HPLinks #88.
* Due soon from Hippocampus Press, as a limited hardcover, Joshi’s new biography The Star-Treader: A Life of Clark Ashton Smith.
* Also forthcoming from Hippocampus Press, the Schultz H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and Other Notes: An Annotated Edition, also as a limited edition hardcover.
This exhaustively annotated edition, based upon decades of study of both the text and sources of the commonplace book, illuminates the origins of many entries—from events in Lovecraft’s life, books or stories he read, and other sources—while also indicating their use in his fiction, even in cases where the use of the entries is by no means obvious. Other lists and notes relating to the commonplace book, including such works as “Weird Story Plots” and “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” are also presented, thoroughly annotated.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news that…
I have nearly finished my monograph on Poe and Lovecraft, tentatively titled ‘Solitary Victims of Fate: Lovecraft’s Interactions with Poe’. The work is only about 35,000 words and not likely to get much bigger; it will be issued by Hippocampus Press next year. I have had great fun writing it, and I think I have found some Poe influences on Lovecraft’s tales that have not been cited before.
* The new McFarland multi-author book Literary Floridas: Essays on a Wild Peninsula Imagined (2026) has the chapter “Horror in the Sunshine State: H.P. Lovecraft, Tourist”. Judging by the preview pages from Google Books, the chapter appears to be a well-researched but lively introduction to the topic.
* The Complete Acolyte: A Historic 1940s Fanzine Reprint, available now in print. A key and quality early Lovecraft fanzine, now in print. I believe it’s also available as good page-scans elsewhere, for free.
* Now available in Italian, the complete run of H.P. Lovecraft’s amateur magazine The Conservative (2026)…
For the first time ever in the Italian language, this volume collects The Conservative in its entirety.
* Also new in Italian, a translation of the Joshi & Schultz Lovecraft’s Library (2026). Translating the fifth English edition, 2024.
* Feuilleton surveys The Art of Helmut Wenske. Scroll right down to the bottom to see two Lovecraft covers, indiscriminately used by the publisher Moewig for other books.
* An online conference set for later in June, Afterlives of World Building: The World of Robert E. Howard. Booking now.
Saturday 20th June 2026. The event is sponsored by The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, and will include pre-recorded interviews, two scholarly panels, and a keynote address by Sara Frazetta. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link and password.
* Sculptorium of Madness has a range of 3D printable figures for sale as downloadable 3D files. You can then print them yourself, paint them up as you like. I imagine one might also put them into home-made dioramas…
* David Thrussell & Shinjuku Thief Present: The Call of Cthulhu on two vinyl LPs, a reading with soundscape and soundtrack. Due 19th June 2026.
* Dark Worlds Quarterly exclaims “What?! More Plant Monsters!”, as more vegetable variants sprout from the old pulp magazines.
* Locus magazine reports “Subterranean Press to Close” at the end of 2027. The catalogue currently features Thomas Ligotti, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, and they have also published the nine-volume Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg.
* The editor of a planned Pop Culture Fandoms survey-book, apparently set for publication by Bloomsbury Press in 2028, is calling for short contributions…
I’m wide open to other suggestions. I’m particularly interested in non-US/UK fandoms and historical fandoms.
Send 200-300 word abstracts of your topic(s) by 30th August 2026. The aim is obviously not to be comprehensive with the book, as there will only be “100 short (1,000-word)” entries, when there could easily be 500 or more. So, you should probably also say why the fandom you’ve chosen is important to include. More important than, say, Elvis or Tolkien.
* New on Archive.org, the illustrated catalogue for Comic & Illustration Art Auction 114, December 12, 2019. Including Jack Kirby Eternals original b&w artwork, Mike Ploog’s Conan/Kull, and some Berni Wrightson pencil concept-sketches for a long-ago possible movie of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”…
* Popping up on eBay, and of possible use as a RPG prop, a local magazine ad for the Moses Brown school in Providence. “In the autumn of 1918, and with a considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he [Charles Dexter Ward] had begun his junior year at the Moses Brown School” (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).
* Those making RPG props and book designs may be interested in an excellent free Photoshop script to jitter the baseline for your text, thus making the lettering for a handwriting or calligraphic font more believable. Tested and working.
* And finally, Talkie: an LLM from 1930 (online test page) and talkie-1930-13b-it-GGUF (for local use in Jan.ai etc). Trained only on material from before 1931. The online version of the AI is censored, but the local GGUF is not.
As you can see, of obvious use for 1920s Mythos writers and RPG makers. Seems best on topics related to the USA, though verifying its absolute accuracy could be a problem. It could not run much the same query re: detailing a Birmingham – Southampton rail route in the UK (the ill Tolkien being brought home from the Somme), seemingly having no knowledge of the westerly route and insisting on going aroundabout via London.
— End-quotes —
“I am glad you found my modification of your story interesting. I may use that plot — divested of any element connecting it with your tale — in supplying one of my amateur proteges with something to write about. It does not quite conform to the general idea of my own tales, so I shall not use it myself. I have lately — by the way — been collecting ideas & images for subsequent use in fiction. For the first time in my life, I am keeping a ‘commonplace-book’ — if that term can be applied to a repository of gruesome & fantastick thoughts.” — Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, January 1920.
“I was afraid those disjointed things bored you, but since they seem not to have done so, I will give you a few more, as I have recorded them for future fictional development in my commonplace-book. Remember, gents, that these crude sketches are the mere dreams themselves, not the stories. I relate only exactly what I dreamed, not what I am going to build up around the dreams. I was walking or rather wading through a seemingly interminable and treeless marsh, under a leaden sky. My companion was an old man — a man so old that he frightened me…” — Lovecraft, ‘To the Gallomo’, April 1920.
“I think I have two kinds of moods in writing weird tales — one when I feel the need of scientific realism, & try to achieve a convincing air of objective sobriety against which the marvel itself stands out by contrast, (Colour Out of Space, Cthulhu, Whisperer, &c.) & the other when I feel myself half involved in the nebulous uncertainty of the pictured dream, & try to convey a hint of the febrile doubt & apprehension inherent in an imperfectly glimpsed vista, (Randolph Carter, Erich Zann, &c.). Of late the objective side has been uppermost, but that is because I have recently been writing from actual visual impressions gained in the New England countryside. When I get to a period of more fecund composition, & begin developing some of the odd items & subjective mood-jottings in my commonplace-book, I fancy the Erich Zann method will be called upon now & then.” — Lovecraft to C.A. Smith, November 1930.
“Glad you found the commonplace-book and cuttings of interest. […] Cosmic phantasy of some sort is as assured of possible permanence (its status subject to caprices of fashion) [however, in the future] its later & less irresponsible forms will doubtless differ vastly from most of the weird literature we have had so far. Like the lighter forms of dream-phantasy & Yog-Sothothery, it will require a delicate & precise technique; so that a crude old-timer like myself would never be likely to excel in it. Nevertheless, if I live much longer, I may try my hand at something of the sort — for it is really closer to my serious psychology than anything else on or off the earth. [… In thus] using up the ideas in my commonplace-book, I shall doubtless perpetrate a great deal more childish hokum, (gratifying to me only through personal association with the past) yet the time may come when I shall at least try something approximately serious.” — Lovecraft to F.B. Long, February 1927. Long had been sent the commonplace-book as it then stood, for perusal and return.