Publishing tomorrow in hardcover, Pulp Power: The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Art of the Street & Smith Universe. A sumptuous 352-page cross between an artbook and a history book on a single pulp publisher, by the look of it.

Also, the major convention PulpFest 50 is on this weekend, and the lucky attendees are about now un-bagging the annual The Pulpster #31.

The contents have been announced. Items of interest…

* Darrell Schweitzer offers an interview with Science Fiction Grand Master Poul Anderson concerning his early years as a pulpsmith.

* The story of “The Vizigraph” the renowned letter column published in Planet Stories.

* Leading pulp and comic book dealer David Smith discusses “slabbing” pulp magazines.

* Pulpster editor emeritus Tony Davis explores pulp magazines and the founder of the Church of Satan.

* An examination of The Avenger, the Street & Smith pulp hero.

Newly listed at Hippocampus is the scholarly Lovecraft Annual journal for 2022, weighing in at 260 pages. Here are the 2022 titles in order…

A Tale of Two Providences: Topographical Realism in “The Haunter of the Dark”.

“Uncle Eddy”: H.P. Lovecraft’s Used Bookseller.

The Ripple Effect: Star Trek and the Lovecraft Mythos.

Solitary Conversation: A Bakhtinian Exploration of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon”.

The Appeal of John Martin’s Paradise Lost Pictures to H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft and the Folklore of Glocester’s Dark Swamp.

A Note on Nodens in Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Lovecraft’s Garden: Heart’s Blood at the Root.

The Authorship of The Cancer of Superstition and Lovecraft’s Late Readings on Folklore.

Painting in Word Shadows: The Role of the Hidden and Unknown to the Reader in Lovecraft.

“What Has Sunk May Rise”: How H.P. Lovecraft Re-emerged.

Reviews (four of them).

Briefly Noted

Looks very good. I’m hoping that “Lovecraft’s Garden” will be a perceptive study of his gardens — known in boyhood (also flower-shops), self-created in youth, visited on travels, and in fiction / poetry / dreams, and perhaps with a small nod to Belknap Long’s later wartime “Interplanetary Gardens” series of plant tales for boys.

Having penned the “Uncle Eddy” item myself — Joshi is kind enough to call it an “an authoritative article” in the issue’s blurb — thankfully I don’t have to pay for a copy this time around and one should be arriving shortly. I thank Ken Faig Jr. for his assistance with some of the genealogical data for this final print version of my “Uncle Eddy” item.

Also listed as new at Hippocampus is Arthur S. Koki’s 1962 masters dissertation (as we call them in the UK, no apostrophe) titled H.P. Lovecraft: An Introduction to His Life and Writings, for Columbia University. In 208 pages and $25, with the ebook version “coming soon”, the book is billed as…

“the first detailed account of Lovecraft’s life, written more than a decade before L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). De Camp has acknowledged drawing upon Koki’s thesis for much of his own work. … it retains value even after the passage of sixty years, when so much work on Lovecraft has been done. Arthur S. Koki is a pioneer in Lovecraft studies, and his thesis deserves to be read by all devotees of the dreamer from Providence.”

Interesting. The book has a rather nice colour cover, using a photoreal rendering of Khoi Nguyen’s recent Lovecraft 3D figure. That reminds me I had the notion to see what might be done about improving the older Meshbox 3D Lovecraft figure for Poser, and I now have the new Poser 12 software which could accomplish that notion. Poser 12 has added the Blender software’s new improved Cycles 2 materials and rendering engine. This is not to recommend Poser 12 to most readers, as it’s still in Early Access. The $52 Poser 11 at Renderosity, is the one that most people will want.