Time for another monthly round-up for Tentaclii. As always, please try to support me via Patreon or an occasional PayPal donation or even an Amazon Gift Voucher. Also, please note that I may well be looking for additional regular-monthly paid work from September 2022. If anyone can use my talents for $500 a month, please enquire. Digital magazine production and historical research work are a speciality. At present I’m producing Digital Art Live magazine each month, and have been for years now. To contact me, just post a comment on Tentaclii and I’ll see it.

This month on Tentaclii, in ‘Picture Postals’ I took more deep dives into Lovecraft’s New York City: strolling along Willoughby / Fulton Street, Clinton Street, and also popping into Automats pre and post-Deco. In the most recent posts in this series I put the final touches to the discovery of Lovecraft’s favourite cafe and grocery in Brooklyn, with a useful map, the names of businesses and business-men surround the cafe, and new vintage photos of 169 Clinton Street. I think this burst of New York research is pretty much done now. It adds to the story of Lovecraft’s cafes, most of which turn out to have unusual characteristics or unusual characters who ran them.

I also posted research essays on Lovecraft and Haldeman-Julius’s censorship-busting “Little Blue Books” of the 1920s and 30s, and on Lovecraft’s passing adoration of the now-obscure French writer Remy de Gourmont at the end of his ‘decadent phase’. A question from a Patreon patron also resulted in the short essay “Lovecraft and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith”. E.E. Smith being a contemporary cosmic tale-weaver but of a very different sort.

I linked to a scan of the Lovecraft poem “New England Fallen”, new at the Brown Repository and not in the collected poetry. A new collection of mid 1960s sci-fi convention programmes being posted on Archive.org enabled me to put a face to Lovecraft’s biographer L. Sprague de Camp. I also found a small new 1923 item by Everett McNeil, “oldster” of the Lovecraft Circle, the non-fiction “The Feast of the Dead”.

I posted my lengthy “Notes on Selected Letters II: Part Two”; “Selected Letters III”, and “Selected Letters IV”. I’m now starting on the final Volume V, again making notes as I go. Relating to a recent ‘Picture Postals’ post, I was pleased to find evidence that Lovecraft did see the hothouses at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The Letters also offered more evidence for his early love of florist’s shops and fine ornamental gardens.

New scholarly books noted this month included Ken Faig Jr, Pike’s Peak or Bust: The Life and Works of David V. Bush (Lovecraft’s major revision client in the 1920s); S.T. Joshi published The Parameters of the Weird Tale, with some Lovecraft-related essays not in his recent volume collected essays on Lovecraft; and also Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft (forthcoming). New in Spanish was H.P. Lovecraft: poesia fantastica completa (‘the complete fantastic poetry’). I suggested the need for a volume of Lovecraft’s maps, alongside the forthcoming mega-index to the volumes of Lovecraft’s Letters, and outlined a contents-list.

In the arts, the opera A Dream at the End of Time, a Lovecraft musical was staged in Los Angeles for a week’s run. Various forthcoming TV and movie adaptations of Lovecraft were noted. A number of new public-domain audio readings were linked, including The Strange World of Harry Houdini from 1920s issues of Weird Tales. The useful typewriter font ‘X Typewriter’ was found and linked.

In terms of free research materials, this month I found a run of the journal Old-Time New England, 1910-1981 on Archive.org. And as for research tools I made a home-brew mouse-gesture to fix the Opera browser’s problem with Google Search + spellcheck (only relevant if your browser can’t do spellcheck on search-terms you type into the Google Search box).

I was ill for two weeks this month, and so my Doctor Who Tom Baker watch or skip list was updated. Some months back I had stalled in my re-watch at the end of Season 14. But now I’ve also seen series 15, 16, 17 and 18 and have updated the watch/skip list accordingly. I’ve now also ferreted out the ‘watch’ list for the subsequent Doctor Who, Peter Davison (1981-84) which totals 11 stories.

That’s it for June, onward to July!