Fans purchasing all rights to D&D...

[T. Foster]

That makes sense. I didn't realize Moldvay had a librarian pull that together - I figured he was as extensive a reader as Gygax or even more so. Of course that doesn't mean he wasn't.

From what I understand Moldvay was a big reader and was particularly fond of CAS and Talbot Mundy's Tros of Samothrace, so their inclusion at least on his list is probably his doing, but there is a librarian credited in the book for creating the list, and the sections for Young Readers in particular were probably more her doing than his.

[ken-do-nim]

Having read some Clark Ashton Smith over the past year, I do believe that influenced Gygax to a great degree. The geas spell, the lich, plane shift, all featured in CAS stories.

From what I understand CAS was a huge influence on Rob Kuntz, but not so much on Gygax. And it doesn't appear to have just been an oversight in the DMG list because he was consistent about it -- his later inspirational reading lists in DJ and Roleplaying Mastery also pointedly fail to include CAS. Which means the stuff in D&D that feels most CASian probably all came from Rob Kuntz (but not necessarily the lich -- the lich as presented in SuppI comes directly out of one of Gardner Fox's Kothar books, every bit as strikingly as the troll from Three Hearts and Three Lions).

Kothar books, interesting. I was thinking of the Death of Malygris, where it even calls him a lich. Except that he's not animated very much.

[T. Foster]

The lich in the Kothar books is also called a lich, and described as looking exactly like a D&D lich (skeleton dressed in ruined finery with glowing eye-sockets), and is the 1000-year-old preserved corpse of the greatest wizard (or mage, as Fox calls them) of his age, people are paralyzed with fear at the sight of him, and his alignment would best be described as neutral with evil tendencies, and when he's found he's just hanging out in a random cave/tomb, just like Asperides in D1.

The Kothar books are probably the most AD&Dish in feel of any books published prior to AD&D -- which isn't to say they're particularly good (because they aren't) but the purple prose and the pastiche setting (Yarth), and the sword-swinging adventures, and the fact that Kothar always wins a huge treasure at the end of every story but is broke at the beginning of the next one all feel pretty much exactly like AD&D (well, except for all the anomalous Tolkien stuff that shows up in AD&D). Plus they're all like 120pp long so you can easily read them in a single sitting.