Well, what a month. One of those months where you do a lot of work… and it feels like you’re mostly just back where you started.

Not much in terms of new journals this month, though I noted that Hippocampus has listed the ’emerging scholars’ journal Lovecraftian Proceedings #4 (February 2022) in paper. The ebook of this for #4 has yet to appear on Amazon. Elsewhere I spotted that The Journal of Dracula Studies returned (it had vanished into the mists earlier, with a swirl of its cape). Various new scholarly online items were found and added to my Open Lovecraft page. Joshi confirmed I’ll have items in both his Penumbra journal and the Lovecraft Annual, in due course.

In new books, the paperback edition of the Joshi-edited anthology His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Stories about H.P. Lovecraft appeared. Also Joshi’s 1920s Lovecraft-as-detective novel Honeymoon in Jail. Ken Faig Jr.’s new book of research essays Lovecraftian People and Places appeared on Amazon and seems to be shipping now.

Various reviews and musings were noted and linked here, as well as relevant news from the German and Hungarian Lovecraftians. I also briefly caught up with Robert E. Howard material and events, ahead of the fast-approaching Howard Days in Texas.

On the Letters, I posted my final notes on reading the Galpin book of Lovecraft letters and some addresses in this led me to do some detective work in Cleveland… and I was pleased to newly discover the location of the cafe that Lovecraft and the rest of the crowd frequented during that fateful Cleveland visit. I also posted my notes on reading Selected Letters I, preliminary to tackling a re-read of the rest of the Selected Letters over the summer. From this I discovered the exact location and fabric and destruction-date of the ‘observatory’ tower on Nentaconhant Hill, via Selected Letters and some detective work. So far as I know these data points are also a new discovery. I also un-puzzled some of the puzzling aspects of the ending of Lovecraft’s war-story “The Temple”.

In my ‘Picture Postals’ posts I looked yet again at the foot of College Street, and found not one but two good pictures. Which just goes to show that, even when you think a particular place has been exhausted of old pictures, there may yet be more to be found. One of the two new pictures was a magnificent one showing the looming Industrial Trust building under construction, and I newly colourised this. While writing a post for a Patreon patron on the Brooklyn Museum, I realised that there are now pictures of Lovecraft’s adjacent beloved ‘Hill and Pool’ Japanese garden. Not great pictures, from scans of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record journal (1912-1944), but they are from the correct period. This led me to Part One of a look at the gardens in the form of their adjacent exotic hothouses.

In other ‘Picture Postals’ post I managed to find a good picture from inside the Providence Opera House and of the actual stage on which the young Lovecraft once strutted and slung slabs of Shakespeare at the audience. Judging by other online collections of such pictures I am the first to alight on a picture of the actual stage. Ken Faig also kindly pointed me to a cine home-movie showing the Market Place fruit-market site on the waterfront in November/December 1934, and a Lovecraft-alike man shopping for a Christmas tree (as Lovecraft did, for his new home at No. 66). Incidentally, through dipping at random into another volume of the Letters I learned that Lovecraft’s previous home at Barnes seems to have lacked furnace-heating for much of the time he was there. He seems to have only had piped heating there in the last two years?

Looking ahead in time I itemised some Lovecraft anniversaries for 2023, including the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft’s breakthrough into a mass market readership in America and the UK in 1973. I also looked at authors entering the public domain in 2023, with an eye to the more unusual or re-workable items. I suppose we will never be able now to confirm the Arthur Leeds death-date (he would have been entering the public domain in 2023) and thus will have to rely on the slipping years to gradually make all his tales public domain in the USA.

Tentaclii has of course returned. The old website host was, I think, trying to get rid of the legacy web-hosting sites it inherited many many takeovers ago, of which I was one. I paid them, but their unreachable ‘support’ meant that there was no way to find out why jurn.org was no longer responsive. I gave up on them and on the money paid, and just decided to move the backups to a wholly new domain on a new paid host, and to forget about the old address. It seemed the only option. The old site still hasn’t come back, so I now feel justified in the move. So, as you can see, Tentaclii is now located at https://www.jurn.link/tentaclii/ and though there was some initial hassle with getting the ‘domain verification’ email that problem is now sorted. As such the blog should now stay online for years, and is also now a lot faster and more responsive. It’s on a large service that only does hosting and does it well, and is also unlikely to get bought-out by some uncaring conglomeration that also does 100 other things and doesn’t much care about its websites. As such the blog and URL should hopefully stay online for a good few years now (sound of frantic tapping-on-wood…).

The site move was sadly not without cost, in money as well as a week of my time and frustration, and I really welcome PayPal donations from a generous benefactor to help cover the cost. The other way that readers can help is simply to link the new address in their own blog posts, and to spread the word on social media to those who might have lost track of where Tentaclii is. Many thanks. As usual, becoming a Patreon patron is also very much encouraged and encouraging.

Elsewhere in April, I completed a large ‘Carl Sagan’ special for the free Digital Art Live monthly magazine, and even managed to do a chunk of work on my forthcoming Tolkien mega-book.