Poul Anderson acknowledges this painful lack in his introduction, taking a moment to badmouth sword & sorcery while he’s at it: Howard collection that ignores Conan (which Del Rey books did in 2007, with considerable success, now that I think about it.) This is sort of like assembling a Best of Robert E. Those stories were being published by Ace Books, who had five volumes of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in print by 1970, and the Classic Library of Science Fiction line was owned by Ballantine, which meant The Best of Fritz Leiber couldn’t include any of them. Which brings us conveniently to the book’s first problem. Unlike Weinbaum and many of the authors who would follow him, Leiber was well known - even a star - to contemporary SF readers in 1974, thanks chiefly to his popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books. The Best of Fritz Leiber, published in 1974, was the second in the line, following The Best of Stanley G. And so we come to Fritz Leiber, in our continuing exploration of Lester del Rey’s Classic Library of Science Fiction series.
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