• About
  • Directory
  • Free stuff
  • Lovecraft for beginners
  • My Books
  • Open Lovecraft
  • Reviews
  • Travel Posters
  • SALTES

Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Monthly Archives: February 2023

“Erich Zann” adapted by Roy Thomas

28 Tuesday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

Dark Worlds Quarterly has a fine new survey, with a few predictably gory examples, of vintage Lovecraft in Black & White. This being a survey of b&w comics that have, over the decades, adapted various Lovecraft tales.

I especially liked the look of the opening splash page for “The Music of Erich Zann” adapted by Roy Thomas, in the short-lived Masters of Terror #2 (September 1975). Masters of Terror was a b&w magazine-format comics anthology published under Marvel’s Curtis cover-imprint, offering reprints.

I tracked it down online and found the same (final) issue also had “Pickman’s Model”, again adapted by Roy Thomas…

A rather good “Zann” reprint then, but from where? A little digging finds it was originally in colour under the title “The Music From Beyond” in Marvel’s regular-sized Chamber Of Darkness (issue #5, June 1970). This issue had nice Kirby pencilled cover-art, and a Kirby tale inside, so is collectable and thus pricey today.

Astounding set

27 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Currently on eBay, no bids. Low starting prices, and he ships from the UK. The condition looks less than astounding, but some may be interested.

Miller meets metal

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

“Ahah”, I thought, “this new metal album’s cover artwork is a superb emulation of ‘Ian Miller channelling Lovecraft'”.

Turns out, it’s actually by Ian Miller himself. His blog has the full cosmic vista…

Encyclopaedia Metallum reviews the album Anthronomicon, by the band Ulthar, and immediately finds…

“We’re off to battle right away against the Lovecraftian hordes!”

After that, it’s apparently much of the same old-school metal pace right through to the end. Delivered with all of the skill of a leading Californian metal band on their third album.

Turns out this is not the first cover Miller’s done for them. A little more digging discovers their two earlier albums with Miller covers…

The orange one reminding me instantly of the art for one of Miller’s classic 1970s paperback covers for Panther. Is this the picture that was lost and had to be recreated? Anyway, if you don’t fancy framing the album cover(s) then this one can be had as a fine art print direct from Miller.

400 and counting

25 Saturday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Scholarly works

≈ 2 Comments

Congratulations to S.T. Joshi who posts that he’s now approaching his 400th book, not counting the various ‘revised and expanded’ editions.

He notes that…

My edition of the letters of Clark Ashton Smith, Donald and Howard Wandrei, and R.H. Barlow is also close to ready

Interesting. Presumably the letters not sent to Lovecraft or other major correspondents such as Derleth or R.E. Howard?

He’s also headed to New York City soon, to do research relating to the letters of Lovecraft’s friend Frank Belknap Long. He further notes his…

proposed volume of [early Lovecraft collaborator] Winifred Virginia Jackson’s collected poetry. David E. Schultz has already done an incredible amount of work on this project, but some of her poetry remains elusive.

Thus if you have any unique Winifred Virginia Jackson poetical items tucked away, now’s the time to speak up.

Winter and spring

24 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

≈ 1 Comment

This week on ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’, a glimpse of the winter we’re now leaving behind. Here’s a rare view looking up College Street in a New England winter after snow. Lovecraft would later live at No. 66 College Street, at the top of the rise seen here.

With thanks to the Providence Public Library, picture extracted from the John Hutchins Cady Research Scrapbooks Collection. Here newly colorised and contrast balanced.

Lovecraft would increasingly dread having to venture out in very cold weather. Though he did, well wrapped-up.

He once penned a little-known Dunsanian fragment based around the idea of winter and spring…

… And it is recorded that in the Elder Times, Om Oris, mightiest of the wizards, laid crafty snare for the demon Avaloth, and pitted dark magic against him; for Avaloth plagued the earth with a strange growth of ice and snow that crept as if alive, ever southward, and swallowed up the forests and the mountains. And the outcome of the contest with the demon is not known; but wizards of that day maintained that Avaloth, who was not easily discernible, could not be destroyed save by a great heat, the means whereof was not then known, although certain of the wizards foresaw that one day it should be. Yet, at this time the ice fields began to shrink and dwindle and finally vanished; and the earth bloomed forth afresh.” (Lovecraft’s unused ‘transcription from the Eltdown Shards’, Selected Letters V, March 1935)

And here is his beloved Angell Street with the leaves off, but about to “bloom forth afresh” as the earliest spring starts to bud on the trees…

View down Angell Street, Providence.

Up and down this colonial hill [College Hill] I have walk’d ever since I could walk at all — and it has always exerted upon me the greatest possible fascination, even though my native part of Angell Street is somewhat farther East [along the hill], in a decidedly newer (middle and later Victorian) district. Let no one tell me that Providence is not the most beautiful city in the world! Line for line, atmospheric touch for atmospheric touch, it positively and absolutely is! Colour, shade, contour, diversity, quaintness, impressiveness — all are there” (rhapsody on his return home to the city, Selected Letters II, May 1926).

Bookshops of Arkham

23 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

In the Bookshops of Arkham, an eight-hour YouTube series of Call of Cthulhu ‘actual play’. Just in case you were curious about such RPG things.

And, as for props for such things, I found a nice 1904 card which might serve to aid in visualisation of settings. The shop on the right of the row being a possible book shop.

It’s a pity that city bookshops and galleries don’t (didn’t) get photographed, as 80 or so years later they’re of great interest due to their connections with famous writers and artists.

Deleuze on Lovecraft

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

The Deleuze Seminars, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, given 1975-1976 in Paris and filmed for a ‘French philosophy as it is lived’ project of the period. Now online.

[He] focuses on the molecular multiplicities defined through their dimensions, specifically their maximal dimension that is the borderline. […] his extended example comes from H.P. Lovecraft [and he later] refers to Lovecraft’s story, “The Outsider”, which provides a term to describe the peripheral status in molecular multiplicities, “the one you don’t expect”, the unnamable, and from which another borderline can be acquired. […] A third, very brief fragment commences in mid-quotation from Lovecraft (located in print in A Thousand Plateaus, p. 251) that provides Deleuze with way to discuss the possibility of numerous dimensions possessed by molecular multiplicities. This brings him to propose the plane of consistency or the rhizosphere as the common intersection of all these multiplicities by a plane.

Henry Kuttner

21 Tuesday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

New on archive.org, Collected Fiction of Henry Kuttner, ordered by date across 8,400 pages. Including his Lovecraftian tales and his poem “H.P.L.” for Lovecraft.

The young Kuttner at an early SF convention.

For a short overview of his best Mythos tales see Shawn Ramsey’s “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Tales: An Overview”, Crypt of Cthulhu #51 (Hallowmas 1987). Also the anthology The Book Of Iod (1995) which collected ten Mythos tales by Kuttner and added an introduction by Robert M. Price, a collaboration, and one tale by Price himself. The book Discovering classic fantasy fiction: essays on the antecedents of fantastic literature (1996) has an essay of wider scope, “Henry Kuttner, Man of Many Voices”.

The Lovecraft letters to Kuttner were first published in the early 1990s, and these are now to be found at the back of the volume H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C.L. Moore and Others.

Also on Archive.org is The Best Of Henry Kuttner (1975) from Doubleday with an introduction by Ray Bradbury (the influence was ‘Kuttner influencing Bradbury’, rather than the other way around), and The Best Of Henry Kuttner Vol. 1 (1977) from Mayflower in the UK, with a very different story list.

Many of his magazine covers can be seen in date order at Dark Worlds Quarterly’s survey which starts with Henry Kuttner Part 1 – 1936-1939.

Kuttner’s ‘repeating character’ series are: the Hogben tales of a family of weird mutant hillbillies; and the Galloway Gallegher series about a brilliant but penniless inventor who can only invent when drunk, and when sober finds himself at a loss to explain his new inventions. We see him here considering a fabulous (but also fabulously vain and preening) robot he’s created.

Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran

20 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

New at the HPLHS Store, Miskatonic University Monograph: “The Discovery of Fragments of Kitab al-Azif at Harran”. In the years before 1920…

Scholars from Cambridge and Miskatonic universities collaborated on a series of archeological digs in what is now southern Turkey. Excavations at the site of Harran made several unusual discoveries, chief amongst them is a fragmentary medieval document in Arabic. Professor Henry Armitage correlated the translated fragments with a passage in Miskatonic’s incredibly rare occult tome: the Necronomicon.

Said to be shipping at the start of March 2023.

Lovecraft was right, part 823

19 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Physics-defying ‘dwarf planet’ Quaoar, discovered at the edge of our Solar System.

… the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting.

The Providence Herbalist

19 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

A new eBay item, of reasonable crispness and thus of possible interest to makers of Lovecraftian RPG games set in Providence.

And talking of ephemera, advance news of a new book…

John D. Haefele and I actually have been slaving away on a book on Arkham House ephemera from the Classic Years — 1937-1972. We’ve got guys eyeballing some of the largest private collections (as I post, one stalwart has the legendary Phil Mays Collection under review), and we’re riding the whirlwind trying to juggle the info into order.

NecronomiCon Providence – 2024 dates announced

18 Saturday Feb 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Dates for your 2024 diary and advance holiday/hotel booking. NecronomiCon Providence is set for Thursday 15th August to Sunday 18th August 2024. Note that this is 2024, not 2023.

← Older posts

 

Please become my patron at www.patreon.com/davehaden to help this blog survive and thrive.

Or donate via PayPal — any amount is welcome! Donations total at Christmas 2023, since 2015: $390.

Archives

  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010

Categories

  • 3D (15)
  • AI (60)
  • Astronomy (70)
  • Censorship (14)
  • de Camp (7)
  • Doyle (7)
  • Films & trailers (100)
  • Fonts (9)
  • Guest posts (2)
  • Historical context (1,094)
  • Housekeeping (89)
  • HPLinks (37)
  • Kipling (11)
  • Kittee Tuesday (92)
  • Lovecraft as character (54)
  • Lovecraftian arts (1,591)
  • Lovecraftian places (19)
  • Maps (69)
  • NecronomiCon 2013 (40)
  • NecronomiCon 2015 (22)
  • New books (958)
  • New discoveries (165)
  • Night in Providence (17)
  • Odd scratchings (984)
  • Picture postals (276)
  • Podcasts etc. (424)
  • REH (177)
  • Scholarly works (1,440)
  • Summer School (31)
  • Unnamable (85)

Get this blog in your newsreader:
 
RSS Feed — Posts
RSS Feed — Comments

H.P. Lovecraft's Poster Collection - 17 retro travel posters for $18. Print ready, and available to buy — the proceeds help to support the work of Tentaclii.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.