A comment from Robert, here at this blog, which I think deserves to be worked up as little guest post…

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Robert of Innsmouth Mania in France, writes:—

Here is a Web link to details of a very strange event which occurred in France over a decade ago, in 2001. The article is at http://clefargent.free.fr/wb_7rev.php. It is in French, but I will summarize it for you. It’s about an email which circulated on the Web for a few weeks, accompanied by a picture (which you can see on the website). This email said:

“Mail to all Lovecraft fans. It has been discovered recently in a Parisian bookseller, a copy of an unknown novel of Lovecraft, translated in French! This is the cover. Translation was made by Gabriel Lautrec, correspondent of R.H. Barlow, who has translated it at the end of the 1930’s. You will find the entirety of the text soon, on our website, which is under construction at the moment. The address will be given to you in another email soon.”

And then there was silence…

The title was the Club of 7 Dreamers, a book that Lovecraft thought of writing at some point (S.T. Joshi and others have noted it), but which he never did it. Gabriel Lautrec really existed and was indeed a known translator. The deep analysis of the cover showed that it was not a cut-and-paste made in Photoshop — it seems that the guy really printed the cover. But there was no trace of any such book in the catalog of the editor, nor in the archives of the French National Library, which is the equivalent of your British Library or Library of Congress.

It’s a fake, but a really good one, since in those days it would have taken months for people to search and get all the information, and then eventually conclude it was a prank. But during this time France had produced an unknown book by HPL! Like the title, we dreamed…