Newly listed at Hippocampus is the scholarly Lovecraft Annual journal for 2022, weighing in at 260 pages. Here are the 2022 titles in order…

A Tale of Two Providences: Topographical Realism in “The Haunter of the Dark”.

“Uncle Eddy”: H.P. Lovecraft’s Used Bookseller.

The Ripple Effect: Star Trek and the Lovecraft Mythos.

Solitary Conversation: A Bakhtinian Exploration of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon”.

The Appeal of John Martin’s Paradise Lost Pictures to H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft and the Folklore of Glocester’s Dark Swamp.

A Note on Nodens in Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Lovecraft’s Garden: Heart’s Blood at the Root.

The Authorship of The Cancer of Superstition and Lovecraft’s Late Readings on Folklore.

Painting in Word Shadows: The Role of the Hidden and Unknown to the Reader in Lovecraft.

“What Has Sunk May Rise”: How H.P. Lovecraft Re-emerged.

Reviews (four of them).

Briefly Noted

Looks very good. I’m hoping that “Lovecraft’s Garden” will be a perceptive study of his gardens — known in boyhood (also flower-shops), self-created in youth, visited on travels, and in fiction / poetry / dreams, and perhaps with a small nod to Belknap Long’s later wartime “Interplanetary Gardens” series of plant tales for boys.

Having penned the “Uncle Eddy” item myself — Joshi is kind enough to call it an “an authoritative article” in the issue’s blurb — thankfully I don’t have to pay for a copy this time around and one should be arriving shortly. I thank Ken Faig Jr. for his assistance with some of the genealogical data for this final print version of my “Uncle Eddy” item.

Also listed as new at Hippocampus is Arthur S. Koki’s 1962 masters dissertation (as we call them in the UK, no apostrophe) titled H.P. Lovecraft: An Introduction to His Life and Writings, for Columbia University. In 208 pages and $25, with the ebook version “coming soon”, the book is billed as…

“the first detailed account of Lovecraft’s life, written more than a decade before L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975). De Camp has acknowledged drawing upon Koki’s thesis for much of his own work. … it retains value even after the passage of sixty years, when so much work on Lovecraft has been done. Arthur S. Koki is a pioneer in Lovecraft studies, and his thesis deserves to be read by all devotees of the dreamer from Providence.”

Interesting. The book has a rather nice colour cover, using a photoreal rendering of Khoi Nguyen’s recent Lovecraft 3D figure. That reminds me I had the notion to see what might be done about improving the older Meshbox 3D Lovecraft figure for Poser, and I now have the new Poser 12 software which could accomplish that notion. Poser 12 has added the Blender software’s new improved Cycles 2 materials and rendering engine. This is not to recommend Poser 12 to most readers, as it’s still in Early Access. The $52 Poser 11 at Renderosity, is the one that most people will want.

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.