Monthly Archives: May 2025

HPLinks #39 – join the Esoteric Order, Lovecraft’s Dark Enlightenment, sculpting Lovecraft, Dunwich revived, Mayfair magazine, and more…

25 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in AI, HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #39.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated (19th May 2025). Among many other items, he is currently seeking a new acolyte to join his very own secret Esoteric Order. He also notes the ‘zine…

Nightlands no. 3 (Autumn 2024), containing my article ‘H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Art’ (an article I wrote years ago as liner notes for an album that never appeared)

* In German, a philosophy journal article whose fragmented title might best translate into English as ‘The Dark Enlightenment of H.P. Lovecraft’, from Weimarer Beitrrge No. 68 (2022, freely available online 2025)…

… he develops an atheistic-materialistic philosophy not only in his literature, but also in essays and especially his extensive correspondence, which can be understood as a “dark enlightenment”. What Adorno and Horkheimer do in their dialectics of the Enlightenment, based on de Sade and Nietzsche also applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, for Lovecraft. His work unfolds an “intransigent criticism of practical reason” and its agent, the too “self-evident subject”. [Only by understanding the] basic positions of Lovecraft’s philosophy, as developed in essays and letters, does his poetics of form [become clear and] open us up to the full understanding of his literature. His works also provide directional concepts for the philosophy and philology of ‘the eerie’. […] Against this background [I engage in] a reading of his “The Color Out of Space” (1927)

* From Russia, “Preserving the Author’s Style in Translating The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath“ (April 2025). A short conference paper, freely available online. Partly in English.

* Deep Cuts considers the very late “Of Gold and Sawdust” (1975), by Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman.

* “Making an Ultra-Realistic Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft” via 3D digital sculpting and texturing. A link from a few years back, but I don’t think I’ve linked to this ‘making of’ page before. Only to the results.

* New on Archive.org, a pack of three Historic Males SD 1.5 LoRAs including Lovecraft. These are free character add-ons for generating images with Stable Diffusion 1.5. Historical personage add-ons having been last week removed from CivitAI (the main Stable Diffusion download website) along with living celebrities. I guess CivitAI didn’t have either the manpower or the cultural savvy to know if a celeb was dead or alive, and thus they junked the lot.

Tip: you may want to put “Spock” in the negative prompt, if the LoRA wants to veer towards Star Trek’s Captain Spock. That seems to restore Lovecraft’s face. The above is an Img2Img style transform + the LoRA, starting from a Bondware Poser 13 render.

* Feuilleton has lengthy comments on the ‘history of Lovecraft in comics’ academic paper (linked to in my previous HPLinks). Reading this history has spurred him to finish his own unfinished adaptation of The Dunwich Horror… “This, then, is my major project for the next twelve months. The book as a whole will take at least this long to finish”.

* The Alan Moore World blog has “Lovecraft was an American William Blake”…

In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge.” (Moore, 1993).

Sadly, it appears that his Yuggoth Cultures was left in a London taxi-cab and thus lost. Not sure how the book overlaps with Moore’s comic-book series Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, but I’ll take it on trust that Alan Moore World knows that the published comics and the lost book are different things.

* I missed noticing this event, but managed to snag the poster at a small size. A ‘Lovecraft festival’ on the videogame service Steam, which has now been-and-gone.

But from this I was able to track down the larger and more appealing artwork (same artist, no artist credited) that the poster was partly made from…

* Bounding Into Comics reviews the new Re-Animator movie 4K UHD set, and itemises the many additional extras newly packaged with the movie.

* The publisher Dark Horse is preparing to ship a ‘special hardcover’ edition of Richard Corben’s “Lovecraft and backwoods terror” graphic-novel Rat God. 184 pages with “remastered lettering”. Unfortunately it’s also being coloured, having originally been in greyscale. Due in the autumn of 2025…

Terrible things stalk the forests outside Arkham in this chilling original tale from comics master Richard Corben.

* Viking (an offshoot of Penguin Books, last I heard) is reported in the book trade as being set to publish Penguin Weird Fiction later in 2025… “an anthology of stories featuring H.P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others”. The advance notice makes it sounds like the stories feature these authors as characters, but I suspect it’s not that interesting. Just another cash-in reprint, I expect.

* New on Archive.org, a set of Mayfair magazine (for several decades a leading mass-market British equivalent to the U.S. Playboy), which search shows had in its February 1970 issue a reprint of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”. George Underwood was the artist…

* Another new batch of short SF/fantasy readings at LibriVox. This time around there are four by Lovecraft’s one-time protege Henry Kuttner, all public domain. Also, I didn’t realise any stories by Marion Zimmer Bradley had slipped into the public domain. But at least one of her stories must have, since she’s in this collection.

* And finally, a reminder to those who may be visiting Providence this summer, that I have a free Lovecraft’s Providence Map online.

— End-quotes —

“”Polaris” is rather interesting in that I wrote it in 1918, BEFORE I had ever read a word of Lord Dunsany’s. Some find it hard to believe this, but I can give not only assurance but absolute proof that it is so.” — Lovecraft to Dwyer, March 1927.

“As to the charge of modernism against me because of my predilection for Poe & Dunsany, why, Sir, I refute it!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner December 1919 (he instead hails his predecessors in the 18th century gothic, discovered and read in his childhood attic).

“When I think of Dunsany, it is in terms of “The Gods of the Mountain”, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean”, “The City of Never”, “The Fall of Babbulkund”, “In the Land of Time”, and “Idle Days on the Yann”.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“… a few weird [stage] dramas such as Dunsany’s ‘Gods of the Mountain’ & ‘Night at an Inn’ have demonstrated how a natural expert can weave horror, dread, & mounting tension with skilfully managed dialogue.” — Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, March 1935.

“I infinitely prefer Dunsany to Cabell — he was a genuine magic & freshness which the weary sophisticate seems to lack” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, August 1926.

“Imaginative artists have been few, and always unappreciated. [William] Blake is woefully undervalued. Poe would never have been understood had not the French taken the pains to exalt and interpret him. Dunsany has met with nothing but coldness or lukewarm praise.” (Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”, January 1921).

HPLinks #38 – Lexicon bagged, history of Lovecraft in comics, Amazing tentacles, Baranger art-prints, Tower of Shadows, AI art-styles, a bad fire, and more…

16 Friday May 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #38.

* The latest edition of the journal ImageTexT has “The Actual Anatomy of the Terrible: Gou Tanabe, Weird Ekphrasis, and the History of Lovecraft in Comics”. The first part surveying some of the history of Lovecraft in comics. Open-access, freely available online.

* The Passing Place this week blogs about a new project, having newly embarked on what sounds like a researched… “book about Lovecraft’s creatures and worlds”. The author has some form there. Having already produced a 2022 book, though I don’t think I had noticed it here at Tentaclii, a book titled Lexicromicon: A bluffers guide to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

For those impatient for this forthcoming book, note that there’s already Anthony Pearsall’s fine The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places & Things in the Tales of H.P Lovecraft (2005). Which I only have as a Kindle ebook purchase, not ideal for a quick ‘pull it off the shelf’ consultation. But I’m pleased to say that Passing Place’s post fortuitiously prompted me to check eBay just now, and thus I’ve bagged the Lexicon. In VG paper from a UK seller for a reasonable £12… nice. Normally the price is stuck at three times that. Thanks again to my Patreon patrons, for the PayPal used to bring such little treasures winging onto my book shelves.

* The Pulp Super-Fan looks back at the ‘The Library Lovecraftian’ series, itemising what was in this ill-fated mid-1970s attempt at a small Lovecraftian fiction ‘zine. The third issue managed to attract “The Horror on the Beach: A Tale in the Cthulhu Mythos” by Alan Dean Foster (by then a well-known SF writer, I seem to vaguely recall), but after that it folded.

* New on Archive.org and new to me, scans of what appears to be a full run of Cimoc. This being a Spanish local equivalent of Heavy Metal magazine, and which ran 1981-1996. There’s a wealth of fantasy and science-fiction artwork here, even if you can’t read the stories. How many of these monthly Heavy Metal equivalent Euro-comics were there? Quite a few, it seems, as I also recently discovered the Italian equivalent L’Eternauta, having already known about the various Toutain-edited titles and licenced editions.

* Talking of which, this week up pops Les magazines de bande dessinee en France (2025). It’s a new open-access book with various chapters on the history of the ‘BD’ comics form in France. Includes, among others, in French…

   – Influence of the North American underground in adult comics magazines in France, 1969-1976.
   – Rock in comic-book magazines from the 1970s and 1980s.
   – The place of sex in comic-strip magazines for adults in the 1980s.

* Turns out the major new exhibition ‘Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo’ may have a Lovecraftian feel in their Old Europe macabre mistiness, if the images shown in reviews are anything to go by. On now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, until 29th June 2025, though with a hefty £17 ticket price. There’s a book catalogue.

* New on Archive.org, a fine scan of Amazing Stories for December 1929, with a delightfully tentacular cover that was new to me. One recalls Tolkien’s “The Watcher in the Water” here, and wonders if he ever saw the magazine in his friend Lewis’s pulp collection.

* Frontier Partisans has a brief “Centennial Salute to H. Rider Haggard”, 100 years after the adventure writer’s death.

* The Silver Key reviews the new biography Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author (2025), and finds it worthy.

* Limited edition French Paper Art Club fine-art prints, featuring The Art of Francois Baranger. Some are already selling out their editions, with the ‘Mi-Go from space’ print already gone.

* Publisher Fantagraphics is reprinting lesser-known Marvel Comics material as pleasing new books. The first is Lost Marvels Vol. 1: Tower of Shadows (2025) which collects the new comics (not reprint material) that appeared in the Tower of Shadows supernatural anthology news-stand comic from 1969-1971. Included adaptations of Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” and “Pickman’s Model”.

Barry Windsor Smith in his Trimpe-emulating period, original artwork for a page of “The Terrible Old Man”.

* A new free Lovecraft Pulp Style LORA, a style add-on for Stable Diffusion SDXL-based image-generating AI models. The style is too ‘modern card-art for tabletop games’ for me, but some may like it and one user seems to have pushed it more towards Lovecraft’s landscapes.

* Talking of SD, I’ve been running workflow tests to see if a scene from Bondware’s Poser 12 can be translated to a new and convincing artistic style, using Stable Diffusion 1.5. The aim here was to keep exact Photoshop-layer registration with the original Poser render of the 3D scene (here deliberately made to look bad but also ‘SD friendly’). Such that the resulting image then can be consistently re-coloured and parts of it easily masked in Photoshop. Easy consistent clothes / heads / colouring / style being a Holy Grail in SD-made comics. Here a strong Controlnet, using a special type of render from Poser, holds the scene in place while allowing the SD style makeover to happen.

Using a difficult test scene from Poser I’ve had some success, as you can see. In this little demo a Lovecraft-alike visits an alien world and surveys the cosmos through his boyhood telescope. A wonky pose was applied to the Poser figure, meant for a steampunk airship with rigging for the figure’s hand to grasp. And it’s ‘too light, to too dark’, but that’s intentional. Plus getting a likeness of Lovecraft was tricky from a 768px starting render. Anyway… it’s a proof-of-workflow and you get the idea. Now I’m moving on to try to ‘Moebius’ the same scene.

* Talking of which, the new edition of The Comics Grid has the long article “Moebius and Digital Tools: From Experimentation to Remediation”. This examines how… “Moebius used digital tools throughout his career in a variety of ways, ranging from experimentation to remediation and back”. Remediation = ‘fixing unsatisfactory old artwork’.

* A while back I blogged about Novelforge, the offline creative writing editor software with style assistants and a one-time $60 purchase. A new version had added a choice of free remote or local AI creative-writing assistants. Those who tried it then may recall that Novelforge unfortunately lacks a dark mode, but… I now find this can be forced with the latest $10 WindowTop Pro utility. WindowTop forces any Windows software to use a dark mode, while also trying to keep the user interface’s other red-blue-green colours the same. The effect can be toggled with a few keyboard presses. I tried several ‘dark mode forcers’, and this was the one that worked for Novelforge while also keeping the red-blue-green UI icons etc intact.

* On display at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, until the end of June 2025, a selection from their new Lichtman Sci-Fi Fanzine Collection. The selection being exhibited aims to survey the collection’s “breadth and depth”…

… the Robert Lichtman Science Fiction Fanzine Collection amounting to over 15,000 items. This extensive collection spans nearly a century, dating from the late 1930s through 2022, and features commentary, fan fiction, criticism, conference proceedings, and other genres. Along with the printed works, the archive includes correspondence, original art, and several fanzine titles personally published by Lichtman.

It occurs to me that long-time fan collectors could now approach the Library, to see if their own collection might make a welcome and complementary addition (in due course)?

* And finally, Oregon Live has a long article recounting how last December, a couple purchased the sight-unseen contents of a storage unit in Lyons for $60, finding there…

“The original manuscript of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story, ‘Under the Pyramids’, which Lovecraft wrote on the back of old business letters.”

This turned out to have been stolen from…

James Strand’s collection [which was] probably the finest ever put together of science fiction and fantasy dealing with Lovecraft, [and also] Arkham House and the Arkham House writers. I can’t even think of an institution with a better collection.” (quote by L.W. Currey) […] Drug dealers and street-gang members quickly waltzed in after the medical examiner departed with Strand’s body [after his death]. They ransacked his library, stealing first editions, manuscripts and original art. [ Local police were not interested in the thefts, but …] The FBI [now] estimates $1 million in stolen books and comics have been recovered, but no one knows how many Strand books have disappeared into personal collections, burn piles or other storage lockers. If Strand kept a meticulous inventory, it disappeared in the looting of his home.

One hopes that, at least, no unpublished Lovecraft letters were lost. Such a pity the collection was never shipped to a university archive. But then in the case of some universities, you have to wonder if the archives themselves will be subject to purges a few decades along the line.

— End-quotes —

“I used to have the atlas [Mitchell’s Ancient Atlas], but it was lost during a household removal. Three removes [i.e. house moves], said old Dr. Franklin, are as bad as a fire!” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber Jr., December 1936.

“… the door of some Cyclopean furnace had been thrown wide, and the old mansion stood out black against a veritable holocaust of empyreal fire. The spectacle was a chromatick tumult unearthly and iridescent, nearly every colour having its place — even a vivid and sinister green which seem’d to typify the poisonous corrosion and putrefaction of the decaying elder America.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, November 1923, on encountering his own ancestral Simmonsville mansion amidst a violent sunset, during a walking tour of old family places.

“… [my] hands simply paralysed unless I hold’ em over the [portable oil] heater and thaw’ em out afresh for every beastly word. [Though] maybe I’ll survive through the night, since I see a fire has just been started in the furnace” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1925 (Lovecraft, shivering in his New York room on the edge of Red Hook).

HPLinks #37 – Fungal horrors, Lovecraft’s lexis, Spanish Lovecraft filmfest, Lovecraft in strings, Lovecraft tarot, and more…

07 Wednesday May 2025

Posted by in HPLinks, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #37.

* The Palgrave Handbook on Fungal Horror in Popular Culture has a call for submissions, though with a rather tight deadline of 1st June 2025. Edited from Sweden in English, the forthcoming book has “33 commissioned chapters” but apparently now seeks… “approximately 10 additional original essays” of 7,000 words. The book will be academic but broad in scope, covering…

popular culture such as, but not limited to, literature, film, television, comics/graphic novels, computer games, art, and memes.

* New from Italy, the essay “Alice in Borderland and Lovecraft: liminal worlds, mental abysses and the nihilism of the unknown” (2025). In Italian, but here linked in a Google Translate version (should work). Examines the Alice in Borderland Netflix TV series (adapting a Japanese manga comic) via Lovecraft.

* New from Brazil and under full Creative Commons Attribution, an article which translates as “Lexis and the Construction of Cosmicism in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft: a corpus linguistics perspective”.

* Spain’s major International Fantastic Film and Terror Festival (‘PUFA’) returns for its second year, with the 2025 festival… “dedicated to the literary universe of H.P. Lovecraft”. 30th June to 6th July 2025.

* Creative orchestral news from the Ukraine, 6th May 2025…

At the end of the concert program, ‘After reading Lovecraft’ by contemporary Ukrainian composer Oleksandr Rodin was played in Kharkiv for the first time. The audience heard mysterious reflections of Lovecraft’s horror stories and philosophy, evoked through the sounds of a string orchestra. […] Kharkiv Music Festival took place at Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, one of the safest places in the city and located just 19 miles south from the Russian border.

* The HPLHS Store’s “new to old” listing page pops up a H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – Best of 2023 DVD. So I guess it’s new, or perhaps new stock?

* At RPG web-a-zine Noble Knight, a new “Publisher Spotlight: H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society” plus a mini-interview.

* A new Italian ebook I mondi del Professor Challenger : politiche, tecno-logiche, ambienti (‘The Worlds of Professor Challenger: politics, technology, environments). Being the latest #88 (2025) issue of the book-a-journal Studia Humaniora. Professor Challenger being the Conan Doyle adventurer character. Freely available for download as a Creative Commons .PDF (see bottom of page).

* Talking of reflections on Conan Doyle… new to me is the story collection Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of H.P. Lovecraft Volume One (2023) and Volume Two (2023). A mega anthology featuring Will Murray, among others. Which is a good sign, though the reviews for volume one are variable and there are none for volume two. Sounds like the books might not suit Sherlock purists.

* A new call for submissions to Gramarye, the journal of the venerable Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, based here in the UK and the first such centre. Deadline: 21st September 2025.

* A new free reading of the Solomon Kane tale “Red Shadows” by Robert E. Howard, read by the fine and increasingly prolific Josh Greenwood. Use the freeware MediaHuman Youtube to MP3 converter to get it without the YouTube adverts.

* SFcrowsnest this week reviews the book An Informal History Of The Pulp Magazines by Ron Goulart.

* New to me, The H.P. Lovecraft Tarot | Second Revised Edition (2002). Never heard of it before. Time for a third and AI-enhanced edition, perhaps?

* The remastered Elder Scrolls: Oblivion videogame has added an apparently new official “Side Quest With A Lovecraftian Twist”…

‘A Shadow Over Hackdirt’ stands out for its chilling vibe and gripping tale. This quest pulls inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft, dropping you into the unsettling town of Hackdirt to investigate a merchant’s missing daughter. The place feels off from the start—quiet streets, strange locals, and an eerie sense that something’s watching. As you dig deeper, you uncover … [spoilers]

Oblivion was the successor to the all-time classic Morrowind. I played Oblivion to the end in the original, and I’d suggest it’s well worth considering in its big new ‘remastered’ blockbuster version. Blander and more generic than a re-play of Morrowind + mods, but very enjoyable as fantasy RPGs go.

* And finally, AI is getting startlingly good at precisely geo-locating the exact spot an image was made, just by closely examining what it shows. Astral Code has a long article and the tests to prove this, and it appears that even a photo of some random beach sand can be good enough. Could this emerging technology help Lovecraftian and pulp author researchers identify the ‘until-now unknown’ location of historical-biographical images? One wonders if it might also work on old postcard images of places?

— End-quotes —

“I have always been fond of maps & geographical details (I’ve drawn a map of ‘Arkham’ to keep my local references straight), & my lifelong antiquarianism has caused me to lay zestful stress on historic backgrounds & traditional architectural minutiae.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, November 1936.

“In the Boston North End [the] old tangled alleys have now been swept away. […] I remember when the precise location of the artist’s house in the story [“Pickman’s Model”] was hit by the razing process. It was in 1927, and Donald Wandrei […] was visiting the East for the first time. He wanted to see the site of the story, and I was very glad to take him to it — thinking that its sinister quaintness would even surpass his expectations. Imagine my dismay, then, at finding nothing but a blank open space where the tottering old houses and zigzag alley-windings had been!” — Lovecraft to Duane Rimel, February 1934.

“For the past year I have had such a knowledge of Paris that I’ve felt tempted to advertise my services as a guide without ever having seen the damn place — this erudition coming from a ghost-writing job for a goof who wanted to be publicly eloquent about a trip from which he was apparently unable to extract any concrete first-hand impressions. I based my study on maps, guide-books, travel folders, descriptive volumes, & (above all) pictures — the cards secured from you [Galpin] forming the cream of the latter. Fixing the layout of the city in my mind, & calculating what vistas ought to be visible from certain points (pictures seen under a magnifying-glass furnish a splendid substitute for first-hand vistas), I cooked up a travelogue which several Paris-wise readers have almost refused to believe was written by one never within 3,000 miles of the place.” — Lovecraft to Galpin, November 1933.

HPLinks #36 – Radio France, Lopez, German Cats, Space-Eaters, new Reanimator movie, a haunted ‘Arkham House’, and more…

01 Thursday May 2025

Posted by in HPLinks

≈ Leave a comment

HPLinks #36.

* A new Radio France podcast on Lovecraft, celebrating his publication in the highly prestigious Plaiades book series.

* A new article on “La influencia de Lovecraft en la ciencia ficcion por R.R. Lopez”. (‘The influence of Lovecraft on the science fiction of R.R. Lopez’). Freely available online. In HTML, so easily auto-translated.

* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated again. He notes he did a new podcast interview, now on YouTube. Also, that Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” is now translated into Hebrew and published, which sounds good. I presume it wasn’t translated before?

* New on YouTube, “The Space-Eaters” by Lovecraft’s good friend and fellow writer Frank Belknap Long. Presented as a 75-minute audiobook, with a suitable reader. Adverts, if you just press ‘play’ and view as a video. But no adverts, if you download it with Mediahuman YouTube to MP3 or similar freeware.

* Movie-industry trade paper Deadline reports “‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ Movie Remake In Works”. Sadly, it only hopes to be a “contemporary reimagining” of Lovecraft’s shocker serial, rather than a period piece. But it sounds like it has both talent and ‘cancel-culture resistant’ finance and it’ll happen…

… production and finance shingle [i.e. independent wholly-owned movie-financing outfit] Woodlake Entertainment is fully financing the project. Multi-Emmy-nominated artist- and producer Jeffrey Lewis and Keith Previte will produce for Woodlake, with the Lovecraft adaptation the first in series of elevated genre pics the company plans to develop and finance.

* In the Norwegian folklore journal Folkminner, “Ett groteskt och gigantiskt fettberg – om uppkomsten av monster i London”, on the latest real-life variant of a ‘London sewer-monster’. In Norwegian, but easily translated from an HTML page. Freely available online.

* Wormwoodania gets “‘Steeped in Antiquity and Fantasy’: Some Esoteric Seventies Music”. Specifically, of the British earth-mysteries / gothic / fantasy sort, digging out highly obscure bands which were issuing music from the late 60s / early 70s… “Fantastic literature pervades the ideas and images of many of the bands.”

* Nothing of note in the latest monthly update from the German Lovecraftians, but I see elsewhere that Gou Tanabe’s graphic-novel of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” is making its appearance in a 224-page German translation soon, as Die Katzen von Ulthar along with other tales from the Dreamlands. Set for a 1st July 2025 release.

* The sumptuous new Illustrator’s Quarterly #45 book-a-zine reportedly includes… “a Gallery of Doc Savage artists: pulp illustrator Baumhofer, James Bama, Ken Barr, Bob Larkin, Boris Vallejo, and Alex Ross.”

* A book title that’s new to me, on the history of the pulp-and-paperback industry — Pulp Fiction and the Rise of the Australian Paperback (2024). Appears to be a well-researched academic book.

* The Politically Incorrect Guides series has just published the Politically Incorrect Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy. 216 pages (reported as “243 pages” in Kindle ebook format). I’m not sure how deep it goes, given what are likely to be fairly short-and-sharp chapters. I think I’d want to see an author index before I shell out £15, and there’s no index to be had via Google Books.

* My regular Tolkien Gleanings reaches posting #300. The latest Tolkien links, with a strong emphasis on noting the latest scholarship and insightful fan blog-posts. No blather about movies, TV, fan-awards or cos-play events.

* And finally, be sure to make the Elder Sign and pass by, if you encounter the new ‘Arkham House Publishers’ outfit at arkhamhousepublishers.com. Apparently hailing from Sauk City, but unconnected to Derleth or his estate. Not only will this vanity press ‘publish’ any book you pay to have published, but they can also have their AI-fuelled shoggoths-on-typewriters write it for you. I’m not against AI assistants, you understand, but using the press name seems rather underhand and could mislead both writers and book-buyers.

— End-quotes —

“By 1899 my poetical outbursts had become quite numerous, one collection [at age eleven] being still in my mother’s possession. It is a book made of cheap pad paper, bound with pins, & is entitled “Poemata Minora”. It contains an ode to the moon, regrets on the passing away of the pagan religion, musings on the downfall of Rome, & such like things!” — Lovecraft to Kleiner, November 1916.

“The visible world is my circus and prompt-book, but I don’t take it very seriously and don’t give much of a damn what becomes of it. To me the most important thing — and the most primarily interesting thing — is opportunity to think and dream and express myself as I please.” … “As for a book of my stuff — I don’t think it’s worth bothering very energetically about.” — Lovecraft to Moe, and Lovecraft to Derleth, both March 1923.