March 2019 saw 15,000 words posted here at Tentaclii. Two new $1 Patrons were added, Leslie S. Klinger and Martin Andersson, who together nudged the total up from $41 to $43 a month. Please encourage other likely readers to support Tentaclii — all it takes is pledging $1 a month or more via Patreon.

Content posted here during March 2019:

An important but overlooked point about Lovecraft’s time in New York was uncovered, his seeing Fritz Lang’s Siegfried in 1925, and the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of the movie’s showing in New York was investigated. Along the way, a small but important new aspect of the career of Arthur Leeds was identified. It also led me to wonder why this event was not included in Letters from New York or I Am Providence, as the facts originate in a Lovecraft letter held at Brown University.

Other investigative posts also took me to New York City, first tracking down the locations of the Binkin bookstores from the 1970s back into the 1930s, and along the way getting more context for this aspect of the mysterious rediscovery of a horde of rare Lovecraft material in the early 1970s. Looking for Binkin on the edge of Red Hook then led me to find out about Lovecraft’s favourite bookstore in the pest-zone — Schulte’s Book Store — and to discover photos of the exterior and descriptions of the interior.

A likely inspiration for Lovecraft’s Akeley in “The Whisperer in Darkness” was suggested and investigated. I also took an illustrated plunge into The Endless Caverns with Lovecraft, and a long illustrated stroll around Lovecraft’s Roger Williams Park in Providence. The nature of the ‘Waldorf Lunch’ restaurants was also uncovered, and good photo of a Providence branch found.

Many new or forthcoming books were noted and linked, mostly scholarship and history books. But also some curiosities, such as a colourized facsimile of the Home Brew “The Lurking Fear”.

One important book, Frank Belknap Long’s memoir Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside, was also noted in a new affordable ebook version.

The Open Lovecraft page had about seven new additions of free scholarly works, found and linked.

A sprinkling of blog posts noted excellent art, one free font, and one graphic novel adaptation with page previews.

New arrivals of old scans were noted: the entire 1923 run of Weird Tales was linked up in a post; as was the useful Lovecraft essay “Some Backgrounds to Fairyland”; Hugh B. Cave’s book Magazines I Remember: Some Pulps, Their Editors, And What it Was Like to Write For Them was found, read and the useful bits extracted; also found was a short 1933 biography of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright and some other similar snippets. I’d quite like to write a detailed book-length biography of Farnsworth Wright, but on calculating the likely cost it would be just too expensive to obtain all the needed materials, and even then it would probably only sell 20 copies.

I also noticed and linked some choice store discounts, a generous scholarship from S.T. Joshi in the field of Lovecraft Studies, and a major forthcoming Lovecraft auction.

And finally, I managed to get my ebook version published for my 22,000-word The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth book. This was not as easy as it sounds, as in the end I had to hand-code it in HTML in order to preserve the vital indenting of the print version. But it was useful, as the book had yet another round of close proof-reading and ten more additions exclusive to the ebook. Only one ebook copy has sold so far, and two in print (probably to the Tolkien Estate and their lawyer), but hopefully it will eventually start selling.