The month of May is bursting out all over, here in the English Midlands. It’s time to kick back in balmy breezes, bask in the sunshine, watch the willow-bay herb-fluff floating by, and review the month’s progress here at Tentaclii. Daily blog postings continued during April 2019. 12,000 words were slipped into the luminiferous aether in 65 posts, so actually it’s averaged out at two a day. I’m pleased to say that my Patreon is now back up at $50 a month. My thanks to all my patrons. Anything you can do to spread the word about Tentaclii will be welcome, please. All it takes is $1 or more per month.
A great many new scholarly books and journals were noted and linked here, probably 20 or more. Most have been published or else seem imminent, such as The H. P. Lovecraft Cat Book. Podcasts, arts, and recordings were also noted here, and even a worthy-looking game or two.
My own substantial musings here have included ‘The acoustic and Lovecraft’, ‘“Alonzo Typer” – does it contain traces of the lost “House of the Worm”?’. Plus a deep illustrated delving into Lovecraft and the New York Public Library inc. a newly colourised picture, and shorter trips down Pawtuxet way and into the realm of the Lovecraft fave-food Friends’ Beans.
Numerous delights were pulled from the kitten-basket of the fantastic that is Archive.org. Including a great many relevant new scans of Weird Tales, noted and investigated and linked as they slipped onto Archive.org. Some of these revealed several header illustration I had not seen before for Lovecraft stories. Some of these headers seemed quite important in their ramifications, such as for “The Temple”. The world also gained the famous “Call of Cthulhu” first-publication edition of Weird Tales in a nice crisp scan, along with the previous issue’s trailer for the story and letters pages in later issues.
Also noted at Archive.org were new digital copies of zines providing Lovecraft essays previously unavailable online. Plus several useful books and other reference materials there.
New versions of software useful for writers and historians were noted.
Several discount sales at relevant niche stores were noted, to the advantage of Tentaclii‘s readers. Likewise the opportunity to get tickets for a free ‘psyhogeographic’ walking event in Providence, and tickets for S.T. Joshi’s forthcoming Australian speaking tour.
The Open Lovecraft page only had one addition, but it was a very fine piece of historical scholarship that adds to the small but growing interest in Lovecraft’s sources in the classical world.
What appeared to be Lovecraft’s copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho came up for auction and was linked.
For authors who do proper clean HTML-coded Kindle books for Amazon (rather than just pumping them through Calibre in 30 seconds), I pointed you to my workflow for a relatively easy solution for MS Word — clean HTML, including round-trip linked footnotes and intact indented quotations.
And finally but not least, there was also my respectful survey of the first week of responses to the passing of Wilum Pugmire, rest in peace. This post was also posted in public at another blog I run, where it has seen a goodly amount of visits.