Fascinating Nouns has a new podcast interview with S. T. Joshi on Lovecraft. The interviewer is a newcomer to Lovecraft, so I expect Joshi spends a lot of time covering the Lovecraft 101 basics.
Joshi’s latest blog post reports that according to John Trimble “an elderly science fiction fan”, the SF ur-fan Forrest Ackerman once owned a tape of Lovecraft reading one of his stories…
He [Trimble] said things we all know — Lovecraft’s voice was high pitched, he pronounced Cthulhu oddly, and added that HP was a lousy reader (as a dramatist).
I would note that Ackerman was a correspondent from 1931 and that the Ackerman archive is as yet unprocessed. Is a Kickstarter needed, to pay for someone to process it, and perhaps find the tape?
A “tape”? Audiotape didn’t really take off till after WWII, & I understand that in the 1930s the “tape” would be a steel ribbon. Wire recorders are a bit more likely for the 1930s, I think.
It could have been a tape copy of an earlier recording. Lovecraft does write somewhere of making a one-off cylinder recording of himself singing, but then says he ‘accidently on purpose’ dropped and broke it. Possibly he was enticed to make another.