Chris Perridas posts news of a most unusual item, Lovecraft’s own annotated wall plan of his grandfather’s study, which along with the attic library is the ‘ground zero’ of 20th century horror. Unfortunately the online scans at L.W. Perry are too small to read. I’ve enlarged them and sharpened as best I can. You can make out what some of the labels say…

It seems there was a whole wall of cat/kitten paintings, which Lovecraft dubs “Kitten Row”.

I’d love to see this space and the 2000-volume attic library (strong joists! *) faithfully recreated via a videogame engine, so we could “step inside it”. Many of the library’s volumes must now also have been scanned and placed online by Google and others — would it also be possible to recreate the book collection in “virtual form”?

( * although the attic was apparently only a store-room or sub-library for the older books of the library)

Just launched, via Facebook (ugh) — the Fantastic Culture Preservation Society…

“Welcome to a fledgling network for the subcultures who appreciate horror, science fiction, and fantasy, which we hope will make up the Fantastic Culture Preservation Society. Through this network we hope to educate our community, and preserve our history.” […] “with the demise of many of the fan magazines … vast amounts of information about a substantially large subcultural movement is at risk of being completely lost.”

It seems at the moment to be very movie-oriented, an area I would have thought was already amply covered by the film archivists, various national film organisations, and indie DVD publishers. But it may expand and develop in future. And it does raise a valid point about the need to preserve archival copies of blogs and suchlike before they vanish (as they tend to do).

If you’re interested in the preservation of early videogames and associated material and fan works, there’s the Video Arcade Preservation Society and the UK’s National Videogame Archive.

[ Hat-tip: Theo Fantastique ]