A new Voluminous podcast reads a Lovecraft letter to Frank Belknap Long, 25th February 1924. It’s part of the new Long cache deposited at the John Hay Library, and apparently it’s largely new here…

A couple of excerpts from this letter were published in Selected Letters I, but it is not yet available in the Brown Digital Repository, which means that except for a very small handful of people, you are among the first to experience the complete version since Frank Belknap Long opened the envelope 98 years ago!

The reading is followed by a good interview with the John Hay librarian in charge of the Lovecraft materials. It’s revealed that the collection has un-digitised collections from the Lovecraft Circle, and they welcome endowments specifically targeted at Lovecraft and the Circle (which, I guess, might enable scanning). It seems they can’t dip into the general university funds to pay for such things, and Special Collections relies on endowments and donations.

The S.T. Joshi Fellowship at Brown is revealed to have re-opened to scholars. That was mentioned in the podcast as being “1st October”, but it seems this was a slip of the memory. The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship Web page states 1st November 2022, so there’s still time to apply. A point to keep in mind for applications is that Brown is said (in the interview) to favour applications to work with un-digitised areas of collections. It was thus interesting to hear that they have un-digitised Circle materials, and also one of the world’s largest collections of Silver Age U.S. comics, in that respect. So potentially one might track the early emergence and evolution of Lovecraftian themes in comics.

Another factor revealed in the interview is that, as of NecronomiCon 2022, scanning of the new Long letters has not yet started. So presumably they won’t be arriving online very soon.