At the end of January 2024 on John Coulthart’s blog, he showed an early surrealist drawing “Exquisite Corpse (1927) by Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise”. The result of three-person collaborative ‘art game’, derived from a children’s game. He doesn’t mention this, but it struck me how similar this is to how later artists have depicted the basic idea of Lovecraft’s bibliophile ‘Great Race’ in “The Shadow Out Of Time”. Including the scale with humans.

The “Exhibition History” (the University of Chicago currently holds the original) only reveals a 1984 showing, but one wonders if Lovecraft might have seen it before “Shadow” (1934-35).

For comparison, however, here is Lovecraft’s own at-the-time drawing of the Great Race…

Not so similar, though admittedly the viewing angle is different. So perhaps it is some later artists who have chosen to accentuate the apparent borrowing from a surrealist experiment?

A new series of Lovecraft Country sourcebooks from the makers of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, under the series title “Arkham Unveiled” and with the first book possibly titled “Call of Cthulhu: Arkham”. Supposedly the series is to start publishing in February 2024 [update: Amazon now says March 15th] and will then grow to cover Kingsport and Innsmouth etc. Which has been done before by Chaosium, often several times, though possibly not in such a “thick n’ slick” format as in this rather sumptuous and expensive-looking new series.

New Miskatonic University and Dreamlands sourcebooks are also said to be pencilled in. It might be nice to see some inter-twingling between those two, perhaps with several of the professors having investigated first-hand accounts of the Dreamlands and there also being some way to access the Dreamlands via some “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”-like secret device at the University. You’ll recall that in the early “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919) the protagonist sees into ‘cosmic dreamscapes’ via a self-invented device.

Artist Francois Baranger has announced his next lavishly illustrated book project. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is currently underway in his studio, for a possible 2025 release. I think this will be his fourth in his illustrated books of H.P. Lovecraft’s tale. Innsmouth will be in the same artistic style as the others.

Looks to me like he may want some photo reference for the bus. His is too 1940s French. I found this a while back, the Newbury area bus from the correct time-period…

No sign of movement at their website, but one of the venues has some dates for the London Lovecraft Festival of stage shows. Booking now for February 2024.

Old Time Music reviews and explicates The Meaning Behind The Song: “To Life”, a show tune devised and performed a while ago by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. The song can be sampled online.