Twinbrook metrorail station, giving you access to the DC events. More information and a tentative schedule is at

www.erbzine.com/dumdum

His writings have appeared under his full name and under variants such as Eric Holmes and J. Eric Holmes. He wrote two excellent ERB pastiches, “Red Ax of Pellucidar” and “Mahars of Pellucidar.” He was guest of honor at the 1993 ECOF in Willows, California, hosted by Ralph Brown. (The photo at right is by John Martin and was taken at the 1993 ECOF.) He will be missed. May he rest in peace.

One of Edmund's descendants was Mary Rice, who married ERB's grandfather, Abner Tyler Burroughs, so ERB was named for her. He mentions this in Escape On Venus. He often used family names for characters in his books, such as “Abner Perry” and “Bowen J. Tyler, Jr.” His motto for John Carter of Mars was “I still live,” and of the 84 Rice Family members mentioned in the Rice genealogy, 74 lived to be over 90, five of them over 100 years of age. ERB was justly proud of this record.

The appendices include letters from readers of All Story magazine, raving about the new story. There are also another 20 pages on Stanley's In Darkest Africa, on Emerson's Self-Reliance, on Feral children, plus explanatory notes and a chronology of ERB's life. 

This Oxford World Classic is sold both in paperback ($8.95) and hardback ($14.95, not yet seen) and worth adding to your collection.

The story is printed with marginal spaces on each page for students to write down their notes, very reminiscent of the 1963 edition from Oxford University Press which was the first of their “Teaching Editions” with questions at the end of each chapter for students to answer. More and more current editions are exploring the backgrounds for the Burroughs stories, which is one more indication of the author’s arrival on the classical side of the fence.