What’s a convention without a Guest of Honor? In selecting its first Guest of Honor, PulpFest chose a notable publishing professional and a wonderful raconteur with a strong connection to the world of pulp fiction. PulpFest 2009 announced its Guest of Honor on February 14, 2009.

PulpFest’s 2009 Guest of Honor

We’re delighted to announce that Edgar Award-winning writer, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler has accepted our invitation to be the Guest of Honor at this year’s PulpFest.  Otto, whose recent anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps has done more to renew interest in Golden Age pulp fiction than any mainstream publication in recent history, is a perfect GoH for a show like ours in that he is also a world-class collector of crime fiction, many of whose most notable authors—including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and John D. MacDonald—toiled in the pulp vineyards before achieving mainstream success with major publishers.

Otto, who will be with us for the entire convention, can be expected to regale PulpFest attendees with stories of his adventures in the publishing business and as a lifelong collector. He’ll also be giving us a preview of his much-anticipated Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, an upcoming anthology collecting rare yarns from the prestigious pulp magazine that was home to Hammett, Chandler, and other giants of hard-boiled detective fiction.

Still the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop, a New York City landmark that celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, Otto Penzler published The Armchair Detective, an Edgar-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, for seventeen years. He was the founder of The Mysterious Press, now an imprint at Grand Central Publishing, and also launched the publishing firms of Otto Penzler Books and The Armchair Detective Library. He currently has imprints at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States and Quercus in the U.K. In 1977, he won an Edgar Award for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. The Mystery Writers of America gave him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994 for his exceptional contributions to the publishing field. He was also honored with MWA’s highest non-writing award, the Raven, in 2003.

Otto first endeared himself to pulp-fiction fans in the late 1970s by publishing a two-volume collection of short stories featuring Norgil, a magician-detective created by Walter B. Gibson, who also wrote more than 280 novel-length adventures of pulpdom’s legendary crime fighter, The Shadow. In 1984, Otto reprinted two of that character’s best-remembered adventures in The Shadow and the Golden Master. Subsequently his Mysterious Press issued trade-paperback anthologies of classic pulp detective stories by Carroll John Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, and others. First You Dream, Then You Die, a deluxe hardcover biography of veteran pulp scribe Cornell Woolrich published by The Mysterious Press in 1988, earned an Edgar for author Francis M. Nevins and became a standard reference work.

A witty raconteur with an encyclopedic knowledge of mystery fiction, Otto has done a lot for the pulp-collecting community and will make a terrific GoH.  We guarantee that you’ll enjoy meeting him.  So don’t wait—download a PulpFest registration form and send it in today!

Keep watching this page for further updates. PulpFest is taking shape fast!