Grove Koger

If you have an interest in older genre fiction, you may have run across a series of books published by Juniper Press of Long Island City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Appearing in both paperback and hardback editions, they shared a distinctive red and black cover design—an image of a menacing gentleman holding up a cape on which the book’s title and contents were printed. The first four volumes were published as “The Forgotten Classics of Mystery”—a designation shortened to “The Classics of Mystery” for the remaining six.

I’ve owned a couple of Juniper Press books for decades, having discovered them on the back shelves of the Book Shop, a mainstay Boise institution run at the time by Nancy Stringfellow. One was The Strange World of Arthur Machen, my introduction to a marvelous Welsh writer who remains a favorite to this day. Another was Part 1 of An Omnibus of Continental Mysteries, the second part of which I’ve since purchased online. Several of the books, like the Machen, are by writers regarded as standards in their genre or even in the wider world of literary fiction. The omnibus volumes, however, include a number of long-forgotten figures as well. All the works in the series were in the public domain, and derived from times in which the term “mystery” covered a pretty wide range of dark fiction. Several of the longer ones were abridged.

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Information about Juniper Press is scarce, but recently I tracked own an old column by critic John Barkham that provides some details. The piece, which I assume was syndicated, appeared in an Illinois newspaper, the Freeport Journal–Standard, for June 16, 1960.

Barkham reports that the books were published by one Mircho Smrikarov, a Bulgarian refugee who had brought out translations of prominent mainstream American authors in his native country before fleeing in the early 1950s. Barkham credits Smrikarov with handling the entire Juniper Press operation, including the typesetting, but other individuals are credited as editors in the books themselves. The volumes I own include short introductions and were printed by the Murray Printing Company of Forge Village, Massachusetts.

Here, according to the invaluable WorldCat online union catalog, are Juniper Press’s ten mysteries:

• Wilkie Collins. The Best of Wilkie Collins. Ed. by George Bisserov. 1959.

• An Omnibus of American Mysteries. Ed. by Michael Eenhoorn. 1959.

• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. The Diabolical Genius: Sheridan La [sic] Fanu. Ed. by Michael Eenhoom. 1959.

• Robert Louis Stevenson. R.L. Stevenson: The Fabulous Raconteur. Ed. by Arno Eckberg. 1959.

• An Omnibus of British Mysteries. Ed. by George Bisserov. 1959.

• Arthur Machen. The Strange World of Arthur Machen. Ed. by Arno Eckberg. 1959.

• Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. by Michael Eenhoorn.1960.

• An Omnibus of Continental Mysteries. Part 1. Ed. by George Bisserov. 1960.

• An Omnibus of Continental Mysteries. Part 2. Ed. by Arno Eckberg. 1960.

• Honoré de Balzac, The Mysteries of Honoré de Balzac. Ed. by Boyan Choukanoff. 1960.

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Digging more deeply, I’ve gained partial access to a 1955 article from Publishers Weekly, “Juniper Press, New Firm, to Publish Balzac.” Presumably this is a reference to the two early Juniper titles that I find in WorldCat—César Birotteau (1955) and The Bachelor’s House (1956). The 1960 edition of Literary Market Place identifies Smrikarov as the firm’s President and Choukanoff as its “Pub. Dir.”

Barkham mentions that Juniper had another series of mysteries “in active preparation,” but, alas, the volumes never appeared. As for Smrikarov himself, I find that he or his namesake died in Hudson, New Jersey, in 1986.

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