Author Archives: asdjfdlkf

Amazon Historical Prices

27 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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A new UserScript plugs an Amazon Historical Prices graph into each Amazon listing page. Possibly of use to book dealers tracking price trends over time, or those seeking to buy a more expensive item (perhaps a few weeks ahead of the possible purchase point, as ‘the countdown to Christmas’ has reportedly started very early this year). One might even use it to spot trends (e.g. the item ‘tends to become cheaper for a short while, once every two weeks’) caused by an AI spotting page-visiting trends among other potential buyers. The script’s code looks clean to me.

de Camp’s other essays, more essays

26 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by in de Camp, Historical context, Scholarly works

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Spraguedecampfan has a new long review of Blond Barbarians & Noble Savages (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp. Not on Archive.org. As de Camp wrote of the item…

This group of essays is a collection of ideas that have come to me in studying the lives and works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

And news of a new book of essays, Beyond the Black Stranger and Others: New Essays on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (2023) being essays by Charles Hoffman. In Lovecraft…

* Flights to Hidden Lands: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – A Study in Contrasts

* Some Notes on Poe and Lovecraft

330 pages, currently in paperback only.

Fables, read

24 Sunday Sep 2023

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I’m now paging toward the end of the Fables series, reading through the 22 x ‘trade’ collections (2002-2015). This is the DC series I blogged about recently because the maker has sent all his Fables IP into the public domain.

I’ve only read one DC book in the last 20 years, and without the news of the IP release I’d have been especially wary of a book featuring ‘re-imagined fairy-tale characters’. To me, ‘re-imagined’ is a dog-whistle for ‘made politically-correct’. But a sampling of Fables found it to have excellent brisk storytelling, no political tub-thumping, and the artwork becomes very pleasing after the first couple of trades because it often somewhat emulates Jack Kirby (minus the krackle). Everything is very polished on the page, and as you’d expect…

Fables does have a bit of a creaky start during the first one and a half books, as everything gets hoisted into place. It’s also very “talky” for a comic. You do wonder if being forced to remove 50 words from each and every completed Fables non-action page would have improved the reading experience. Vol. 13 (‘The Great Fables Crossover’) I found to be a no-consequences mid-series filler and it’s definitely skip-able. But otherwise, great… absorbing and imaginative comics entertainment with superb storytelling. How memorable it will be in toto I’m not yet sure. Will it be like those blockbuster TV series, which gripped at the time, yet can’t even be remembered six months later? I have yet to find out, since I still have the last three trade books to go. But I read that the series has a “very satisfying” ending.

Apart from one passing and somewhat jokey mention of “Yuggoth”, there are no Lovecraft influences that I can see. But of course, now it’s public domain, there’s no stopping a Lovecraft crossover.

The Art Club

22 Friday Sep 2023

Posted by in Picture postals

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This week on ‘picture postals from Lovecraft’, a continuation of last week’s theme. A look at some of the little side-ways that Lovecraft enjoyed and ventured down. Here is what looks like a press photograph (likely made with the ubiquitous pressman’s Rolleiflex square format camera, possibly late 1950s?). We see the Providence Art Club seen from an unusual angle. I’ve newly colorised the picture, which I’m fairly sure is from the Public Library collection.

A little way ahead of the cameraman, but before the artists on the sidewalk, we glimpse the archway and cobbled entrance… which was where Lovecraft used to often meet ‘Old Man’ after the master’s return to Providence…

He belonged to a market at the foot of Thomas Street — the hill street mentioned in Cthulhu as the abode of the young artist […] Occasionally he would stroll up the hill as far as the Art Club, seating himself at the entrance to one of those old-fashioned courtyard archways (formerly common everywhere) for which Providence is so noted. At night, when the electric lights make the street bright, the space within the archway would remain pitch-black, so that it looked like the mouth of an illimitable abyss, or the gateway of some nameless dimension. And there, as if stationed as a guardian of the unfathomed mysteries beyond, would crouch the sphinxlike, jet-black, yellow-eyed, & incredibly ancient form of Old Man. […] I came to regard him as an indispensable acquaintance, and would often go considerably out of my way to pass his habitual territory, on the chance that I might find him visible. Good Old Man! In fancy I pictured him as an hierophant of the mysteries behind the black archway, and wondered if he would ever invite me through it some midnight … Wondered, too, if I could ever could back to earth alive after accepting such an invitation.

Opening letters…

21 Thursday Sep 2023

Posted by in New books

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A useful new page at hplovecraft.com details exactly what’s in the book H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others. Includes his letters to…

a pair of brilliant weird artists, Virgil Finlay and Frank Utpatel

According to S.T. Joshi’s latest blog post this is… “the second-to-last volume in the Lovecraft Letters series, to be followed next year by A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”. He also notes that the new For the Outsider: Poems Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft is in his hands.

Frank Utpatel’s jacket for Lovecraft’s Collected Poems

19 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Assembled from the best pictures on various listings, here’s a closer look at the fine detail and penmanship of the pleasing Frank Utpatel cover for the Arkham Press edition of Lovecraft’s Collected Poems (1963).

In Photoshop I’ve repaired a couple of bits of edge-wear and de-saturated some tobacco staining.

The scene must evoke Lovecraft on his favourite bluff above York Pond in Providence, overlooking the real River Seekonk. Though here the view of opposite bank of the wide river is more akin to Ulthar than to the humdrum East Providence.

And here’s a look at the full dustjacket, in which we see the full curve of the tree…

Of course, today you can obtain a fine edition of the complete poetry in its second edition, for which I recently made a free back-of-the-book index. It’s missing only one newly-discovered early poem from 1912, which was recently printed in the Lovecraft Annual and is on the Brown Repository here if you want to print it out and slip it in the back of the book.

Also, newly listed on Honest Abe’s site is an apparently “scholarly” Lovecraft ‘zine from the 1970s…

More Lovecraftian arts

18 Monday Sep 2023

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As we approach October, some Lovecraftian arts announcements…

* “The Shadow Over AFRU” – a show of Lovecraftian & cosmic horror in Portland. A gallery exhibition at the AFRU gallery. Timed to coincide with the Lovecraft Film Festival, then continuing to 29th October 2023. There’s still time to get 2D and sculpture into the show…

Bring out your visions of incomprehensible entities from unknown realms! Forbidden and dangerous knowledge! Irreversible madness from glimpsing creatures beyond the stars! Scientific curiosity decayed into existential dread! And, let us not forget – the catastrophic results of exploring the frozen, lightless corners of the world!

Submission deadline: 22nd September 2023.

* The Lovecraft Sextet’s The Horror Cosmic 12″ LP, due for release 27th October 2023. It’s a move forward for the group’s ambitions, being the…

first soundtrack to a yet-to-be-created movie. ‘The Horror Cosmic’ is a Lovecraftian cosmic horror short story which dives into the existential dread of the infinite nothingness. The album was composed as a soundtrack to accompany the illustrated short story and is an expanded step in the multidisciplinary aspect of the Lovecraft Sextet project. Therefore this release should be listened to as a soundtrack with compositions working to accentuate a specific mood to the specific chapters of the story. ‘The Horror Cosmic’ will also be release as a very limited custom hardcover illustrated short-story book with a special vinyl color LP.

* And don’t forget the Innsmouth Literary Festival in the town of Bedford, UK, on 30th September 2023. A rare Mythos writers event in the UK.

* In RPG games, the planned release of a Trail of Cthulhu 2nd Edition, revised in various ways.

* Lots of videogames too, which can’t be covered here. But I note that the latest trade magazine Edge (November 2023) has an article on the annual tidal surge of such games, “The Call of the Weird” and confirms that…

The videogame influence of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos is only growing.

Still no dedicated ‘zine for them though, which is perhaps something of a missed opportunity?