Hot on the heels of my recent long blog post on “Lovecraft and Charles Fort” comes a new book. My post could only recommend the book The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction (2020). But the latest Reason magazine (ever alert to the forces of unreason) reviews Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers (University of Chicago Press) and thus alerted me to another one. The new book is set for release on the 3rd of July 2024.

The book’s 394-pages survey not only the influence on imaginative writers, paranormal research and crypto-zoology (‘Bigfoot’ etc), but also what the Reason review calls “the libertarian-leaning strains of Fort’s following, from the San Francisco Renaissance to the Discordians”. These are left unexplained by the reviewer and may be unknown outside of a West Coast crowd of a certain age. So I should perhaps explain that the former references the 1950s/60s Beat generation writers (Ginsberg, Burroughs et al), and the latter a prank religion perhaps best known to science-fiction readers via mentions its primary text Principia Discordia in the infamous Illuminatus! Trilogy of the mid 1970s.

On searching the Google Books version of Think to New Worlds (already online), “Lovecraft” gets 17 hits. So his posthumous intertwingling with Fort is not ignored.

The new University of Michigan Press book Legal Stories: Narrative-Based Property Development in the Modern Copyright Era has a chapter on Lovecraft’s works and copyright. “From Yog-Sothery to Property: H.P. Lovecraft and the Making of the Cthulhu Mythos”. The author appears to be a comics copyright specialist, and the chapter is of substantial length (pages 74-122). Due at the end of July 2024, but Google Books already has a preview of some of the interior pages.

Two new items listed at the Hippocampus website.

Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue in its expanded 2024 fifth edition. Which will be a treat, if I can get the idiot-bot that semi-organises Amazon to send me the correct newest edition.

I find I only have the second edition from 2002 on my shelves. Which means 148 new additions, for me at least. Due in May 2024.

We also have MORE Lovecraftian People and Places by Ken Faig Jr. Another weighty table-trembling paperback, collecting more articles by the master researcher of Lovecraft’s life and the people around him. Set for June 2024.

S. T. Joshi’s new blog post brings news of, among other things, When Chaugnar Wakes: The Collected Poetry and Other Works of Frank Belknap Long (2024). Available as a Kindle ebook.

“Ah, Sweet Idiocy!” (1948), being the fan memoirs of Francis T. Laney in a glorious Gestetner-vision PDF scan.

He fatefully encountered the Lovecraft-loving Duane Rimel, and begins by giving an evocative account of their friendship and (on pages 4-5) a detailed short biography and pen picture of “Duane Weldon Rimel”. As many Lovecraftians will recall, Laney didn’t stop there. He went on to be editor of the seminal Lovecraft ‘zine The Acolyte, and here we have the full story in his own words.

The find of the scanned original led me to find the free 2019 PDF and ePub OCR reprint in aid of the TAFF fund. The old inky text here becomes plain Times Roman. The new reprint also includes various expansions, explanations of acronyms, and some scholarly apparatus.

Rememberance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury (November 2023), begins with letters from the year of Lovecraft’s death 1937 and ends in 1957. The letters are presented in themed and clustered sections, and mostly face towards his contemporaries during that period. The book is substantial, but is said to be merely a taster for around 14,000 letters so far traced by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.

The hardback is available (though Amazon UK can’t ship it to me, so there may be region restrictions), but the paperback has yet to appear. Amazon UK says it’s due in November 2024.

Fabula reports the publication of Selection de lettres (1927-1929) in France. 86 Lovecraft letters newly translated into French for the first time, in a volume of over 400 pages. The Amazon UK listing has it as published with 600 pages and a hundred letters. So I’m guessing there may have been a truncation of the volume, so as to meet publishing schedules? Anyway, a vital chunk of Lovecraft’s letters, now available in French.

AI cover illustration, by the look of it, with no-one bothering to Photoshop it a little to remove the tall-tale signs. I’ve nothing against well-done AI images, but part of the process really should be a final pass by a human with Photoshop.

I assume these 82 letters don’t overlap with those in a book by another translator, Lettres de 1929: Juillet a Decembre published in 2021…

This collection offers us, in a quality translation, a selection of thirty letters written between July and December 1929, absolutely unpublished in French. Together with a very useful “glossary” of almost 50 pages, to help the French reader understand the numerous references found in these letters.

Incidentally, I believe Lovecraft’s translated tales first appeared in French in 1954? Which would make 2024 the 70th anniversary of the French discovery of Lovecraft.