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The Wind that Tramps the World

16 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Odd scratchings

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Two printings of a Weird Tales favourite tale of the 1920s, Frank Owen’s “The Wind that Tramps the World”. Thanks to Archive.org uploaders for the Weird Tales scans.

April 1925 first appearance.

June 1929 reprint appearance.

(Now defunct PDFs, seek the pages on Archive.org).

Note the broad similarity to Lovecraft’s “Erich Zann” (1921, National Amateur 1922), which saw a reprint in the May 1925 Weird Tales, a month after Owen’s “The Wind”. Only those readers who had seen the 1922 publication of “Zann” would have been aware that Lovecraft was not following up on Owen with his own “copy-cat” story.

“Colour” in Penguins Classics

15 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in New books

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Rather too late to benefit from the movie, Penguin is set to publish an £8.99 paperback of The Colour Out of Space under their Penguin Classics imprint. Amazon lists it as on pre-order for early July 2020.

The contents will be “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”, and one assumes they’ll use the S.T. Joshi texts and annotations from the existing Penguin Classics editions. Penguin has popped two quotes from leftist newspapers on the Amazon page, presumably in the vain hope of quieting a Twitter-tantrum about Lovecraft being published again under the ‘Penguin Classics’ label, aka ‘Modern Classics’.

As is usual with Amazon, the page currently has links that sidetrack the potential buyer onto utter crapware with the same title. The big publishers such as Penguin would do us all a favour of they were to haul Amazon in front of Trading Standards officers in the UK, and put a stop to this underhand practice. But I guess there’s nothing to stop a merry band of readers doing the same, and the political climate now feels right for such a move.

Journal: Gramarye

15 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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I’d overlooked a book in summer 2019, Shapeshifters: A History. A short, but seemingly sound, historical survey of this cultural phenomenon. There appear to be no journal reviews of it, but then these days journal editors are increasingly refusing to review titles not published by a university or prestige press.

But looking for such a review led me to discover a new journal I wasn’t aware of, Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester in the south of England.

It has produced 16 issues so far, balancing articles with a healthy crop of reviews.

The latest Gramarye is issue 16 and has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” by Simon Young and “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells” by Jeremy Harte, both topics on which I mused a couple of years ago (“On Jenny Green-teeth”, “‘Lady Wells’ in the High Peak”, “Mothlach”, and “On The Butts, Baggins, and Butterflies”). The same issue also has the review of Shapeshifters: A History.

As such I’m inclined to get No.16, but… it’s not on Amazon in either ebook or paper. It’s available from the university, but instead of a simple PayPal connection the eager buyer goes to one of those annoying clunky “sign-up before you can buy” shopping-carts. Which it appears only takes credit-cards. Then, a departmental assistant manually emails you the purchased PDFs. It’s not ideal.

It’s a pity that departmental journals are not also assigned an ‘impact rating’, in the same manner as a dept’s scholarly article-output. Such a official rating (which affects their taxpayer income) might chivvy up the publicity and distribution for such journals, and see a few summer interns or apprentices assigned to tasks such as getting them all on Amazon as ebooks. But of course the ideal in terms of ‘impact’ would be a big crowd-funder which would ‘buy out’ all the back-issues and make them open access, and then for a small legacy or bequest to ensure the journal continues to be open access.

Anyway, nothing very ‘Lovecraft’ except tangentially in some of the reviews. But other items of interest to me in other issues of Gramarye:

#14. ‘From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names’, Jeremy Harte. [Presumably on the noted Gawain word ‘woodwose’].
#13. ‘Tolkien’s style’, Colin Manlove.
#6. ‘The American Fantasy Tradition’, Tom Shippey.

Shippey has always been a bit sniffy about Howard’s Conan, so it would be interesting to see his take on that aspect of fantasy and its place in the American tradition.

A two-year subscription to the PDF version of Gramarye is £20, about $26. The paper edition is not much more. It appears you can’t back-date a subscription and have it start from, say, #13.

Cesare Augusto

14 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Picture postals

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I can’t imagine that Lovecraft-the-Roman never once sought out this fine bronze statue of ‘Cesare Augusto’ on the Brown University campus.

The statue stood in front of Rhode Island Hall, an exact replica of an ancient statue of Caesar Augustus in Rome. It was installed at Brown in 1906, a gift from M. B. I. Goddard, and by the 1920s and 30s the statue’s surface and pedestal would likely have become somewhat softened in tone by natural weathering.

Standing before it, many aspects of the man would have flashed in Lovecraft’s mind. Not the least of which would be that here was monument to a fellow writer…

… it would pay to study other languages … Even Latin literature can be known pretty well through good English renderings of Caesar, Cicero, [etc, though] not all of them [to be read] complete, of course, but in balanced rations as recommended.

Encyclopedia Brunoniana reveals that after 1915 the Hall housed the Philosophy Department on the first floor and the Geology Department on the ground floor and in the basement. One then wonders if a visit to Providence by the geologist Morton might once have enabled Lovecraft to go inside the building with him, and be given a tour of the Geology dept.? Thus also admiring the statue on the way in and out. The statue stood there until 1952.

Predictably, toxic leftists are now demanding it be removed from the campus.

Journal: Fantasy Art and Studies

14 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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New to me, a regular scholarly journal on Fantasy Art and Studies, which has already reached seven issues. Mostly in French, but the editors appear to try to have at least one English article in each issue. It looks robust and sound, for instance with an R.E. Howard translation in the Spring 2019 ‘Pop Norse’ issue. The latest issue is on Arthurian works.

They have a current Call for texts and illustrations for an issue on Animaux Fabuleux / Fabulous Animals / Amazing Beasts. Which might perhaps lend itself to an illustrated study of the creatures of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, and perhaps also the tightly integrated extension of such in The House of the Worm (1975).

The House of the Worm in ebook

13 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Have you been looking for the well-regarded book of Dreamlands tales The House of the Worm (1975)? S.T. Joshi has referred to it as (I paraphrase from memory) ‘an exercise in how closely one can write like Lovecraft’. Which, to me, is a kind of recommendation. Thus I was pleased to discover that the book is now a Kindle ebook titled The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2013). In early 2020 this ebook edition is currently on a heavy discount, at a somewhat affordable £7.60.

The Country of the Worm is Myers’s long-awaited follow-up to The House of the Worm. It contains that first book in a corrected edition, together with all the stories in the same fantastic vein that Myers has written in the forty-three years since.

“Corrected” because the Arkham edition of 1975, though said to be nicely printed and collectable, was also reportedly riddled with typos.

Note also that recent issues of Crypt of Cthulhu (#111 and #122) appear to have had short Dreamlands fiction by Myers, which I’m guessing from their titles may be new or newly-published post-2013 tales? These issues are also available in ebook format.

In 2012 the Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society blog usefully reviewed the original Arkham The House of the Worm, adding some detail on how… “Chaosium has milked it dry for inspiration for their own compilations”, re: commercial RPG game books for the Dreamlands setting.

In Norwegian, there’s also the blog review “Gennem den dybe slummers porte”, which shows some of the interior illustrations from the 1975 edition.