S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of a new book by Ken Faig Jr, in the form of Pike’s Peak or Bust: The Life and Works of David V. Bush (Sarnath Press, June 2022). Available now in paper, or as a budget Kindle ebook.

The new book is described by the blurb as an “exhaustive biography of Bush … a dynamic salesman with boundless self-confidence who was part guru and part charlatan”, and typical of a type that emerged in the 1920s.

He had his poetry and some of his booklets revised by H.P. Lovecraft. Bush gave Lovecraft steady revision work in the 1920s, which helped Lovecraft to get through that decade. Bush was also an early promoter of ‘marital advice’ sex books as I recall, some of which Lovecraft may have perused before his marriage. So far as we know he never ghosted any of the sex material, though he is said to have done whole chapters of Bush’s homespun popular psychology booklets. No doubt Ken Faig Jr. has all the details on that.

Archive.org’s search has become as flaky and unreliable as Amazon, and is no longer trustworthy as a guide to what an author has in there. But here are the Bush-isms I could find there after some digging and round-the-houses trips.

What to Eat (1924)

Psychology of Sex : how to make love and marry (1924)

Affirmations and how to use them (1923)

Character Analysis (1923)

Applied Psychology and Scientific Living (1923)

Psycho-analysis, kinks in the mind : how to analyze yourself and others for health and prosperity (1923)

Poems of Mastery and Love Verse (1922)

Grit and Gumption (1921)

The Silence: What It Is, How To Use It (unknown date, audiobook version only)

Inspirational poems (1921)

Humorous verse on current events and other topics (1916)

Soul poems, and other verse (1916)

Peace poems and sausages (1916)

eBay shows he was still trying to pack them in to his lectures, by then for ‘health foods’, in 1950…

S.T. Joshi’s blog announces his new book The Parameters of the Weird Tale, which includes “old bibliographical articles from the New Lovecraft Collector (1993–99)” among other items. I don’t see the Lovecraft items in his World in Transition collection, and the old Lovecraft Collector is not on Archive.org.

The contents include, among others…

* An Annotated List of Lovecraft’s Juvenile Manuscripts in the John Hay Library.

* Lovecraft’s Earliest Writings.

* Lovecraft’s Amateur Pamphlets.

* The Sense of Place in Lovecraft’s Early Tales.

Parameters can be had on the Kindle as an ebook, or in paper.

Newly listed on Hippocampus, Ellen J. Greenham’s book Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert…

In Greenham’s analysis, Lovecraft’s cosmicism offers human beings limited options in madness or death as responses to the inescapable revelation of their own insignificance and ephemerality in the universe. The neocosmicism of Dick, Heinlein, and Herbert offers another pathway in the framework for how humans might respond when facing engulfment. Rather than yielding to despair, neocosmicism offers an experience that leads to the revitalisation of the human’s relationship with the universe it inhabits.

Were there actual Theosophists publishing stories in Weird Tales in Lovecraft’s day? Rather than just the occasional Theosophical Press advert and some writers who used a sprinkling of Theosophist notions to ginger up their tales? Tellers of Weird Tales investigates this week.

There’s also a new book on their wider influence, Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement, from the State University of New York Press (SUNY)…

This book successfully demonstrates that the Theosophical Society and its derivatives crossed all sorts of intellectual and cultural boundaries, and it makes a strong case that these phenomena — long ignored because of their heterodox nature — must be given the attention they deserve.

S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Of interest is that he has copies of both Lovecraftian People and Places and Lovecraftian Proceedings #4, so they are shipping in paper. He also notes that…

the Spanish edition of I Am Providence is out

It appears that this edition manages to pack the two volumes into a mammoth 830-page table-trembler.

And all for 32 euros, which equates to $33.

The continent appear to do book pricing differently. For instance a few days ago I had a new Polish book arrive, Mitologia Polnocy a Chrzescijanstwo which I had to have for my Tolkien book since it has a chapter on Earendel (not so hot as was touted in a review, as it happens). The book managed to reach the UK, new, for just over £10 ($12.50), including shipping. The low cost was why it was my first new in-paper book for quite a while. It was found to be very handsomely designed and somewhat thick, obviously not print-on-demand. How publisher Avalon can make a zolty of profit on such a price I can’t imagine. I surmised there was perhaps some state-subsidy for worthy books related to national heritage, but the book had no subsidy credits or state logos. Such a nicely-made and rarefied scholarly book in the UK would automatically be around £26 ($33), and I know from my interest in open access that academic humanities publishers whine like hell about (apparently) barely scraping a profit even on £60 monographs featuring unpaid authors. And yet now comes the whole of I Am Providence in Spanish for just $33.

What is the secret? Has some impoverished former Soviet nation in Whereizitagain decided to corner the market in offering cheap book design and printing? Have such presses just found a couple of generous Bitcoin billionaires? Or did the supposed ‘paper shortage’ perversely lead to such an over-supply that the book-paper and printing market is now flooded and thus dirt cheap? Answers written on a night-gaunt’s wing, please, addressed to ‘Tentaclii Towers’.

Newly listed on Hippocampus…

1. H. P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous Letters.

Various letters to circles and correspondents, fragments of letters to Sonia, and also the letters Lovecraft sent to various local and national publications.

2. H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others.

Letters to Woodburn Harris, Walter J. Coates, William Lumley.

Publication due in August 2022, according to the pages, and pre-ordering now. Both newly annotated.

According to Joshi’s recent “what is to come” list for the letters, by September 2022 the Lovecraft letters should then only have the following as ‘forthcoming’…

Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others

Letters with Frank Belknap Long (2 Vols.)

+ the single volume mega-index to all the published volumes of letters.

For some reason, from the UK I regularly need to turn on a USA VPN to get to the Hippocampus Press site. Anyone else outside the USA have the same problem?