I see that the first issue of S. T. Joshi’s new journal Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism is now available on Amazon as an affordable £4.65 ebook for download. Even if you don’t care to add yet more fiction to your tottering reading-pile, there are also enough non-fiction pieces to find something of interest for your fivver. Such as…

* The Cosmic Scale of Elfland.

* The Idea of the North in the Fiction of Simon Strantzas.

* Finding Sherlock Holmes in Weird Fiction.

* “The Weird Dominions of the Infinite”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Scientific Gothic.

There’s a new David Goudsward publication. He has made Old World Footprints available again in a new Kindle ebook edition at a modest price.

In 1928, Mrs. William B. Symmes gave her family and friends 300 copies of her 32-page travelogue. The book’s printer was amateur pressman W. Paul Cook … Mrs. Symmes’ nephew, Frank Belknap Long is credited for the preface, actually ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft proofread the book for Cook, and may have edited it as well.

The work is a very minor footnote in Lovecraft’s life and writing. But many will still welcome this new edition which is annotated and has photos.

It’s presented in 58 pages. I’m uncertain what “revised” means. The Amazon listing has it that it’s a “Print Replica” and “revised”. My guess is that “revised” may mean that errors of fact may have been corrected via the annotations? Or perhaps it’s just an Amazon thing, a way to get a clean listing so that Amazon’s idiot-bots don’t confuse it with the original?

Lovecraft’s ghost-written preface can also be found in Collected Essays of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume 5: Philosophy; Autobiography. David Goudsward’s article “Cassie Symmes: Inadvertent Lovecraftian” was in The Fossil, April 2017, and presumably the new book builds on this and provides the definitive version of it.

Late last year Tentaclii noticed the new book Ideology and Scientific Thought in H.P. Lovecraft. In my initial post I said the book was in Spanish, relying on the Spanish publisher’s page for the book and its use of…

“Idioma: Castellano” (language: Spanish)

But, according to a blog comment made here and labelled as coming from the book’s author Juan L. Perez-de-Luque, the book is actually in English. This appears to be confirmed by the free TOCs and sample pages in PDF. Presumably the publisher’s assistant did not have either this PDF sample or the book itself to hand, to double-check the matter, when setting up the sales page.

Neither Amazon UK or Amazon Spain give details of what language the book is in. I see the book is significantly cheaper from the Spanish Amazon, where it lists at the publisher list-price of 15 Euro, compared to UK price-gouger listings of £27 and £37. It’s not being sold on eBay, at present.

More news from S.T. Joshi. His blog announces… “another collection of my miscellaneous essays, reviews, introductions, etc” and gives the table of contents. Said to be imminent, The Progression of the Weird Tale will include a substantial central section of items on Lovecraft and Barlow, plus a critical assessment of two novels by Frank Belknap Long. Also memoirs of several fellow Lovecraftians.

Not to be confused with his already available collection The Advance of the Weird Tale.

S. T. Joshi’s Blog updated just before Christmas. The Italian translation of his I Am Providence has now published its second volume, of three, and covers Lovecraft’s life and work to 1928. Joshi also notes that the comprehensive overview 20 Years of Hippocampus Press should appear soon, with full TOCs for every item published.