Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull. The phrase her mentor liked to quote had actually been a bit more descriptive than that, but it was the philosophy that was important.

It was the story of a man of the people who made good and kept his integrity, who understood the people and could make them laugh and cry.

But let's suppose your fan activities are confined to writing scholarly treatises on the Sources Used by H.P. Lovecraft in creating his Cthulhu Mythos, or deadly-serious lit-ry criticism of the latest Ace paperbacks …. In this case, you may very well be dismissed as an eggheady old Sercon.