There’s a new HPLHS Fundraiser to Preserve Lovecraft’s Letters to Frank Belknap Long…
A collection of original letters from Lovecraft to his friend Frank Belknap Long is being sold by a private collector. The 52 letters were written between 1920-1931 and total 509 pages, of which many have never been published. We believe these letters should be acquired and donated to the permanent collection at Brown, but the price is rather high.
So these are not the letters from “Long to Lovecraft”, as recently mentioned by S.T. Joshi on his blog. But rather unknown(?) and certainly ‘many unpublished’ letters from “Lovecraft to Long”. I imagine most of them cluster in 1920-1924 and 1927-30 (since he and Long were largely face-to-face in New York in the middle of the period).
The Italians also have their own video explainer for the campaign.
A note on upscaling, using AI Gigapixel, obviously used on the interior photo on the stamp when it’s seen a larger size. It looks fine above, but not when larger. For best results on that sort of image use the very latest version, in ‘Compressed’ mode and turn on ‘Face refinement’ (now far better than it used to be). Keep de-blur and noise-reduction very low.
Joshi did mention these letters on January 25: “After that, all that will remain is to publish Letters to Frank Belknap Long, which may come out as early as 2022, but more likely 2023.” The reason why this book will be the last of the series is that this very important collection has not been secured and transcribed yet. It has been known for years — the current owner even has it in his online catalogue. The asking price is $225,000 the last time I checked.
Thanks. It seems you’ve mis-understood my comment. To clarify, there appear to be two sets of letters:
1) Lovecraft to Long. These are the ones being crowd-funded for by the HPLHS. Thanks for the additional price info on these.
2) Long to Lovecraft… “the letters by Long to Lovecraft, of which there is a substantial number”, as noted by Joshi in his recent blog post. These do not appear to be the letters now being crowd-funded for by the HPLHS and others, and in his comment Joshi was talking about a further volume, beyond even the planned “Letters to Frank Belknap Long” volume.
Therefore, in my blog post on the crowd-funder I was assuming that my readers may have recalled Joshi’s recent comment on the “Long to Lovecraft” letters, and I was pointing out that the crowd-funder is not for those letters.