19 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Housekeeping, Lovecraftian arts
So the Yuletide season rolls around, for another year. Happy Christmas, and here’s a rather excellent illustration — which can serve as a Christmas card for readers…
Picture: the UK’s Nelson Evergreen (the canvas name of Neil Evans).
19 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
Amazon has bizarrely suppressed a werewolf novel for having too many hyphens — which apparently makes it “unreadable” (despite the author having spent £1,000 on proofreading). Whatever next, Lovecraft’s work banned for alleged unreadability? And let’s hope they don’t take a peek at Ulysses or On The Road, because then Amazon’s grammar-checker might just implode.
18 Thursday Dec 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Additions to the ‘Lovecraft audio before digital’ gallery post. Many thanks to Dennis Weiler of Fedogan, for sending me more cover art from Lovecraft audio cassettes. Dennis writes of them…
“Our “Fungi From Yuggoth” is on [picture] 01, initially released in 1987 on cassette alone. As far as I know, it was the first HPL poetry recording ever released for sale. All of these J-cards are from cassettes in my possession. The R.M. Price recording is marked 1997, but I’ve no idea whether digital-format was released. It was a Necronomicon Press production, I think.”
18 Thursday Dec 2014
It appears I was correct about George Fitzpatrick, an Australian Lovecraft correspondent (see my Historical Context #4 and also Lovecraft Annual 2013). Drs. Brendan Whyte & Martin Woods of the National Library of Australia looked into the Fitzpatrick bookplate collection, seeking the Lovecraft bookplate. They found it…
“I instructed him to see if the HPL bookplate was in the Fitzpatrick collection, and indeed it is. Attached are photos of it and the card to which Fitzpatrick attached it. The verso of the card, presumably typed (rather poorly) by Fitzpatrick from notes sent by Lovecraft, reads:
GENESIS.
The georgian doorway with a suggestion of a tall flight of outside steps, serves a three-fold symbolic purpose. 1. The doorway quality of all books, whereby they serve to admit the reader to strange and spacious realms. 2. It typifies the urban scene in which he has spent his life, the quaint hill streets of Old Providence scarcely changed in a century and a half, 3- symbolises his personal antiquarian tastes.
ARTIST. Wilfred Blanch Tolman.”
A note in pencil on the side states: “Don[or]. Mrs G. Fitzpatrick. 7.12.[19]49”
I would agree that the typed card must be Fitzpatrick’s summary of a Lovecraft letter which had accompanied the bookplate to Australia, and which had been discarded. The words “The doorway quality of all books, whereby they serve to admit the reader to strange and spacious realms.” certainly sound like they could be Lovecraft’s own.
One wonders if this was the limit of the correspondence, or if there were later letters between the two men?
17 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Historical context, New books
News of a new book of Lovecraft letters, from S.T. Joshi…
David E. Schultz and I are working hard on getting Lovecraft’s Letters to Robert Bloch ready for publication with Hippocampus Press. It will also include letters to Natalie H. Wooley, Robert Nelson, William Frederick Anger, Kenneth Sterling, Donald A. Wollheim, Wilson Shepherd, and Willis Conover. A fat book! This could be published as early as February 2015. After that — the joint correspondence of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith!”
* Robert Nelson (1912-1935) isn’t in The Lovecraft Encyclopaedia. But there is information here. The blurb for a 2012 book collection of his work, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters, gives a biographical outline…
Robert Nelson (1912-1935) was a contributor of verse to Weird Tales magazine in the mid-1930s, and of verse and prose to fan magazines like The Fantasy Fan. He was also a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. … Also included [in the book] are five [1930s] letters by H.P. Lovecraft”
* Natalie Hartley Wooley corresponded 1933–37. She was a poet of the amateur journalism movement, with poetry in The Tryout and probably other amateur journals. She also had poetry and at least one “straight ghost story” in The Fantasy Fan, plus a lead essay on “The Adventure Story” in The Californian (Fall 1935) which had an early critical appraisal of a Conan story. Lovecraft’s letters to her appear to have had much to say on race relations, pungent extracts from which have already been published in Selected Letters.
* Wilson Shepherd was a friend of Wollheim, publishing the forerunner (Fanciful Tales?) to The Phantagraph. He corresponded 1936-37, and Lovecraft revised a couple of his poems. He published “A History of the Necronomicon” in pamphlet form in 1937.
14 Sunday Dec 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Lovecraft in audio, before digital…
UPDATE: Additions to the ‘Lovecraft audio before digital’ gallery post. Many thanks to Dennis Weiler of Fedogan, for sending me more cover art from Lovecraft audio cassettes. Dennis writes of them…
“Our “Fungi From Yuggoth” is on [picture] 01, initially released in 1987 on cassette alone. As far as I know, it was the first HPL poetry recording ever released for sale. All of these J-cards are from cassettes in my possession. The R.M. Price recording is marked 1997, but I’ve no idea whether digital-format was released. It was a Necronomicon Press production, I think.”
14 Sunday Dec 2014
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
(A few have pages deleted because certain stories are still in copyright)
12 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Historical context
Samuel Loveman letter from 1972, regretting that he had to sell Clark Ashton Smith’s letters and manuscripts.
12 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Historical context
An interesting and plausible suggestion that the Henry S. Whitehead story “No Eye-Witnesses” (pub. August 1932) might have had its ideas influenced by Lovecraft. In terms of: the protagonist’s “visit with his ageing father in Brooklyn” (specifically Flatbush, where the ‘old gent’ Lovecraft had lived); the New York City subway (which came to nauseate Lovecraft); and the time-travel idea (favourite Lovecraft daydream theme). The circa Q1-Q2 1932 writing date (copyright was registered 1st July) is also very congruent: Lovecraft had an extensive stay with Whitehead in summer 1931, during which they co-wrote “The Trap” and likely discussed his New York City breakdown. The H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopaedia notes the two worked on another story with a broadly similar ‘time slip’ approach…
In the spring and summer of 1932 HPL appears to have assisted Whitehead on another story, apparently titled “The Bruise.” [later “Bothon”, according to Joshi] This story (about a man who experiences strange visions after receiving a blow to the head) had been rejected by Strange Tales as too tame, and HPL devised an elaborate plot involving the man’s access to hereditary memory, so that he sees in his mind his distant ancestor’s experience of the destruction of the Pacific continent of Mu 20,000 years ago.”
“No Eye-Witnesses” is available in the new Wordsworth budget paperback and Kindle ebook Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. The Kindle version is currently available at half-price on Amazon UK.
12 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A fine new sci-fi short movie, Wanderers, from director Erik Wernquist of Sweden. It captures something of the nature of ‘cosmic awe’, although is perhaps more Asimov/Clarke than Lovecraft…
12 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
“Page-by-page” replicas of Weird Tales. The store includes notable contents + a cover for all issues from the Lovecraft / Howard years. Evidently the ‘scanty gals’ covers only started appearing from May 1933.
$34.95 each. The store-front makes no mention of the size of the replica, which makes me suspect they might be smaller than the original newsstand edition. “Page-by-page” also doesn’t quite reassure me that the adverts and the letters pages are included. The seller might sell more if he could place a YouTube video on the store, showing an example replica being flipped through.
10 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
* Isabella van Elferen (2014), “Hyper-Cacophony: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism”, IN Carl Sederholm and Jeffrey Weinstock (Eds.), The Age of Lovecraft, Palgrave 2015. (Pre proof version of the essay. Lovecraft in speculative realist philosophy, with a focus on Lovecraft’s symbolic use of music and more inconceivable sonics).
Appears to be destined for The Age of Lovecraft: Cosmic Horror, Posthumanism, and Popular Culture, a forthcoming book on “Lovecraft’s place in contemporary culture”.