Time for another monthly round-up of items miscellaneously Tentaclii-fied.
In my regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts I completed my photographic stroll around Lovecraft’s beloved Japanese Garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, discovering among other things that it was far larger than imagined and also had vast hot-houses. A possible partial inspiration of “The Shadow out of Time”, and definitely inspiring for his friend Belknap Long’s later wartime Curator of the Interplanetary Gardens series for boys. I looked into where the Eddy Jr. tale “Black Noon” might be found today, which spurred a ‘Picture Postals’ post on both the Dark Swamp and the adjacent Durfee Hill, with a new composite map and a side-trip (as Lovecraft did) into Pascoag and pointing up its “Red Hook” connection. One small new discovery was made, indicating why Morton might have wanted to visit Durfee Hill.
In other pictures, a picture was found of the 132 Wickenden Street branch of Lovecraft favoured “Jake’s”, and I mused on if he might have ever set foot in this branch. Faig Jr. suggests not, and it certainly looks like there’s no evidence. But I pointed out the proximity to the New York boat docks. Rather usefully, I also found the opening times for both this and the main branch. The ferreting away at “Jake’s” then led me to discover a very nice picture of the main site at 9 Canal St. Providence, and not just an exterior either. A superb interior with customers and owners, which I promptly cleaned and colourised. To top this discovery, later in the month I found the very elusive “John’s” in Brooklyn, though sadly not as an interior. Also “Bickford’s”, another Brooklyn favourite. This formed a quartet of posts — Bickford’s, Johns, pictures of John’s, and then ‘who John was’. With many new discoveries and pictures along the way. Now we at last have the addresses and names it’s possible that other Lovecraftians, especially those who know the history of New York City and have access to paid U.S. newspaper databases and city archives, will be able to find more in the future.
In scholarly work, there was news via S.T. Joshi of the two new volumes Miscellaneous Letters and Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others, set for August 2022. The Spanish edition of Joshi’s I Am Providence is out. The German Lovecraftians reported the imminence of their scholarly volume on the “cultural interplay between H.P. Lovecraft and Germany”. Which I assume will be issued in German, though hopefully someone will be translating it soon. Leslie Klinger’s annotated The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories appeared, an affordable cut-down one-volume paperback version of the previous volumes. The selection and ordering looks very suitable for beginners, and I believe he used the Joshi texts.
In my reading and note-taking on the Selected Letters I got as far as ‘Notes on Selected Letters II – part one’. The concluding part two is coming soon. I made the seemingly new discover about the strong likelihood that his reading of New Lands by Charles Fort influenced “The Colour Out of Space”. If he read it before and not after March 1927, that is.
In matters relating to historical context, I linked to useful blog post elsewhere about William Dean Howells, musing on which added to my knowledge about censorship in Lovecraft’s era. A PulpFest post also had me thinking about Lovecraft’s role in networking the productive end of early SF fandom, and thus ultimately in the exploration of space (via SF’s influence on the Space Race). I also spotted a scholarly book on Theosophy’s wider cultural impact, which I assume must include Weird Tales, Lovecraft and some of the circle.
In open archival material, I grabbed and rectified a nice new eBay scan of the Old Brick Row in Providence. A useful simplified map of Providence was found. The newly online archives of the Year Book of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers, 1923-1931 may also hold some as-yet undiscovered treasures. I also discounted the notion that Lovecraft might have known the novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, but along the way discovered a very interesting bit of proto-sci-fi.
As for the Lovecraft Circle, I noted the new Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Volume 2, and that J. Vernon Shea’s late memoir of Lovecraft is online as printed in Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 1966) with interesting surrounding context. Fritz Leiber’s collected and collectable science-fiction cat stories, Gummitch and friends, turned up to “borrow” as a scan on Archive.org. I did some digging re: the facts on an obscure and as yet untranslated 1980s mythos anthology from Spain.
Not much in the arts this month, though I don’t track the waves of videogames and Lovecraftian films. But I see there’s a “Quest of Iranon” opera production set for the stage in June 2022. Tanabe’s Innsmouth No Kage manga graphic-novel is to be published by Dark Horse later in the year. The overlooked ‘Lovecraft as character’ novel, Martian Falcon (2015) was discovered and it looks rather fun.
The only podcast this month was in the form of the welcome return of Robert M. Price’s The Lovecraft Geek — and with a cracker of an episode.
In scholarly software, PDF Index Generator 3.2 looks well worth having. The AI auto-coloriser DeOldify can now be run without Internet access, via a Windows installer. Also rather handy for some, you can block the drop-down suggestions on Google Scholar. These block lines are what I cooked up for uBlock Origin and they currently work on Scholar…
Also handy is a Web browser UserScript to Display the total time for a YouTube playlist. The old one had stopped working, but this one works for now. Try it with the new ‘best of’ Tom Shippey on Tolkien playlist.
As usual, please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, as these days every little helps. Despite Prime Minister Boris firing various “big bazookas” of money at the public over the last three years, not a penny of it has yet reached me. So the monthly Patreon is very useful. Thankfully there have been almost no departures of patrons due to Tentaclii’s recent domain change-over. Mentioning and linking to Tentaclii is also useful, and costs nothing except a moment’s time.
Many thanks, and stay clear of the Monkey Pox!