Monthly Archives: May 2020

Some interesting authors entering the public domain at the start of 2021

17 Sunday May 2020

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Here’s my survey of interesting texts and authors set to enter the public domain in early 2021 in nations which follow “the 70 year rule”, the author having died in 1950. Some of their works may already be in the public domain, but soon all of them will be. Then I follow this section by briefly noting the names in the “50-year rule” nations.

Nations following the 70 year rule:

* Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Tarzan, Barsoom, old Venus and more.

* George Orwell, for the anti-authoritarian political classics, Animal Farm and 1984. His essays might also be selected from to make a new themed book.

* Olaf Stapledon, ground-breaking British science-fiction author. His seminal ‘future history’ Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are his best known books. His post-war Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fantasy (1949) was only issued in a limited edition of 500. Basil Davenport collected his best in To the End of Time: the Best of Olaf Stapledon (1953) and Sam Moskowitz gathered up the rest in Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon (1979).

* Ernest Haycox, an extremely prolific and popular author of what appear to be romping quality westerns and revolutionary war adventures, featuring tough and robust characters who live by their own rules. Had stories in the pulps of the 1920s, and he later graduated to the ‘slicks’ where he was admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway. I would imagine he was being noticed by the likes of Robert E. Howard. One story was filmed as Stagecoach (1939), another as Union Pacific (1939). He had a vast output, and looks likely to be an excellent mine of brisk adventure plots that could be morphed into newly-told science-fiction works.

* Rafael Sabatini, a prolific English-Italian writer of historical adventure and mystery novels. His sea adventures The Sea Hawk (1915) and Captain Blood (1922) became best-sellers and were filmed. Blood became over time, effectively, a four-book set. Along with the works of Everett McNeil, the Blood books were among the very few books that librarians found it impossible to keep on the juvenile library shelves in the 1920s and 30s — as soon as they came back, another boy would take them out. He also published a three-book series The Historical Nights’ Entertainment, containing vivid re-tellings of real-life royal murders and intrigues, impersonations and similar bizarre doings in the upper echelons of society. His mystery stories were collected in The Evidence of the Sword and Other Mysteries (2006). At a guess, he’s now possibly of most interest today to makers of media productions looking for the next Game of Thrones with a pirate-y twist.

* Max Pemberton, a London dandy who had an early career as a boys’ magazine editor. Knowing what boys want, his The Iron Pirate was a best-seller of the 1890s — a tale of a giant new type of gas-powered ironclad ship which dominates the Atlantic. He went on to write many historical adventure novels and mystery-crime stories. His Wheels of Anarchy (1908) is an “adventure tale about anarchists and assassins that is set across Europe”.

* William Hovgaard, a naval historian. His early book The Voyages of the Norsemen in America (1914) has probably been superseded, but perhaps suitably updated with his 1925 article “The Norsemen in Greenland” and later scholarship, it might make the basis of an unusual non-fiction graphic novel?

* Erle Cox, an Australian science-fiction writer with a modest output. His novel Out of the Silence (1919 as a serial, 1925 as a book, 1928 in New York) was very popular in Australia and saw 13 reprints. This became a long-running comic strip and also a radio series in Australia. His Fools Harvest (1939) was a prophetic future-war tale. Short story collections available include Major Mendax: Tales of a Mad Scientist, and The Gift of Venus and Other Stories. He was perfectly timed, and with the right politics, to have been an occasional H.P. Lovecraft correspondent — but he doesn’t appear to have been.

* George Bernard Shaw, the once incredibly famous playwright and thinker. He had a vast output, but almost all of his work addressed ‘topical issues’ of his time and thus is not usually to modern tastes. Some of it has had a lasting popularity, such as his Pygmalion (famously filmed as My Fair Lady) which might be newly adapted into science-fiction, perhaps with themes of AI and robots. His Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) is a series of linked plays leading into the far-future in an Olaf Stapledon-like manner, and it is his only serious attempt at science-fiction. It was ambitiously presented as an unabridged full-cast broadcast for BBC radio in 1952, but no recording or reading-script appears to have survived. By the 1950s Back to Methuselah had become a running joke in the dressing-rooms of British theatre-land, for its difficult staging and long running-time. Like most of the British left at that time, he was avidly in favour of eugenic breeding — which may freak out today’s enfeebled left and cause further problems with any revival.

* R. R. Ryan. (Evelyn Bradley). Tense and ghoulish psychological horror novels of the 1930s, usually involving girls being menaced. From the descriptions, he seems to be an acquired taste for hardened connoisseurs of obscure British horror.

* Ralph Straus, a science-fiction and fantasy author with some novels that still sound interesting and are probably already in the public domain in most places. His The Dust which is God (1907) takes the Edwardian reader on a Dante-esque guided tour of several utopian planets, and it may be of interest to those who enjoy early ideas-led Edwardian cosmic science-fiction and attempts to imagine utopias. Apparently rather a good book, according to several reviewers in the 1970s, though he doesn’t appear in Science Fiction: The Early Years. In his later Pengard Awake (1920) he departed from his usual style, and has “An English book collector travel to Chicago where he meets an antiquarian bookseller in his shop in Chicago and tries to help him cope with a dark mystery.” The review in Punch said that the author “tells his queer story so plausibly and with so light a touch that even though you may affect to scoff at his dashing improbabilities you cannot escape their attraction.” The New York Tribune made it sound a little darker… “an amazing but plausible novel of dual personality. Not since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we had a more powerful delineation of the forces of good and evil at war in a man’s soul.” Possibly there are other interesting stories by Straus to be found and collected.

* Irving Bacheller was a successful American newspaperman who introduced American readers to the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, and who sponsored The Red Badge of Courage. He turned to writing his own enormously popular semi-autobiographical novels of early America, farm-life and war. He also wrote what appear to be vivid historical novels such as Vergilius: A Tale of the Coming of Christ, and his favourite A Man for the Ages: A Story of the Builders of Democracy (being the story of Abraham Lincoln).

* William Rose Benet the American encyclopedia-maker, reviewer, anthologist and poet. His more intriguing titles include The Flying King of Kurio: A Story of Children (1926) and the poetry pamphlet Mad Blake: A Poem (1937). The latter seemingly sunk without trace, but presumably being about the visionary William Blake. His dark poem “The Skater of Ghost Lake” is taught in American schools. His Pulitzer Prize winning poetry book The Dust which is God is not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Ralph Straus (see above).

* Frank Parker Day, whose novel Rockbound (1928) evokes the terrible powers of the Atlantic ocean, as it tells the story of bitterly feuding families on an isolated island off Nova Scotia. Not a novel to take away on your cheerful island holiday, by the sound of it, though it appears to have a cult following among modern gloomsters.

* Warwick Deeping, a once very popular British story and novel writer, who saw reprints in the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure. His early works were described as… “misty colour-shot, ultra-fantastic romances of pre-Arthurian days”, and he is is said to have gleefully re-worked Arthurian characters in a Marion Zimmer Bradley manner. But he was stung by vicious utilitarian critics for the crime of being both fantastical and middle-brow, and he appears to have tried to please the critics by turning to modern tales addressing worthy ‘social issues’. He apparently sometimes succeeded quite well at this, despite the continuing disdain of the critics — who made his name a by-word for popular mediocrity. But one wonders what he might have produced, if his lighter historical fantasies had been allowed to develop and deepen through the 1920s and 30s. But what we do have of the earlier historical and Arthurian novels are: Uther and Igraine; Love Among the Ruins; The Seven Streams; Bertrand of Brittany; The Red Saint; Joan of the Tower; The House of Spies (Napoleonic period); Martin Valliant, and also the posthumous The Sword and the Cross (1957). His time-travel story The Man Who Went Back popped up as the lead novel in Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine for Christmas 1947, and is essentially a historical work. Probably there are others like it…

* E.C. Bentley, a British poet who published a much-praised modern detective novel, Trent’s Last Case (1913) which was filmed three times. Later Trent short stories were collected in his Trent Intervenes (1938). A science-fiction story, “Flying Visit” (Evening Standard, 1953) has recently been re-discovered.

* Lawrence Donovan, a writer of nine Doc Savage novels, he may have died in 1948 or 1950 (Wikipedia has 1948, Gutenberg Australia has 1950). In the 1920s he landed stories in titles ranging from Argosy to Zeppelin Stories, and then continued publishing in the pulps and mystery magazines into the 1930s.

* Dorothy Kathleen Broster is now best known for a trilogy of historical Scottish novels set at the time of the Jacobites, but she also wrote some British ghost stories. These are said to be almost all collected in the wartime book Couching at the Door: Strange and Macabre Tales (1942).

* Percy K. Fitzhugh was an enormously popular writer of Boy Scout books in 1920s America, often humorous and most of them officially approved by the Boy Scouts of America. They sound vaguely like a sort of Scouting version of the British Just William tales, only with less grubby boys.

* Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, the Nobel Prize winner and a leading Danish author of the 20th century. His The Long Journey trilogy (in English 1923–24) “attempted to create a Darwinian alternative to the Biblical Genesis myth” by following “the development of mankind from the Ice Age to the times of Columbus”. Most of his work is in Danish, and some of it appears to be on ancient myths.

* Alfred Korzybski, a charlatan whose book General Semantics somewhat influenced early science fiction writers, with van Vogt using the ideas to fuel at least one imaginative work. General Semantics allegedly offered a way to “improve mental health through linguistic discipline”, and as such may have inspired Hubbard and perhaps even modern ‘political correctness’.

50-year rule nations:

E. M. Forster.

Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason books)

Rube Goldberg.

Yukio Mishima.

Reanimator Incorporated

17 Sunday May 2020

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Herbert West Reanimator may have been dashed off as a ‘quickie grue’ series for Lovecraft, written to help a friend fill a new magazine of cheap titillation. But within the tale may lie “philosophical and theological themes”. Or such is the claim of the creatives behind the new graphic novel, Reanimator Incorporated. This re-tells West by pointing up these themes, making the tale an “exploration of existence itself”. The creatives have also shifted the setting to the future, with the serum becoming a “AI-driven atomic assembler unit”. Part one of the six-part series is out now.

Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924)

16 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts

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George Laswell’s artbook Corners and characters of Rhode Island (1924) is now in the public domain and online at Archive.org as a good scan. Possibly also at Hathi, although for the last few months Hathi has been so slow and un-responsive as to be totally un-usable.

My thanks to Ken Faig Jr. who in the latest Lovecraft Annual points out that Sonia recalled that Lovecraft knew and admired Laswell’s pen sketches — since they had first appeared weekly in his local newspaper. A paper on which Laswell was the Staff Artist. Oh, for the days when a local newspaper had a Staff Artist who worked in crisp pen and ink…

That must have been circa 1921-1924, and thus we see Providence as it was after the First World War but before Lovecraft left for New York City. The main focus is on the worthy and seemingly timeless historic buildings, many of which Lovecraft mentions in his letters and stories. While posterity might have preferred a selection of the less-noticed elements of Providence — such as the bookstores, the hidden courtyards and their cats, the Seekonk shoreline and its dark ravine-pools — the book’s extensive survey of the city’s key buildings does make it a handy ‘look up tool’ for visualising a building as described in Lovecraft’s work or letters.

But there are two or three glimpses of the less genteel life of the city, of the sort that Lovecraft could have encountered on waterfront night-walks in the early 1920s. Such as the dredging fleet which over-wintered at Fox Point, and this portrait of the wooden waterfront with its cheap cafes that (so the text says) often went up in flames and burned out sections of the waterfront.

Burned out

I can imagine Lovecraft and Eddy breezing into one of these coffee cabins at the crack of dawn, in the early 1920s, after a long night-walk.

Lovecraft moves to 66 College Street

15 Friday May 2020

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On 15th May 1933 H.P. Lovecraft moved to his last home at 66 College Street.

Here we look down College Street, from the gates of the Brown Campus. Lovecraft’s pale yellow wooden house was hidden away in a secluded garden courtyard, reached down an unpaved little lane at the shadowy back of the John Hay Library. The Library is the tall white building seen on the right of the picture, and the lane entrance is on the corner — seen just a little ahead and in the centre of the picture.

At No. 66 he had more living space than formerly. This included access to a hoary old loft attic with age-encrusted nooks. Lovecraft also mentions “one of the attic rooms” to Bloch, shortly after moving in, and implies this was ‘shrine’ sized. There appear to have been loft windows (possibly shuttered, see below) in the ‘monitor’ roof, and there was an all round view. I recall reading that Brobst later found a way to open a mysterious attic door or hatchway, which the old gent had been unable to open himself, thus revealing another fine view. Presumably this was a door that gave workmen, chimney-sweeps and window-cleaners access to the roof. One imagines this was westerly-facing, as that would have also enabled a wider view across the sunset city than was obtainable from the small windows.

Some might imagine that this loft then became crammed with Lovecraft’s older and less-read books. In one letter he did anticipate using in in that way. But many of Lovecraft’s family items, and the childhood library of old long-s books, had to be stored in another and more distant loft which had stronger rafters. In 1934 Lovecraft mentioned to Barlow that the old books he had grown up with and inherited were stored in the loft of a friend’s nearby barn. There they had become inaccessible to him, because the removal men’s crates had been jammed between old family furniture and crates of heavy crockery. For those in search of this barn, the likely weight involved surely indicates that the loft’s boards and rafters were rather more substantial that those of 66 College Street. Thus a large and sturdy candidate is surely required for the barn.

What became of this inaccessible loft-library, that had once been so formative for Lovecraft in his isolated early childhood? We can be sure that his personal library retained his cherished old copies of the Spectator, similar works of his beloved 18th century wits and satirists, and the pick of the old library. But as for the rest, it’s uncertain, and Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library doesn’t seem to offer an easy answer. I’d imagine that the residue of the family library was eventually hauled out of its barn, perhaps in spring 1941 a short while after Mrs Gamwell’s death, and sent down wholesale to be sold via the Dana bookshop in Providence? The interest in crates of mouldering 18th century books was perhaps not high during the Second World War, but some of the choicer items — such as the books once requested in vain by Barlow — may have found their way to appreciative collectors.

My enlargement and colourisation of the above picture…

Fragments from the Dreamlands

12 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts

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Here is my reasonably faithful large assemblage of the cover art for the 1971 Ballantine U.S. paperback edition of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The spine could only be had as a low-res scan, which is why that bit is fuzzier than the rest.

The book went through three paperback printings from Ballantine before 1975, as the USA’s baby boomers came of age and discovered Lovecraft and fantasy in general. By 1983 the Del Rey edition had galloped like a frisky zebra through 28 reprintings. Given such apparent popularity at that time, it’s a pity so few young writer cut their little kitty teeth on Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Gary Myers’s fine The House of the Worm (1975) collection being the stand-out exception. As C.W. Thomas wrote, back in 2010 at Innsmouth Free Press…

It saddens me a little that the Dreamlands never caught on as a setting for other writers. This seems odd, considering how much of what Lovecraft wrote became the springboard for new authors. … My challenge to writers is simply to write a tale of Ulthar or lost Kadath. Forget the retread tales of Deep Ones, the diaries about guys who look for Cthulhu. Try a little magic, instead. I will gladly join you in the land of Mnar, where men built “Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai.”

The Ballantine cover art for the 1971 Dream-Quest was by Gervasio Gallardo (Gervasio Gallardo Villasenor, of Barcelona, Spain). He had a solo 95-page artbook in 1976, The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo, and a feature in Novum in the early 1970s, “Gervasio Gallardo, Spain: a master of free and applied art”.

An example of his other 1970s work can be seen below. This picture was made at a time before the crude political usurpation of the Marian ‘crown of stars’ by the mundane European Union, and the symbolism here is rather in his blending of the Catholic Mary ‘star of the sea’ with the classical Venus. Though such a comparison was likely to have gimlet-eyed Jesuits leaping out at the artist from dark corners of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, it was and is a perfectly valid elision to make and rests on good historical foundations — it was not a made-up New Age hippy confabulation of the mid 1970s. The devout Christian C.S. Lewis had also felt free to make a similar elision at the end of one of his science-fiction novels, as a way of of introducing the Marian in a form palatable to his readers.

Born in 1934, the artist Gervasio Gallardo came-of-age in the Catholic Francoist post-war Barcelona of the mid 1950s. He left Spain for work at a German studio in 1959, moving later to an agency in Paris and then to USA in 1963. He was prolific in the early and mid 1970s, producing many covers for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and other authors. Thereafter he went back to Barcelona and set up his own studio, and then appears to have worked mostly as a commercial artist, with clients among European perfumiers and the makers of fine Spanish liqueurs and brandies. Not a bad line of regular work to be in, as the boom years of the mid-1980s approached.

The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo at Archive.org.

A Year Without Cthulhu

11 Monday May 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Une annee sans Cthulhu (A Year Without Cthulhu), a new colourful curiosity from France.

It’s a 176-page graphic novel murder-mystery, melding 1980s teenage schoolroom angst with Lovecraftian role-playing games. It’s in French.

Equally curious and gaming related is the new RPG booklet 100 Rumours to Hear in Lovecraft Country. Specifically being…

Rumours to hear in or about the towns of Arkham and Kingsport. … These rumours can be used as potential adventure hooks or background colour. They are aimed at the 1920s-30s setting but, with tweaking, some could be adapted to other settings.

Added to Open Lovecraft

10 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* L. Arriagada, “Realismo estructural ontico en H.P. Lovecraft, Laboratorio, No. 21, 2019. (In Spanish. “Ontic Structural Realism in H.P. Lovecraft”).

* The Fantastic Universe of H.P. Lovecraft, a special issue of Brumal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2019:

– “Rhetorics and Cosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft.”
– “Multiplied Horror: An isotopy in three stories by Lovecraft.”
– “H.P. Lovecraft on Screen: A challenge for filmmakers.”
– “Hidden Rituals, Secret Powers And Everlasting Horrors: The presence of the Lovecraftian imaginary in recent Spanish extreme metal.”
– “The Forms of The Unspeakable: some representations of Lovecraftian horror in the adaptations of Alberto Breccia.”
– “The Influence Of H.P. Lovecraft in the work of Junji Ito”.

“The Night Ocean”

09 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Night in Providence, Podcasts etc.

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HorrorBabble has released “The Night Ocean” by Barlow and Lovecraft, as a new one-hour reading for free on YouTube.

S.T. Joshi evaluates the balance of the dual authorship in I Am Providence…

Another literary project on which Lovecraft and Barlow probably worked during his stay in Providence was “The Night Ocean.” We are now able to gauge the precise degree of Lovecraft’s contribution to this tale, as Barlow’s typescript, with Lovecraft’s revisions, has now surfaced. … Lovecraft’s contribution probably amounts to no more than 10%. … “The Night Ocean” is one of the most pensively atmospheric tales produced by anyone in the Lovecraft circle. It comes very close — closer, perhaps, than any of Lovecraft’s own works with the exception of “The Colour out of Space” — to capturing the essential spirit of the weird tale”