Newly listed at Hippocampus, In the Shadow of Boulder Ridge: The Complete California Tales of Clark Ashton Smith… “this volume emphatically demonstrates how vital his birthplace in the Golden State was central to his life and imagination”. Also includes relevant “poems and prose poems”. No mention of maps, for the orientation of those who only know ‘California is always sunny’ (and are wrong about even that, as apparently it’s cycled between drought and deluge for centuries).

I guess now there’s an opportunity for someone to make/sell a nice hand-drawn map though, as a postcard bookmark to slip into the book on the bookshelf. Possibly the cover-artist. The pleasing cover artwork is by Gregory Nemec.

Here is Lovecraft in 1934 talking of…

the typical Placer County landscape — American River, Donner Lake, Crater Ridge etc — so familiar to me through the view cards and descriptions now and then furnished by Kkarkash-Ton [Smith]

And in 1935, on what lay below…

I wish that I could be in on the expedition to Placer County, where the thousand-mile shaft to evil Tsathoggua’s nighted abode hits the surface of the planet.