Friday's (Not) Forgotten Books: Wise & Fraser: GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL (1943); Healy & McComas: ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE (1946)

contents, courtesy of British Horror Anthology Hell...I don't believe the UK edition was different in content from the US original. See also this ISFDB page for a partial accounting, at least, of original publication sources.

Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural edited by Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser

Tales of Terror
Honore de Balzac - La Grande Breteche
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Wilkie Collins - A Terribly Strange Bed
Ambrose Bierce - The Boarded Window
Thomas Hardy - The Three Strangers
W. W. Jacobs - The Interruption
H. G. Wells - Pollock and the Porroh Man
H. G. Wells - The Sea Raiders
"Saki" (Hector Hugh Munro) - Sredni Vashtar
Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata
Conrad Aiken - Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Dorothy L. Sayers - Suspicion
Richard Connell - The Most Dangerous Game
Carl Stephenson - Leiningen versus the Ants
Michael Arlen - The Gentleman from America
William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily
Ernest Hemingway - The Killers
John Collier - Back for Christmas
Geoffrey Household - Taboo

Tales of the Supernatural
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Haunted and the Haunters
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
Charles Collins & Charles Dickens - The Trial for Murder
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Green Tea
Fitz-James O'Brien - What Was It?
Henry James - Sir Edmund Orme
Guy de Maupassant - The Horla
Guy de Maupassant - Was It a Dream?
F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull
"O. Henry" - The Furnished Room
M. R. James - Casting the Runes
M. R. James - Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad
Edith Wharton - Afterward
W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey's Paw
Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Robert Hichens - How Love Came to Professor Guildea
Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray
Rudyard Kipling - "They"
Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo
E. F. Benson - Caterpillars
E. F. Benson - Mrs. Amworth
Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries
Algernon Blackwood - Confession
"Saki" (H. H. Munro) - The Open Window
Oliver Onions - The Beckoning Fair One
Walter de la Mare - Out of the Deep
A. E. Coppard - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
E. M. Forster - The Celestial Omnibus
Richard Middleton - The Ghost Ship
Karen Blixen ("Isak Dinesen") - The Sailor-Boy's Tale
H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls
H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror

The Contento/Locus index:

Adventures in Time and Space ed. Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas (Random House, Aug ’46, $3.00, 997pp, hc); Second Edition, 1953, omits last five stories, also as Famous Science-Fiction Stories. Derivative Anthology More Adventures in Time and Space.
xi · Introduction · Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas · in
3 · Requiem [D.D. Harriman] · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Astounding Jan ’40
20 · Forgetfulness · Don A. Stuart · nv Astounding Jun ’37
46 · Nerves · Lester del Rey · na  Astounding Sep ’42
115 · The Sands of Time · P. Schuyler Miller · na Astounding Apr ’37
144 · The Proud Robot [Gallegher] · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Oct ’43
177 · Black Destroyer [Beagle] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding Jul ’39
207 · Symbiotica [Jay Score] · Eric Frank Russell · nv Astounding Oct ’43
249 · Seeds of the Dusk · Raymond Z. Gallun · nv Astounding Jun ’38
276 · Heavy Planet [with Frederik Pohl] · Lee Gregor · ss Astounding Aug ’39
286 · Time Locker [Gallegher] · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Jan ’43
308 · The Link · Cleve Cartmill · ss Astounding Aug ’42
320 · Mechanical Mice [ghost written by Eric Frank Russell] · Maurice G. Hugi · nv Astounding Jan ’41; given as by Maurice A. Hugi.
344 · V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship · Willy Ley · ar Astounding May ’45
365 · Adam and No Eve · Alfred Bester · ss Astounding Sep ’41
378 · Nightfall · Isaac Asimov · nv Astounding Sep ’41
412 · A Matter of Size · Harry Bates · na Astounding Apr ’34
460 · As Never Was · P. Schuyler Miller · ss Astounding Jan ’44
476 · Q.U.R. [as by H. H. Holmes] · Anthony Boucher · ss Astounding Mar ’43
497 · Who Goes There? · Don A. Stuart · na Astounding Aug ’38
551 · The Roads Must Roll · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Astounding Jun ’40
588 · Asylum [William Leigh] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding May ’42
641 · Quietus · Ross Rocklynne · ss Astounding Sep ’40
655 · The Twonky · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Sep ’42
676 · Time-Travel Happens! · A. M. Phillips · ar Unknown Dec ’39
687 · Robots Return · Robert Moore Williams · ss Astounding Sep ’38
698 · The Blue Giraffe · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Astounding Aug ’39
721 · Flight Into Darkness · Webb Marlowe · nv Astounding Feb ’43
741 · The Weapon Shop [Isher] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding Dec ’42
779 · Farewell to the Master · Harry Bates · nv Astounding Oct ’40
816 · Within the Pyramid · R. DeWitt Miller · ss Astounding Mar ’37
825 · He Who Shrank · Henry Hasse · na Amazing Aug ’36
882 · By His Bootstraps · Anson MacDonald · na Astounding Oct ’41
933 · The Star Mouse [Mitkey] · Fredric Brown · ss Planet Stories Spr ’42
953 · Correspondence Course · Raymond F. Jones · ss Astounding Apr ’45
972 · Brain · S. Fowler Wright · ss The New Gods Lead, Jarrolds, 1932

So, here are two anthologies Random House offered during the '40s, which helped establish canons in their respective fields, in part because both anthologies were kept in print consistently as part of the Modern Library or other Random House extensions.

As I've been checking through a number of the major anthologies of suspense fiction over the decades, I didn’t till being reminded of it the other day recall how much of the Fraser & Wise volume is devoted to non-supernatural tales of menace, mostly though not entirely in the “Tales of Terror” grouping. It’s remarkable how many of these have become chestnuts…essentially all of them…and I have to wonder how many were already common coin in anthologies by the time this one was first issued in 1943. However, along with August Derleth and Donald Wandrei’s efforts at Arkham House, this book was probably the first great exposure H. P. Lovecraft received (along with some early paperbacks), as far as the larger reading public is concerned, and was almost certainly the first time Lovecraft and Hemingway were anthologized together (though Dashiell Hammett came close with his horror anthology Creeps by Night [1931]). Also notable, at least in the latter-day British TOC offered here, is the “outing” of Karen Blixen rather than credit of her story to her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Even by the time I read this anthology, in a library-sale copy of a 1970s Modern Library edition (with the tamest cover it would get, I suspect), most of the stories were familiar from other anthologies, but not all…to carry another W. W. Jacobs story, aside from “The Monkey’s Paw,” is a small gift in and of itself. Happily, the Modern Library still has this one in print, in the US.

The Healy & McComas wasn’t the first sf anthology from a major publisher in the US, what with Donald Wollheim’s and, just barely, Groff Conklin’s efforts preceding it, along with such mixed selections as Philip Strong’s, but Adventures was one of the most prominent and widely influential, again not least because Random House and eventually the Modern Library imprint were behind it, and Ballantine when purchased by the RH folks did paperback editions with overblown blurbs. As the annotated TOC suggests, John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction was almost ridiculously overrepresented, even given how much good material it had published and how important that magazine under that editor had been in the development of magazine sf in the late 1930s and ‘40s…however, one (1) story each from Planet Stories and Amazing and none from any other magazine (the Unknown essay reprint was the kind of borderline crackpottery that Campbell would pollute Astounding with in the 1950s onward, rather than a story, and very out of place here), and only one entry not from the magazines, don’t make this a particularly representative anthology of the time…and the absence of Theodore Sturgeon, Leigh Brackett, Hal Clement, Clifford Simak, and C. L. Moore (except to the extent that she had input on “The Twonky”) are all telling (and most might wonder where’s the Bradbury?), in a book that makes room for the Phillips article. But, nevertheless, as with Lovecraft in the other volume, this was among the first exposure many of these writers and much of this fiction had for the larger reading public, and much of it holds up well. Unfortunately, this volume hasn’t been reprinted in its Modern Library edition since the ‘80s.

For more of today's selections, please see Patti Abbott's blog. Bill Crider's FFB item this week, in honor of Bouchercon in part, is a memorial volume edited by J. Francis McComas's widow Annette Peltz McComas, collecting from and documenting the birth of McComas's most lasting legacy, co-founding The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with Anthony Boucher...a very good book all but orphaned by its publisher at birth.