Super news from S.T. Joshi’s Blog…

I have plunged into the treatise that I have been promising for years to write: The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft: His Rise from Obscurity to World Renown. In this month alone I have written about 50,000 words — and I’m only up to the year 1980!

Great, we need a good scholarly study digging in to his 1938-1974 ‘afterlife’ in fannish circles, and how he was understood and (often fruitfully) mis-understood in those decades. Ideally that would also survey the early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, and briefly survey the more notable early Lovecraftian artists and book-cover designers and their approaches. But that’s because I’m rather more interested in the history of recognition by the fans, fan-creatives and small-presses than by the sniffy establishment. It would be ‘icing on the cake’ to also get a brisk account of the later 1975-2015 period, in terms of the more easily-surveyed life-research and scholarly criticism, his wide diffusion outside the English-speaking world, and the slow and often reluctant uptake of Lovecraft by university academics and mainstream publishers.

Joshi also reports a fine new set of Lovecraftian fiction, and some essays and letters, due soon-ish in French from “French publisher Mnemos”.

Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith is now on Amazon UK in paperback with a July shipping date. 800 pages in two volumes, 1922-1931 and 1932-1937. Amazon UK has them for £30 each.

There at first seems to be no sign of them on Amazon USA, where general Web search will only land you on the page for the hardback, and with only a $150 used copy available there. Curiously, nothing then shows on Amazon USA when you search for “Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill”, even though the hardback has a known page-listing. Further tests showed that only the search “Dawnward Spire Lonely Hill” — without the comma and in inverted commas as a phrase — meets with success. This reveals the very elusive U.S. Amazon listing pages for the paperbacks: 1922-1931 and 1932-1937.

A simple search for Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill (comma, no quote marks) failed completely. On closer inspection this was due to the dumb AI at Amazon trying to second-guess the title. There can no such word as Dawnward, its pea-sized brain surmises. Therefore you must be searching for Downward. Durh. So much for rapid machine-learning.

Yes Amazon, you need “need help”. Help to fix stupid second-guessing by your search tools, a crude technique that should surely have no place in a billion-dollar high-tech search-based business in 2020 — not least because it fails at least 70% of the time. Google Search has also taken to annoyingly auto-removing your “quote marks”, if it thinks there won’t be enough search results for the phrase. Which reverts the search to synonymys etc. Actually, I’d rather like to know that there are no results for that exact phrase, and not be bamboozled into seeing a page of irrelevant ‘maybe, perhaps, sounds like…’ results, which are inevitably far astray from what I’m seeking.