I’m pleased to say that a lovely Indian Summer suffused this corner of the West Midlands of England, if only for the first three weeks of September. Rich mellowness and fruitfulness abounds, even in the unlikely setting of inner-city Stoke-on-Trent and under the now rainy skies. In terms of new primary material on Lovecraft, September was also a rich and fruitful month here at Tentaclii, with much new primary material posted and many new discoveries made. Sadly this work didn’t translate into fruitful abundance on my Patreon, and the monthly total actually fell by $3. I have a feeling I may have to cease daily posting at the end of October, since at the end of its first full year the Patreon has obviously not been the success I had hoped for.
Still, my failed final effort to bring in Patreon patrons was at least a success in terms of new knowledge of Lovecraft, leading to a cavalcade of newly found and mostly visual items related to his final home of 66 College Street and also its views and environs. Along the way I also found good new pictures of Lovecraft’s “Prof. Upton of Brown”; found ‘Cthulhu’ outside the John Carter Brown Library; dug up new pictures of Winfield Townley Scott in his prime; of the “stacks” at Lovecraft’s local Library; and located and shared several useful c. 1928-40 street maps of Providence.
Patreon-only items this month were:
* College Hill from above: bonus pictures.
* Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: College Street bonus pictures.
* Westward Ho! – Lovecraft’s view. (Many new pictures and my new panoramic Photoshop composite of what his study and rooftop view might have looked like).
* … and a chance to bag a scarce print book on eBay at a tenth of the usual price.
New discoveries are still being made elsewhere, too, and I noted that a new R.E. Howard letter had been found. As for myself, I was pleased to find several more unknown memoirs of Lovecraft dating from the 1940s. My ‘Picture Postals’ post “Misty lanes at the end of summer” also spiralled off into the topic of cosmic-rays and thus ended up making a fascinating discovery — Lovecraft appears to have been the first to link ‘space weather’ with ‘earth weather’ and to write about it.
In my own musings I delved into who was the first to use the term “Lovecraft mythos”. I looked over the horror and historical-epic movies Lovecraft could have seen when he stayed in New York 1932-33. In “A little more on used bookshops in Providence” I updated my long August 2019 post on my newly discovered memoir of Lovecraft.
Scholarly journals blogged about included the latest New Ray Bradbury Review, a horror special; the latest Jack Kirby Collector journal, a “Monsters and Bugs” special; and Monster Maniacs #1, a new fannish magazine on the history of horror comics.
In academia I noted the First Postgraduate Forum on Research in the Fantastic, a useful addition to the scholarly landscape in Germany; a more fannish Spanish event with Lovecraft papers being read in Madrid; and that the USA’s Steampunk Symposium 2020 will have the theme of “The Weird West”. A clutch of new additions were added to my ‘Open Lovecraft’ page for free online scholarship. I noted a call-out for the edited academic collection Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century.
I wrote a long review of the Lovecraft Annual journal for 2015, having bagged a copy at a low price. In this I’m glad I didn’t skip Bobby Derie’s short “Six Degrees of Lovecraft: Henry Miller” as it usefully vectored me onto The Black Cat story magazine. Reminding me that Lovecraft had read it in his boyhood, and along the way I also worked out that its demise in 1922 must have opened the way for Weird Tales to appear later the same year.
I’m pleased to say that I’ve also been able to get a bargain $10 inc. shipping copy of A Weird Writer in Our Midst, so expect a review of that at some point. For a bargain £5 each inc. shipping I also picked up the Lovecraft Annual for 2016 and 2017, and these should arrive shortly. My thanks again to my Patreons for helping to fund these, and the ginger beer with which to enjoy them. It’s quite possible these will also get reviews.
A range of relevant art was found and blogged here, and two new artist-published artbooks of Lovecraft were noted. Several major Moebius exhibitions were noted over in Europe. The Lovecraft Film Festival later in 2019 was noted, but I still can’t find any report from NecronomiCon 2019 that’s actually about Lovecraft and which says something worth linking to.
New non-fiction books were light on the ground this month, but I noted T.E.D. Klein’s book of collected essays / interviews / reviews as being due to ship in November; and of course the publication of the second and final volume of the New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Surprisingly Klinger hasn’t done “Hypnos”, but I have an “annotated Hypnos” 70% done that I need to get back to and finish sometime and which will fill the gap in due course.
In terms of online freebies, I was pleased to see that (at long last) Machen’s autobiography is online in full, all three volumes of it. I linked it up, and added one more for good measure. The Vita Privata di H.P. Lovecraft turned up on Archive.org — effectively Lovecraft Remembered in Italian translation. Nice for the Italian readers of Tentaclii, as it appears to be firmly out-of-print.
Audio was not such a rich seam this month, and I was only able to note S.T. Joshi’s 8,000 word ‘A Short Biography’ of Lovecraft. This spinning sepulchral sonification has been issued on an LP vinyl disc.
Other creative writers making guest appearances in posts here were Poul Anderson (leading to my discovery of an acclaimed and award-winning 1975 West Midlands fantasy novel); and the Simak-like Ardath Mayhar. Both were conservative science-fiction and fantasy writers I had not encountered back in the 1980s.
That’s it for September. Oh, there was also the Comics themed issue of the free Digital Art Live magazine, which you’ll find is something of a crypto-Lovecraft issue if you squint hard at it in an eldritch light.
