01 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
An interesting short survey article on the transforming 18th century understanding of caves, “The Mighty Cavern of the Past“, which may shed some light on the ways in which the young Lovecraft’s mind approached the idea of ‘the cave’.
Above: “The Dead Sea”, engraving of Mammoth Cave by Alfred R. Waud, printed in Every Saturday, 1871.
30 Saturday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Two books found on the Internet Archive…
Old paths and legends of New England (1908 edition)
Old paths and legends of the New England border (1907 edition)
18 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context
Some photos from the H.P. Lovecraft Photo Gallery that I’d not seen before, of Lovecraft in 1935…
1935: Lovecraft in St. John’s Churchyard, Providence.
1935: Lovecraft in front of the Sarah Helen Whitman House, Providence.
1935(?): Lovecraft in Florida?
1935, March 2 – Lovecraft in the doorway of his home at 66 College Street, Providence.
The last two look like they may have been made by someone familiar with American modernist photography.
16 Saturday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context, New books
Nodens Books has published a little edition of the collected works of Robert Nelson, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches and Letters by Robert Nelson…
“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. This slim volume collects all of his published poems, prose-sketches and letters, which date from the last four years of his short life. Also included are five letters by H.P. Lovecraft, four to Nelson and one to Nelson’s mother after the young man’s death.”
01 Friday Jun 2012
Posted in Historical context
Little Fugitive (1953), an innovative child’s-eye movie shot with a new type of portable 35mm movie camera on the streets of Brooklyn and Coney Island in summer 1952 — which must then have still been recognisable as the place Lovecraft knew just over twenty years earlier. (Yes, nit-pickers, Lovecraft visited and enjoyed Coney Island several times). The movie has been restored by the Museum of Modern Art. Not to be confused with the 2006 remake.
03 Thursday May 2012
Posted in Historical context
Discovery News has a new web article on the history of the relationship between humans and the star Algol. Algol appears as the location of the climax in Lovecraft’s fiction in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919)…
“You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence — you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Demon-Star.”
Lovecraft gives Algol as the location for a nova star, Nova Persei, which had indeed happened in fact…
“On 22 February 1901, the discovery of a naked-eye nova, Nova Persei, was announced.” — from: Agnes Mary Clerke and the Rise of Astrophysics, p.145.
S.T. Joshi says in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia that the…
“account of the nova [was] taken verbatim from his [Lovecraft’s] copy of Garrett P. Serviss’s Astronomy with the Naked Eye (1908).”
My recent book, Walking with Cthulhu, also examines possible borrowings from Serviss.
I’ve also just now found that Popular Science ran a long article on “New Stars” in January 1919, and the story “Beyond The Wall of Sleep” was written in the Spring on 1919. The article was triggered by the then-recent naked-eye Nova Aquilae, and recalls the Nova Persei of 1901…
27 Friday Apr 2012
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Teller of Weird Tales has scanned and cleaned illustrations of Lovecraft stories, “by William F. Heitman or attributable to William F. Heitman”, which appeared in Weird Tales magazine. This one is for “Hypnos”…
10 Tuesday Apr 2012
Posted in Historical context, New books
New book, Oceanomania: souvenirs of mysterious seas, from the expedition to the aquarium
“Oceanomania investigates the evolution of our fascination with the sea, in time and space, design, literature and art, revealing how the uncanny and marvelous have inspired artistic research.”
‘Mapping the Marvellous’ blog has previews of a good many interior pages in the book.
30 Friday Mar 2012
Posted in Historical context
Four new Lovecraft letters discovered and currently for sale on eBay with full transcriptions…
“Regarding copyrights – I never bothered with such things. The chances of pirating are really very remote & when a piece is professionally published, the magazine holds the copyrights [for the] “First North American Serial Rights Only.” This means that you are selling only the first printing. If an anthology copies the piece or if the magazine decides to reprint it, more pay is due you — though re-sale prices seldom equal those for a first printing. Re-sales sometimes (illegible) up quite impressively — my “Erich Zann”, for instance has been used six times in America and England. ” — letter to the young Robert Nelson, 16th January 1935.
27 Tuesday Mar 2012
Posted in Historical context, New discoveries
[ Hat-tip: R.E.H.: two-gun raconteur ]
20 Tuesday Mar 2012
Posted in Historical context
All-Story covers, from the 1910s run of this proto-pulp. One can see why these story magazines might have appealed to the young Lovecraft, who was an avid reader of them…
These covers were taken from a ERBzine survey of appearances of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. More might be found, from a complete run of cover images of the 1910s.
14 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Two rather fuzzy glimpses inside the original pulp publication of Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains of Madness” (Astounding, 1936), recently given away as first prize in a videogame competition…
