• About
  • Directory
  • Free stuff
  • Lovecraft for beginners
  • My Books
  • Open Lovecraft
  • Reviews
  • Travel Posters
  • SALTES

Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: July 2021

More scans of the Arkham Sampler

22 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Four more scans of Derleth’s 1940s Arkham Sampler, added to Archive.org as public PDFs. These do not duplicate the existing scans.

Lovecraft and Pan

22 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

Phil Hine on H.P. Lovecraft and Pan, the ancient mythic figure. The young Lovecraft was enraptured by the 18th century’s sylvan poetic evocations of Pan. Hine also discusses the story “The Temple” from a pagan perspective.

Sick kitties

21 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

“The Cats of Ulthar” has been adapted as an indie videogame, albeit with the game-mechanics offering what appears to be a horrible motion-sickness inducing camera. Not sure Ulthar has electric lighting either, but it looks like a good low-budget try at making the story into a game.

For a cent

20 Tuesday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

A portrait of Lovecraft, published in issue 27 of the early videogame magazine ACE (December 1989) and new on Archive.org. A bit fuzzy, it has not been scanned well and it does not up-scale well. But it appears to be by “D.C. Designs”. Which makes it by Dave Carson of south London, in the UK, who apparently also sold limited edition prints and t-shirts of the design.

See also a NecronomiCon 2001 cover and some details on the British zine Dagon.

Possibly based on this photo…

Popular Astronomy, 1893-1951

19 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

Now being loaded onto Archive.org from microfilm, the U.S. Popular Astronomy journal, 1893-1951.

Tryout – the Mrs Miniter memorial chapbook

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Currently for sale, Tryout for September 1934, which has with it the Mrs Miniter memorial chapbook.

New book: Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Now available to order, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1, the first of three planned volumes. This the collectable hardback. Due soon is a more affordable and perpetually in-print paperback edition with new cover-art.

While you’re waiting for a mighty-thewed delivery-man proffering your Vol. 1, this week DMR has a long consideration of the ‘decadent’ and ‘gothic’ traces to be seen in Howard’s “Spear and Fang”.

Woodcuts of Newport

16 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals

≈ Leave a comment

Early 1930s ‘sinister’ woodcuts of Newport, a favourite haunt of Lovecraft. They appear to have been produced for the Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps a fundraiser booklet, at a guess? A Halloween Ball?

Someone may wish to have the church steeple woodcut as a book cover (H.P. Lovecraft in Newport or suchlike). I’ve rectified and enlarged it.

Lovecraft’s 131st birthday

14 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

I’m pleased to say that I’ve finished work on making Lovecraft’s 131st birthday present for 2021, and with just over a month to go. I hope it will be something that all Lovecraftians will find very useful — and repeatedly so.

Your target date this year is 20th August 2021, should you also wish to make or write something or to stage a small event etc. This year it coincides with the PulpFest 2021 weekend.

Famous Monsters of Filmland

13 Tuesday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Archive.org now has what appears to be a complete run of the famous Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, including early issues and annuals. Though it looks like it’s now in need of a sorting-list, so it can be seen in order as #1 through #250 (2010).

Notes on Letters to Family, Vol. II – part two

12 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, New discoveries

≈ Leave a comment

More notes on my reading of the second volume of H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, here mostly relating to 1926-1928.

There is an interesting description, re: a possible inspiration for “The Colour Out of Space”, of a ground curiously mineralised and as-if “powdered with star-dust” (page 604). He finds this in September 1926 scattered around the 1707 birthplace of the early astronomer David Rittenhouse (1732-1796), a homestead that had been encountered by chance as Lovecraft was lost while exploring the Wissahickon Valley. “Colour” was written some six months later.

Lovecraft saw the grand historical-adventure movie Ben Hur (page 602). Later he remarks on his break from cinema-going, between Aug-Sept 1927 and May 1928.

He recalls the Old Corner Bookshop (page 612). Presumably Dana’s Old Corner Bookstore in Providence, as he had sold some of his mother’s books to them and later regretted parting with one such when he saw it on display in the window.

He remarks that, like himself, his friend Loveman also had many young proteges… “He had with him one of his numberless prodigy-proteges, a quiet blond youth whose accomplishments seem to be, so far, appreciative rather than creative” (page 632).

In April 1928 Loveman had noticed that the old rooming house, 169 Clinton St. on the edge of Red Hook, appeared abandoned and with some windows smashed. However, in May 1928 Lovecraft and Loveman went to bid it a final goodbye… only to find it revived (a fresh coat of paint and “marks of rehabilitation”) and thus presumably under new ownership (pages 634 and 661).

By April 1928 the Kalem meetings had “almost dissolved” (i.e. dwindled to just a few attendees) but were strongly revived while Lovecraft was again living in New York City.

On discovering that some museums would make a good affordable plaster-casts for private display, he remarks… “it was my original design in youth to have a private museum of Greek & Roman casts”.

He discovers an old Antarctic adventure novel he has not yet read, titled Revi-lona: a Romance of Love in A Marvelous Land (1879) by a journalist of the time. An explorer finds love with sex-starved women in a tropical shangri-la amid the ice. Apparently very floridly written and yet ultimately conveying the rather cynical and anti-utopian sentiments of an American newspaperman. The implication is that Lovecraft has read most such novels, but that this is a new find for him. Not on Archive.org under that title.

“The Spence book on Atlantis that I read so hurriedly just before departing for my trip” (page 637). There is no footnote for this book, and both “Spence” and “Atlantis” are curiously missing from the index. Lewis Spence wrote five books about Atlantis, and the most likely in spring 1928 was the relatively new The History of Atlantis (1927), though it might have been the earlier The Problem of Atlantis (1924) or Atlantis in America (1925).

Lovecraft read at least one non-fiction book by Lewis Mumford on architecture. This was prior to Mumford’s efflorescence of ideas on tools, technologies and civilisation.

He knew, read and kept the magazine published by the Hospital Trust in Providence. This produced the fine Netropian journal, with many local history articles and local drawings from the 1920s. Copies apparently languish in paper at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, un-scanned.

He mentions reading and being impressed by a volume of poetry by Gessler, friend of his best friend Belknap Long, titled Kanaka Moon (1927). Not on Archive.org.

He found Morton’s full library very impressive when he saw it fully assembled and shelved at Paterson, and thought it better even than that of Cook. “I’ve never seen so fine a private Library” (pages 657 and 658).

Lovecraft finds he has a family-tree line named “Fish” (page 663), and this is some years before the writing of “Innsmouth”.

There was a time when $5 would buy you a custom original plot-synopsis by H.P. Lovecraft. In the spring of 1928 he was writing many such plots for one “Reed”, at the jobbing rate of a dollar per page (page 668). We later learn this client to be a “Mrs Reed” (page 676), now of course known to be his revision client Zealia Brown Reed.

Lovecraft revised the first chapter of McNeil’s historical-adventure novel The Shores of Adventure (1929). In which the boy hero earns and acquires his father’s super-sword.

In summer 1928 he notes “a resumption of the Providence Line of New York boats”, meaning passenger services from Providence — New York City.

Lovecraft discovered an old unchanged working colonial farmstead, “in full sight of the distant towers of Manhattan” and with its inhabitants oblivious to modernity of New York City (page 678).

The Goat with a Thousand Young

10 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

≈ Leave a comment

Rock Hill Herald profiles the Lovecraft-contemporary known as the ‘Goat Gland King’, the sort of quack that Lovecraft appears to laugh at in several works. In this case, John Romulus Brinkley was active from 1916 into the early 1930s. He offered expensive quack treatments claiming that goat-gland transplants would “restore sexual vitality and fertility to impotent or ‘tired’ men”.

However as I’ve noted in “On Lovecraft’s glands”, while laughing at such things Lovecraft also held long-standing notions about ‘glands shaping personality’ and believed glandular compulsion to be the major factor driving various forms of sexual aberrancy. It appears to have followed, for him, that the more tiresome emotions could be ignored because they were just the passing result of “glandular secretion & hormonic discharge”.

These notions were not the result of some cranky middle-aged idée fixe but were more or less a normal take-up of the emerging science-based ideas of his time, half-baked though some of them may now seem. But he was perhaps unusual in extending his glandular thinking to aesthetic capabilities, which may have raised a few eyebrows among the reputable scientists in the field…

There are subtleties & overtones on my side that you can never get [on the] emotional & imaginative wave-lengths. […] we’re simply not built the same way & our glands simply don’t function the same way” (To Woodburn Harris, 1929).

One’s glandular state was then for him a kind of determinism. One had been ‘born that way’, and nothing could be done about it. But he once mused that this dulled state was perhaps not perpetually fixed. Some future eugenic improvement might open up people to new aesthetic experiences that they would otherwise be incapable of…

While nothing in our normal experience is ever likely to call forth any additional senses, it is not impossible that experiments with the ductless glands might open up a fresh sensitivity or two — and then what impressions might not pour in?” (To Ashton Smith, 1933).

In this he seems to vaguely anticipate the technocratic post-war ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who suggested that experiencing electronic media and information-flows might extended man’s “entire nervous system” and thus “produce an entirely different state of being” with access to expanded aesthetic senses. No need for those old 1930s goat-glands, just plug in your gleaming 1970s Home Cinematron screen.

← Older posts
Newer posts →

 

Please become my patron at www.patreon.com/davehaden to help this blog survive and thrive.

Or donate via PayPal — any amount is welcome! Donations total at Easter 2025, since 2015: $390.

Archives

  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010

Categories

  • 3D (14)
  • AI (60)
  • Astronomy (70)
  • Censorship (14)
  • de Camp (7)
  • Doyle (7)
  • Films & trailers (100)
  • Fonts (9)
  • Guest posts (2)
  • Historical context (1,094)
  • Housekeeping (90)
  • HPLinks (41)
  • Kipling (11)
  • Kittee Tuesday (92)
  • Lovecraft as character (54)
  • Lovecraftian arts (1,595)
  • Lovecraftian places (19)
  • Maps (69)
  • NecronomiCon 2013 (40)
  • NecronomiCon 2015 (22)
  • New books (958)
  • New discoveries (165)
  • Night in Providence (17)
  • Odd scratchings (984)
  • Picture postals (276)
  • Podcasts etc. (424)
  • REH (177)
  • Scholarly works (1,442)
  • Summer School (31)
  • Unnamable (85)

Get this blog in your newsreader:
 
RSS Feed — Posts
RSS Feed — Comments

H.P. Lovecraft's Poster Collection - 17 retro travel posters for $18. Print ready, and available to buy — the proceeds help to support the work of Tentaclii.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.