This book is a wonderful tool. Not just a reference, full of working knowledge a small business owner should have before launching a new business (very good for startups). Also, an excellent read if your business has grown to the point where you are considering leaving a regular paycheck to manage and grow your business. Detailed but not overwhelming, insightful without excepting a great deal of prior knowledge about business law. Just a great book.

An excellent 'straight' biography of Lovecraft, warts and all. De Camp never met HPL, but spoke to or corresponded with many of his friends and fellow-writers, as well as drawing on Lovecraft's massive epistolary legacy, to create a lively portrait of the writer. De Camp explores Lovecraft's less attractive facets - his pathological racism and snobbery - as fully as his more appealing ones - his erudition, courtesy, personal kindness and gentlemanliness - and gives us a decently-rounded and thoroughly entertaining account of the life and work of the horror-writing Sage Of Providence. Written in the mid-70s, the book inevitably only follows the story of what happened to his work posthumously up till then, though it does cover the founding of Arkham House in some detail. The book's one defect is de Camp's overtly socially conservative outlook, which leads to him framing debates about issues as diverse as Lovecraft's sexuality and the merits of free verse in a way that nowadays seems mildly reactionary and unrewarding. Otherwise excellent.