S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated…
The Lovecraft Letters project from Hippocampus is, incredibly enough, winding to a close.
Great news. Joshi names the final five annotated volumes, due either this year or the next, and also comments…
I would very much like to publish the letters by [Frank Belknap] Long to Lovecraft, of which there is a substantial number.
Super. Now might be the time, then, to start to think about how best to fund or crowdfund a public ‘snippet search’ engine. This would be able to digitally search across all the books of letters for names and phrases, with search results providing a few lines of the page at each hit — similar to how Google Books used to work before it went ‘full-page’. It could be public or perhaps subscribers-only.
As it is unquestionably the most interesting of all of Lovecraft’s correspondence, I have always wondered why there have never been any mention of the letters to Belknap Long. There are ca 50 of them in SL, but what remains unpublished in the AHT I have never seen mentioned.
Do we even know that all of his letters survive in at least that format? That he sold the letters due to needing the money is well known, but as that is much later it fair to assume that their contents are known? The same could be said for the letters he sold to Loveman as well, who might have burned those at the same time he burned his own?
Any information about this would be most welcome, including why they, due to their importance, haven’t been published ages ago.
I would imagine that the lack of complete publication has probably been due to the Long family sensitivities. That’s usually the way of such things. The unpublished letters doubtless contain much information about domestic life in the Long household, and possibly other family members. But that’s just my guess.