The now very collectable book Dreams and Fancies (Arkham House, 1962) opens with the title section, consisting of Derleth’s pick of…
Fifty-nine pages of Lovecraft’s letters describing his dreams.
I was interested to learn about this. Since I have the H.P. Lovecraft Dream Book from 1994, but on flicking through it I see it only ran to 35 pages of actual dreams.
Whence came the additional pages? Was Derleth perhaps including dream-fragments such as “The Book”, which would make this Dreams and Fancies section longer? But that can’t be the case with “The Evil Clergyman”, at least, since an eBay picture shows that fragment appearing later in the book.
The contents of the H. P. Lovecraft Dream Book and Dreams & Fancies are not the same, neither are they entirely exhaustive.
http://www.wikithulhu.com/book:dreams-fancies
http://www.wikithulhu.com/book:the-h-p-lovecraft-dream-book
According to Eighty Years of Arkham House, the book contains letters to Kleiner, Moe, The Gallomo, Dwyer, Wandrei, Smith, Rimel, Barlow, Lumley, Conover and Finlay, most of which were later reprinted in Selected Letters. It also contains, “Recapture”, “Night-Gaunts”, “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, “Celephaîs”, “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”, “Nyarlathotep”, “The Evil Clergyman”, “The Thing in the Moonlight” and “The Shadow out of Time”. Since all the texts are available elsewhere (or will be once the Hippocampus Press letters series is finished) this book is no longer indispensable for the reader (as opposed to the collector).
Thanks, both. It then sounds like a new completist and affordable volume might appeal to many readers. I imagine this as collecting all of Lovecraft’s dreams and nightmares, presented in date order and ideally with relevant entries from the Commonplace Book interwoven and illustrated.