There are many characters in our society we are familiar with whether from books and comic books or television and movies. One of the characters we know from a variety of media is Conan the Barbarian but little is known about how he came into being.  Conan is a character from the sword and sorcery genre created by a writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard in 1932. Howard’s Conan stories began as a series of articles submitted to the fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s influences ranged from the Greek writer Plutarch to the mythology works of Thomas Bulfinch.  Howard wrote many more Conan stories over the next 4 year completing 21 stories.

Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 after a combination of depression and the unrecoverable coma his mother entered (she died the day after Howard committed suicide).  In the years after Howard’s death the Conan copyright changed hands several times and eventually wound up in the hands of L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. They revised the Howard stories and sometimes rewrote them.

Conan books have been written and published by various different authors over the last 50 years, many of them trying to imitate the style of Robert E. Howard. The original Conan stories written by Howard were allowed to go out of print and were unavailable in their original form. In 2003 the original Howard stories were collected and printed by British Publisher Wandering Star and were republished in the U.S. by Ballantine. These volumes included Howard’s original stories but expanded on them by offering his notes and letters on the setting and for the world of Conan which provided a more complete look at the history of Howard’s ideas and the genesis of the character. Regardless of the history of the character the books, comic books, and the movies of the 80s have kept the Conan character alive and well in the imagination of society since he was first put into print in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard.

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Founded in 1897 by French playwright and director, Oscar Metenier, the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was Paris’s smallest theater – and its most infamous. Drawing on his experience a “chien de commissaire” – the French term for one who leads the condemned to their execution – Metenier set about transforming the former convent and chapel at the end of a Parisian cul-de-sac into a showcase for stories of thieves, prostitutes and murderers at their worst.

However, the Grad Guignol’s provocative subject matter made it an easy target for censors. The theater’s stage adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi was temporarily halted after police shut down the production for daring to present the saga of a lady of the night — the first such on-stage portrayal in the history of French drama.

Nonetheless, the Grand Guignol proved to be a huge success and the following year, under the tutelage of director Max Maurey and novelist Andre de Lorde, the theater began to expand its repertoire into even more risqué territory. Soon, Guignol productions would trace the paths of necrophiliacs, rapists, torturers, cannibals, and thrill killers — but all meted out with an ample dose of black comedy.

In doing so, the Guignol pioneered an assorted array of then-cutting edge special effects and props, including faux severed heads, imitation acids, blunted guillotines, sheep’s eyeballs and gallons upon gallons of fake blood. Maurey is said to have measured the success of a particular play based on the number of people who would faint in a given evening. He even went so far as to hire a house doctor to play up the theater’s macabre reputation.

For the next five decades, the Grand Guignol would remain one Paris’s most popular destinations, just behind the Louvre and Eiffel Tower. Even today, the term “Grand Guignol” remains synonymous with exaggerated and excessive gore and the theater itself is popularly credited for creating an entirely new genre of drama that Hollywood has gone to exploit to great success: the slasher film.

But as the pain and strife of a real world horror story – World War II – played out across France and the greater European continent, the Grand Guignol began a slow but steady decline before finally being shuttered in 1962. As the theater’s last director famously lamented to Time magazine after the Guignol’s final performance, “We could never equal Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”

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We’ve all heard the longstanding tales of alligators running rampant in the sewers of New York City. The logic goes that baby gators were purchased as pets, either in local pet stores or by tourists vacationing in Florida. After quickly outgrowing the confines of their owners’ apartments, they were flushed down toilets and into the sewer system, where they soon bred and infested the labyrinthine network of pipes tunnels beneath Manhattan.

What isn’t largely known, however, is the origin of this famed urban legend, as recorded in the 1920s and 30s by – of all sources — the New York Times. Between 1927 and 1942, the paper ran twelve articles concerning alligator sightings – though in most instances they were in outlying areas beyond the city proper, such as Westchester County and New Jersey, and spotted in rivers or lakes, rather than drainpipes.

The craze got its first shot in the arm on June 28, 1932 when “swarms” of alligators were seen swimming in Bronx River. It was, however, later decided that the witnesses had in fact seen snakes or lizards –- but only after police had reportedly conducted a farcical search involving large quantities of beef liver and butterfly nets.

The sewer component first entered into the myth three years later, after a gang of teenage boys spotted a moving shape beneath them as they shoveled snow into an open manhole cover near the Harlem River. Using a makeshift lasso, they were able to snag the animal’s neck and haul it to surface – where they quickly realized they caught a live alligator. The gator lunged and, in response, the boys beat it to death with their shovels. After dragging the carcass to nearby garage, it was determined that the beast weighed 125 pounds and measured some seven-and-a-half feet in length.

Such up close and personal encounters, however, were few and far between. The legend broke wide in 1959 after the release of Robert Daley’s The World Beneath the City, which detailed the history of New York’s subterranean plumbing and electrical systems. A brief portion of the book recounted the story of Teddy May, the former superintendent of the city’s sewers. According to Mays’s account, after receiving numerous reports of sewer alligators – which he and others believed to be false – he commissioned an investigation in 1935 to squash the stories once and for all.

When no gators turned up, May decided to take a look for himself. Upon visiting an undisclosed location somewhere in the five boroughs, he stumbled upon a so-called “colony” of the creatures – which measured roughly two feet apiece — living in the sewers’ shallow waters. Highly distressed by his discovery, May claimed that he had all of the animals exterminated, though no corroborating account as ever emerged to verify his story.

From then on, embellished stories of an alligator infestation in New York City’s sewers have been propagated far and wide, turning up everywhere from Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. to a B-side released by British band Radiohead in 2001. Biologists, however, generally doubt the reptiles’ ability to survive a New York City winter and no sewer employee in recent memory has ever reported an encounter with the one of the elusive beasts.

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On August 24th, 1926, eighty thousand people broke into a riot at the corner of Broadway and 66th Street in New York City. More than two hundred policemen were dispatched to the scene and an emergency hospital was erected on site to tend to those injured by glass from broken windows or trampled as the crowd surged through the sidewalks.

The impetus for this mass mayhem was the death of America’s then-favorite onscreen lothario, Rudolph Valentino. The silent film idol was at the peak of his fame – on both the screen and in the tabloids — during the summer of 1926 when he descended on the Big Apple to promote his latest picture, The Son of the Sheik.

But all was not well with 31-year-old superstar. After collapsing in the company of friends, Valentino was rushed to New York’s Polyclinic Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a gastric ulcer and inflamed appendix. By August 19th, rumors began to circulate that the actor was at death’s door and, four days later, they proved true. Valentino laid dead, the result of post-surgical complications with his lung and septic poisoning. The news spread quickly through the streets and soon authorities were reporting multiple suicides and suicide attempts by the actor’s female admirers.

Meanwhile, Valentino’s body was shrouded in gold cloth, placed in a wicker basket, and whisked to the Campbell Funeral Parlor at Broadway and 66th. Though the press announced the actor was to lie in state beginning at four o’clock the following afternoon, mourners soon began to congregate at the corner. By the following morning, tens of thousands of those who had come to pay their last respects — the vast majority of which happened to be women — stood four wide in a line that stretched for eleven blocks.

As police tried to rearrange the crowd into a single file, more orderly fashion, mourners spilled in street, losing clothes and shoes along the way and rushing the door as deliveries of flowers poured in. High theatrics transpired inside the funeral parlor as well with approximately one hundred and thirty-eight people a minute viewing the corpse of Rudolph Valentino and many a brokenhearted girl fainting at its sight. Only fanning the flames of this mass hysteria were an honor guard of Fascist Blackshirts, reputedly dispatched by Bennito Mussolini himself to protect the body of the Italian-born film star. The remembrance’s roster of physical clashes was complete once a faction of New York anti-fascists arrived to face down their opposition.

Campbell’s Funeral Parlor closed its doors to the public on August 26th, though, after obtaining a special waiver from the New York Department of Health, Valentino was allowed to remain unburied until the actor’s brother, Alberto, could arrive from Europe. In the meantime, however, not one, but two, starlets, Polish actress Pola Negri and Ziegield Girl Marion Kay Brenda, arrived to announce that Valentino had proposed to them shortly before his passing. While the press never confirmed the veracity of either allegation, the frenzied results of the actor’s death cemented his status as a Hollywood icon once and for all time –- arguably more than any of the movies he made while alive.

History Collectors: We offer a wide selection of museum quality replicas and authentic items representing nearly every century of the Common Era and the most significant civilizations of ancient history. Once you browse through our online catalogue, we are certain you’ll find the perfect gift for yourself or a loved one with an interest in history.

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