Delicious tentacular b&w 3d steampunkery from Danny van Ryswyk, via the Mark Ryden end of Pop Surrealism. Not safe for work…
Danny van Ryswyk
01 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
Happy Christmas from Tentaclii
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).
‘Lovecraft audio before digital’: additions
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.”
“Strange and spacious realms”
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?
Lovecraft on LP and cassette
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.”
Weird Tales scans on Archive.org
14 Sunday Dec 2014
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
(A few have pages deleted because certain stories are still in copyright)
Wanderers
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…
Replicas of Weird Tales
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.
“mad winds and daemon pipings…”
01 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
In the new Journal of Sonic Studies, an essay on “The Imagined Sounds of Outer Space” by James Wierzbicki.
Lovecraft and Interstellar
18 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Films & trailers, Lovecraftian arts
Perhaps I’m just over-sensitised to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas, but it seems to me that the excellent new sci-fi blockbuster film Interstellar has some interesting elements drawn from Lovecraft’s fiction. I was expecting epic civilisation-building space opera on the Foundation scale, yet the film is anything but that. It’s much more down-to-earth, more of a deft melding of Sagan’s Contact and Clarke’s 2001 series. Click on to read spoilers… Continue reading
Feline Classics
11 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Feline Classics (Eureka Productions, Aug 2014, 144 pages), a new anthology. It melds new art and comics with public domain stories and poems. When you flip it over, it reverses into being Canine Classics on dogs — which is not so Lovecraftian. In the kittee section Lovecraft is represented by his poem “The Cats”, alongside an illustration for it. There’s also an essay on cats by Robert E. Howard, “The Beast from the Abyss”, on the rough lives of the semi-wild cats of a Texan oil town.
• Ancient Sorceries – by Algernon Blackwood
adapted by Alex Burrows and Randy DuBurke
• The Beast from the Abyss – an essay by Robert E. Howard
illustrated by Peter Kuper
• Dog, Cat and Baby – by Joe R. Lansdale
illustrated by Lance Tooks
• A Little Fable – by Franz Kafka
illustrated by Vincent Stall
• Tobermory – by Saki
adapted by Trina Robbins and Lisa K. Weber
• The Owl and the Pussy-Cat – a poem by Edward Lear
illustrated by Mary Fleener
• The Cat and the King – by Ambrose Bierce
illustrated by Johnny Ryan
• Fog – a poem by Carl Sandburg
illustrated by Skot Olsen
• The Cats – a poem by H.P. Lovecraft
illustrated by Allen Koszowski
• The King o’ the Cats – by Joseph Jacobs
illustrated by Pat N. Lewis
• What I learn from Cats – a poem by John Lehman
illustrated by Milton Knight
“that worm-riddled book”
06 Thursday Nov 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A fine ‘eaten away’ Necronomicon that also serves as a frame for a portrait of Lovecraft. I’m not sure who did this — it popped up on Facebook with no credit, and Google’s reverse image search picks up no other instance of it online.
Update: thanks to Mandalore for the name of the artist, Joel Harlow.
