HPLinks #20.
Not much to glean this week, which I guess is due to the usual ‘slump’ over Christmas / New Year. And most of the items below are only tangentially related to ‘Lovecraft himself’.
* Up for sale, what appears to be Lovecraft’s copy of the book Landmarks of New York (1923), with bookplate and signature date for May 1928. Which suggests this was a memory-jogger of the New York of 1922, rather than a pocket-guide used at that time or in the later New York Years. The seller notes… “This title does not appear in Lovecraft’s Library nor any of Lovecraft’s published letters”. Not on Archive.org.
Also at Honest Abe’s site, a glimpse of what Lovecraft looked like in Czech. A uniform set titled Volani Cthulhu, with variant dustjacket colours for each volume. Here we seen the green one, which shows off the artwork to best effect.
* The Pulp Super-Fan has a joint mini-review of “three interesting H.P. Lovecraft-related items”. The Starry Wisdom Library, The Dagon Collection, and the map-set H.P. Lovecraft and His Environs.
* Beyond Lovecraft: A Companion is the mooted title for an academic book collection now being assembled. Will apparently have chapters discussing various recent adaptations and (details are scant, so I’m guessing) possibly even those ersatz ‘barely-adaptations that use the Lovecraft name’? (Perhaps we need a name for such cruft, these days? ‘Lovecruft’?)
* New on Archive.org, a scan of Planets And Dimensions, a 1973 book which collected… “the most important non-fiction prose of Clark Ashton Smith”. Includes tributes to Lovecraft.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and among other matters he brings news of the publication of various new August Derleth books, among which the complete Gus Elker farm/rural humourous stories in two volumes. Buck in the Bottoms: Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls and Wild Plums: More Tales of Gus Elker and the Stolls. Of these, Joshi writes…
“David E. Schultz […] did yeoman’s work in unearthing both uncollected and unpublished stories that had gone unnoticed by Peter Ruber, whose compilation Country Matters (1996) purported to include all the Gus Elker stories.”
I wonder if Derleth ever sometimes thought of himself as following Lovecraft in this? After all, the master had once penned the comic tale “Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl”, about the daughter of a Vermont backwoods bootlegger.
* Nominations now open for the 2025 Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards.
* In Portugal until February 2025, a substantial retrospective exhibition of the comics work of Liam Sharp. Science-fiction, fantasy, and some Conan.
* Newly officially free on the Poe Society website, the book Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986).
* The latest edition of the open-access journal Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt is a special on Ancient Egypt in science-fiction and related modern pop culture. Also note the new book Alternative Egyptology: Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt (2024), which is available free-to-read online at the publisher website.
* Talking of ancient Egypt, I spotted an interview with the author of the new novel Tomb of the Black Pharaoh. This is part of his Danforth: Eldrich Tales of WWII series, which fuses… “Lovecraftian horror, Egyptian myth & WWII-era espionage”. Sounds fun.
* And finally, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a new exhibition on “Oracles, Omens and Answers”, showcasing the material and mental cultures involved in supposed ‘divination of the future’ prior to the advent of science-fiction. Has an accompanying book. A timely show, given that our fast-evolving ‘AI oracles’ may soon offer us various forms of precognition. Or, appear to do so. Related: Wormwoodiana has a new post this week on The Tarot in England.
— End-quotes —
“It must be understood that the real developments of the future are utterly beyond prediction, since wholly unseen or wrongly appraised factors may swing matters in totally unexpected directions.” — Lovecraft, in his essay “Some Repetitions on the Times”.
“So far as future history is concerned, I’m damned if I know what lies ahead. […] Nobody knows what factors will pop up to prove the decisive ones. What will the next war bring — and leave? […] How fatal will be the decadence or collapse toward which both western and eastern cultures seem to be moving? Will the modified behaviour-patterns, created by the lapse of certain traditional beliefs, produce unforeseen results? [Thankfully] The northern and western countries seem to have a knack of readjusting their government, economics, and society to meet changing needs without explosive disaster, and if they can be left free to evolve without encroachment, they probably have quite a future.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.
“The past is real — it is all there is. The present is only a trivial and momentary boundary-line — whilst the future, though wholly determinate, is too essentially unknown and landmarkless to possess any hold upon our sense of concrete aesthetic imagery. It is, too, liable to involve shifts and contrasts repugnant to our emotions and fancy; since we cannot study it as a unified whole and become accustomed to its internal variations as we can study and grow accustomed to the vary’d past. […] it seems to me all one can do at present is to fight the future as best he can.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.
“… anyone’s emotional attitude toward the future is essentially a matter of chance and of taste. [Those involved in] the impersonal and objective matter of calculating what the future is likely to be [will of course draw on the] different emotions [that] give different individuals different habits of perception, appraisal, and reasoning-habits which importantly affect all conclusions save those depending on the very simplest, clearest, and most concrete data. One really ought to think of the future apart from all likes, dislikes, and personal perspectives. He would then see a transformation [that is even now] in process; likely to invalidate most of our present standards, thought-habits, and pleasure-sources, and to substitute another set of these things which — though no doubt satisfying to those born under its aegis — will call forth less of the varied pleasure and thought-potentialities of mankind than the systems of the past and present have called forth. He needn’t call this a tragedy if he doesn’t wish to — for of course he will not live to reap its worst effects, while his great-grandchildren will be too steeped in the newer order to miss any other.” — Lovecraft to Morton, October 1929.