New on Archive.org, Street and Smith’s Shadow Magazine 1931-1949. Albeit in dark microfilmed b&w, and only to borrow.

What the “Double Z” cover should look like…

The Great British Summer lasted all of a week here, as usual, with temperatures nicely nudging above 80 degrees each day — while our increasingly ridiculous Met Office sternly warned daily of ‘extreme’ weather. Perfectly normal summer temperatures are not extreme. It’s all vanished now, of course. The mighty walls of Tentaclii Towers are once again bathed in cool rains.

Thanks to my loyal Patreons, who this month helped me restore the Lovecraft Panther paperbacks I had as a lad. These were almost my first encounter with Lovecraft but were lost in 1990s. I’ve now bagged the three key books for a pittance, and yet they are also in excellent condition. It was ‘now or never’, given their increasing scarcity and silly prices. Drool-worthy macro photos are coming soon, possibly for my Patreons only.

Not many new Lovecraft discoveries on Tentaclii this month, but I did find a picture of The Bijou on Westminster St., Providence, which seems to me the most likely candidate for Lovecraft’s cinema ticket-selling job. A new Arthur Leeds article was also found, on movie special effects, along with others newly arrived on Archive.org. Lovecraft’s friend Leeds had been a studio executive before the movie industry moved from New York City to California, a move which left him and McNeil, Dench and Houtain all high-and-dry.

Talking of movies, The Green Knight is a long and fairly faithful adaptation of the supernatural classic. The movie is now widely available in the USA and is being well reviewed. If you’re curious about the background to it, then you want my book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire. Sadly the movie has been pulled from cinemas here in the UK, where it was due to screen on 6th August.

S.T. Joshi’s blog brought the titles for the forthcoming final books containing Lovecraft’s letters, and also the welcome news that Mark Griffin is making a combined index to all the published letters. In new Lovecraft-related books, I noted the greatly expanded new edition of Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman, and Born under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith, both of which appear to be set to ship relatively soon — September. Also noted was the hardback for Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1, shipping now.

Tentaclii did not feature a great deal of my research on Lovecraft this month, as I’m taking a bit of a break from that. But my “Notes on Letters to Family, Vol. II – part two” did appeared, and part three may be posted in a week or two. I also mused briefly on Lovecraft’s interest in glands.

Several useful scholarly sources for movies were noted, including the movie-history search tool Lantern and a full searchable run of Variety 1905-2017. I also found the open journal Victorian Popular Fictions. The Tolkien journal Mallorn is also now open, though with a two-year paywall for members. These and others have been added to my JURN search-engine for open-access arts & humanities journals (and now much more). JURN has also had its usual midsummer overhaul and update on the back-end.

Newly arrived on Archive.org I spotted Frank Gruber’s collectable pulp industry memoir The Pulp Jungle, and a readable copy of the Lovecraft-inspired The Werewolf of Ponkert. Also the uploading of a run of microfilmed Popular Mechanics 1902-2016, among which I found an interesting item on infra-red photography — perhaps a partial inspiration for “The Colour Out of Space”. Other new arrivals there were more scans of Derleth’s Arkham Sampler, Popular Astronomy for 1893-1951, and Midwest Folklore 1951-1964 which may interest R.E. Howard scholars. I was pleased to see more issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland arrive there too, and it looks like Archive.org must now be nearing a complete set. Wilum Pugmire, who was once forced by his parents to burn his precious collection of Famous Monsters, must be smiling somewhere.

Not much in podcasts and audio this month, and I imagine several people are holding items back and waiting for Lovecraft’s birthday in August. But I did link to “Howard Days 2021 – all audio recordings”.

In art, I made not one but two surveys of new and Lovecraft-y art on DeviantArt. By chance I found some nice old creepy woodcuts of Newport, a favourite haunt for Lovecraft. I showed these here and rectified/upscaled one of them. I was also pleased to see several new stop-motion Lovecraftian animations, including “The Other Gods”. A ComicCraft sale was noted, and the horror fonts pointed out.

Also in comics, this month I produced a bumper edition of VisNews with a long Kristian Donaldson (The Dark, Supermarket) interview, as well as a bumper “Oceans” issue of the free Digital Art Live magazine. Lovecraft did not make it to the final cut of the DAL Gallery, but he’ll be in the Halloween issue. The “Oceans” issue of DAL should be out in a few days, as I’m not the one who gets to press the ‘publish’ button on it.

I’m pleased to say I’ve now effectively completed the rescue of my old failed PC and have worked through nearly all of the required software wrangling. I had been running the ancient Linkbot Pro link-checking software and the FeedDemon RSS reader software, but I find that SEO Spider and QuietRSS are fine replacements. The new SSD drive is proving very enjoyable in terms of speed, as is my XP-PEN Artist 22 (2021 2nd Gen, a magazine review-unit) draw-on-the-screen monitor. Thanks again to my Patreons for helping out at a difficult time and helping to fund this vital SSD purchase.

If you can spare a few dollars a month via Patreon, please, it really does help me out. Many thanks.