The Appendix N anthology would be a fantastic basis for an OSR blog or maybe series of PDF releases, making something OSR actionable from each story.
Of course Bebergal's anthology has been written about on various
OSR blogs and talked about on
OSR youtube.
But you're thinking more using the stories in it as inspirational prompts for publishing game content? Magic items and adventures and such? Raid the stories for more stuff which D&D hasn't already used?
This is not to be understated: it wasn't long into D&D's lifespan where you weren't going to be see most of Appendix N on shelves much. Moorcock was still pretty visible. and to some extent Howard was an everygreen, but that was about it.
To some extent, though most of them were easily found in used bookstores. Included authors who wouldn't be pretty easily and cheaply found that way are a pretty small percentage of the list, even though some of them were definitely out of print.
Anderson, Brown, Burroughs, Carter, de Camp, Derleth, Dunsany, Howard, Leiber, Lovecraft, Moorcock, Norton, Saberhagen, Tolkien, Vance, and Zelazny were all easily accessible to me as a teenager in the late 80s and into the 90s, and I still have a lot of the copies I found then.
This is a perfect example of what we were just discussing. 1969, the last year of that decade, know what was the most popular song (according to billboard top 100)? Surly something by the Beatles, right? Or Stones? Maybe Marvin Gaye? The Supremes & The Temptations? Nope, it was a fictional novelty band's
song about how a woman is like candy (following the fictional group's previous 'hits' "Bang-Shang-A-Lang" and "Feelin' So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.)"). So again, nostalgia a curated list, everything else memory-holed.
Yup. The illusion of older music being better is a product of the best stuff being what gets remembered, and the 90% that's crap (tip of the hat to Sturgeon) is forgotten.
I love D&D but it wasn't the primary driver behind the explosion of fantasy novels in the 80s. It probably contributed a bit, but I'd guess it was more a beneficiary of how much fantasy started to be published.
The main thing that kicked off a big uptick in the number of fantasy books being published was Lester and Judy-Lynn del Ray founding a new publishing company, Del Ray Books, in 1977. The first book they decided to publish was The Sword of Shannara, which was a big hit. That lead to them looking to publish more books in the same vein, competitors looking to copy their success, etc.
Was going to bring this up. Remember that Sword of Shannara was explicitly written to a formula they came up with, and targeted at Tolkien readers who wanted more like it. The Del Reys helped launch that and define Fantasy as a category which would be thought of as its own thing and no longer a combo with SF.
I would say it happened in the 60s, but not produced until 70s. The Hippies were fond on the halfling leaf, as are many today.
LotR strongly implies right in the front that it's tobacco, and no sort of intoxication is associated with it in the books. Though "weed" jokes no doubt started with the hippies and that's where Peter Jackson and his co-writers got the idea.
JRR Tolkien, The Followship of the Rings:
"There is another astonishing thing about Hobbits of old that must be mentioned, an astonishing habit: they imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana."
