HPLinks #66.
* Due this month, the new book Twenty-five Years of Hippocampus Press: 2000-2025 (2025)…
This volume chronicles in meticulous detail all the publications of Hippocampus Press since its founding in 2000. Complete tables of contents are provided, and notes on the compilation of the books are provided by the publisher and in-house editor. All in all, this compilation is a complete guide to a pioneering small press in the weird fiction field.
* The forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long is holding its release date in December 2025, according to the current Hippocampus Press website. This date is for the Limited Edition Hardcover, an edition of 500, which appears to still be available for pre-order. It’s not yet known if the Brown University repository will release the scans of the letters simultaneously, or perhaps they may wait until the paperback appears.
* The Italian journal La Civilta Cattolica reviews the long letter Lovecraft wrote to Woodburn Harris, which is now translated into Italian and published as Potrebbe Anche non Esserci piu un Mondo…
the author is unparalleled in the century […] Lovecraft is a merciless pedagogue and an impassioned ideologue, intent on demolishing the three great illusions with which man tries to mitigate his dismay: romantic love, religion, and democracy. He is a racist, a nativist, a champion of the “humanistic man,” an extreme individualist.
* In Leicester University’s undergraduate Journal of Physics Special Topics, the short science paper “The Lack of Colour from Outer Space”…
We find that for photographs taken with a 1930s-style camera, the Outer Ones [in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness”] must have a refractive index that increases with wavelength, controlled by a dispersion coefficient of B = −0.59 µm2.
* A paywalled chapter in a new £90 academic Gothic Studies book, “Fluid Memories of Horror: The presence of water in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart”.
* Now freely available in open-access, the academic book chapter “Domestic Jungles and Murderous Megaflora: Plants in Italian Science Fiction”.
* In Danish, Hvad Maanen Bringer (2025), being a thick book of one-man comics which adapt Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales.
* Nick O’Gorman adapts H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple” as a 40-page comic-book. The Kickstarter has raised the funds, and is still live.
* John Coulthart this week revisits his artwork “H.P.L.”.
* Grognardia’s blog this week considers Lovecraft’s “The Other Gods”.
* This week SpraguedeCampFan has a long article on “Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith”.
* Leading Italian Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi has a new YouTube video talk on “Ungoliant and Cosmic Horror”. Ungoliant being Tolkien’s giant primordial light-eating ur-spider. YouTube can now auto-dub to English.
* New on YouTube, a tribute to Glenn Lord: Robert E. Howard’s Greatest Champion.
* New on CivitAI, a Heavy Metal Magazine Cover LoRA for use with the new Z-Image Turbo. Z-Image has excellent text rendering capabilities. Also of note, a 70’s Painted Art LoRA for Z-Image, which means fantasy and sci-fi paintings rather than David Hockney et al.
* The Internet Archive is running its annual contest for creative short films that use public domain material, especially the 1930 releases due on 1st January 2026. Make a 2-3 minute short film with an equally open soundtrack. The 1930 date suggests obvious linkages with Lovecraft. They offer no rules on AI makeovers of visual materials, but I expect they’ll want to easily discern your use of original footage and images. The deadline is 7th January 2026. To help entrants, here’s my quick survey of what’s (perhaps) entering the public domain in 2026, with a focus on fantasy, science-fiction and horror.
* At the DAZ Store, AB’s Master of Horror is a character pack for use with DAZ’s base Genesis 9 3D figure, which ships with the free DAZ Studio software. The character is not quite Lovecraft, but pretty close. And you could get closer since the latest advanced G9 series of base figures are intended for adaptation, having many sliders for easily tweaking facial features and other anatomy. He would however need suitable HPL-style hair and a 1920 style suit. For which you would have to look to the G8 content, since there’s nothing like that for G9 (I looked). All of which would make the purchase quite expensive — although in such cases the long-time DAZ users know that the trick is to wishlist expensive items and then pick them off during the frequent deep sales.
* And finally, there was once another Lovecraft at Coney Island. New on Archive.org is the Victoria Daily Times (British Columbia, 26th October 1893). The front page for that day relayed an agency report from Coney Island, New York City…
— End-quotes —
“So aviation ain’t come down in price even yet! Why the Pete do they wanna advertise it so much if they’s gonna keep it out of the poor woikingman’s reach! I’ll have to hook a ride on one of these transatlantick planes. If it doesn’t get across, I’ll have just as good a time exploring Atlantis’s weedy pinnacles & barnacled temples.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1928.
“… the rudimentary $3.50 taste [of aeroplane flight] I got at Onset in August [1929, Cape Cod] has given me quite a taste for super-nubian soaring; a taste which I ain’t yet had the opportunity to reindulge. I’d hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddarn useless speeding up of an already over-speeded life! But as devices for the amusement of a gentleman, they’re oke!” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1929.
“I know this has been done to death ever since Arthur Gordon Pym, yet none the less I think I’ll take a whack at it some day. I can imagine an aeroplane party landing on a peak far inland, & finding some glacier-crevasse leading down, down, down to the roofs of a silent & cryptical city of stone whose dimensions are not quite right — or I can imagine a natural (or artificial) phenomenon causing a large-scale melting of the ice …. with revelations better hinted at than told!” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, November 1930.
“It is puerile & silly to fancy that a man living from childhood in an aeroplane age could possibly have even approximately the same basic notions of distance & national isolation as a man living from childhood in an age of horses & galleys, ox-teams & canoes, impassable mountain ranges & unplumbed black forests.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.
“… there have been newspaper accounts of an incredible place in New Mexico — the Navajo country — called ‘The Desert of the Black Blood’. This is a ghoulish and desolate area of broken lava which is rifted by great chasms and which has probably never been penetrated beyond a few miles by any white man — or any living Indian for that matter. Aeroplanes, flying over it, have spied what look like ruins at its very heart; and local legends tell of an ancient and mysterious city whose crumbling walls now harbour carnivorous dragons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, December 1936.
Fell down a rabbit hole when I looked up Frederick A. Lovecraft mentioned in this blogpost.
Frederick Aaron Lovecraft (1850–1893) was the son of Aaron L. (1817–1870) & Althea E. Veazie (1818–1905), and he was thus HPL’s second cousin.
Under the header “The outsider. Something about the potent but unknown factors of the business world.” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, for the week ending 16 November 1889, Frederick A. Lovecraft, is called “One of the shrewdest and most successful business men in New York”. The article goes on to mention that he has “a factory in Newark, where he is the president of the Essex Watch Case Company, and is the Treasurer of the Coney Island Jockey Club.” And that “To compute Mr Lovecraft’s income would be rather a wild speculation, but his salaries, outside of the various manufacturing companies which he owns, aggregate considerably more than forty thousand a year. This is but a drop in the bucket, and he has not yet reached thirty-five. He is an expert accountant, and to this he owes a good share of his success.”
https://archive.org/details/sim_leslies-weekly_1889-11-16_69_1783/page/266/mode/2up
There is a drawing in profile of him in The New York Tribune, 27 October 1893: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1893-10-27/ed-1/?sp=2&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=0.305,0.295,0.999,0.589,0
The headline is “F. A. Lovecraft’s suicide. A well known racing and theatrical man poisons and shoots himself. He had become despondent through overwork and was mentally deranged.”
The same drawing in profile in The New York Tribune, 23 January 1894: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1894-01-23/ed-1/?sp=4&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=-0.026,0.063,0.561,0.331,0
A different drawing of him appeared in The New York Tribune, 6 August 1891: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1891-08-06/ed-1/?sp=9&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=0.211,0.054,0.482,0.284,0
An article in The New York Times, 15 March 1894 has the headline “Lovecraft a mental wreck; suffering from melancholia when he made his will”, and Dr. Thomas S. Robertson describes him as “practically a lunatic Aug. 29, 1893, when he executed his will leaving everything he possessed in the world to Col. Henry S. Kearney, his friend.”: https://www.nytimes.com/1894/03/15/archives/lovecraft-a-mental-wreck-suffering-from-melancholia-when-he-made.html
According to Evening Star, 27 October 1893, “Fear of Poverty Drove Him to Suicide”: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1893-10-27/ed-1/?sp=1&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=-0.045,0.87,0.377,0.222,0
In The Sun, 14 March 1894 it is said that the day before his suicide, his relatives proposed sending him to a sanitarium in “Orange county until he should have recovered his failing health.”: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1894-03-14/ed-1/?sp=5&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=0.037,0.028,0.416,0.246,0
In the L. A. newspaper The Herald, 16 February 1894, and others, there is an article about an actress named Mary Brooklyn who committed suicide in San Francisco by taking a dose of carbolic acid, and the grief over the recent suicide of her lover, Fred A. Lovecraft, is speculated to have led to her death: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85042461/1894-02-16/ed-1/?sp=1&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=0.491,0.561,0.511,0.301,0
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/136548864/frederick_aaron-lovecraft
Frederick Aaron Lovecraft on WikiTree includes a biography and several sources: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lovecraft-6
If HPL had heard tales of the mental breakdown and suicide of his relative growing up, perhaps he saw it in connection with his own father and mother both being institutionalised after mental breakdowns? These three mental breakdown and the suicide of Fred A. may have contributed to the “cursed bloodlines” occurring in his stories.
Winfield was hospitalised in April 1893, and Frederick Aaron was supposedly a “lunatic” by 29 August 1893 before committing suicide 26 October the same year.
Interestingly both Fred & HPL were theatre enthusiasts.
Also, whilst looking for Fred. A. Lovecraft, I found this short astronomy article by HPL in The Morning Tribune, 3 February 1908: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91070631/1908-02-03/ed-1/?sp=8&q=%22lovecraft%22&r=0.056,0.149,0.423,0.249,0