Sorry I’m just getting to your comment… indeed, Palmer was a small fellow, to say the least. I think it was Redfern who recently referred to him as “dwarfish” in his book “Science Fiction Secrets.” But in truth, he was really just a small man, rather than a dwarf by birth, althought the early accident is said to have contributed to “stunting” his growth.

According to Palmer, prior to the Shaver Mystery stuff getting published, circulation was at around 135,000 (these were the actual copies they were selling). They gambled on the Shaver thing, and increased circulation by an additional 50,000 for that first run of “I Remember Lemuria,” and probably more after that. Palmer also claims, once his publisher nixed further publication of Shaver stories, their sales dropped back down to a mere 135,000 per month.

And yes, it does sound a hell of a lot like Watchmen! Only Rorschach wasn’t writing about demented robots living underground (though the Deros, according to Shaver, weren’t mechanical in an sense other than their warped, degenerative behavior).

Hey, one more thing… did you know that over the years there were some allegations made that Palmer had fabricated Shaver, and dreamed up the entire Dero-Tero/Lemuria confict himself? He, as expected, always maintained that this was false, and that he had in fact visited Shaver at his home in Pennsylvania many times.

I wasn’t aware that Palmer was of such short stature as to be considered a ‘dwarf’; how interesting!

But one thing I’m confused about is just how well was Amazing Stories faring *before* the publication of the Shaver stories.

In Darklore vol. 4, The Emperor wrote an essay entitled “Flying Saucerers” (which deals with how the ETH was heavily influenced by Sci-Fi & occultist writers before and during the dawn of the modern Flying Saucer era), and in said essay he mentioned that Amazing Stories was struggling to survive before Palmer resorted to the material relegated to the ‘crank pile’ and thus found the rambling letter written by Shaver (that in itself sounds awfully familiar with the plot used by Alan Moore in his seminal opus The Watchmen, BTW).