There’s now a Kindle edition of the Italian Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico. The paper version can’t be sent to an Amazon locker for pick-up, so that had meant ‘no deal’ for me. Not that I can read Italian, but I could have flatbed-scanned and translated the pages and got the gist of it.

A potential buyer can now get a free 10% sample of the ebook. I had this sent through, and as a result I find that a Kindle Fire tablet will permit screenshots of books being displayed in the Amazon reader app (nice, I didn’t know that). These screenshots can then be opened on the desktop PC, OCR’d by Abbyy Screenshot Reader, copied out to a Word .DOCX then auto-translated. The contents of the new book are then…

Introduction.
Premise [of the book].
1. Distant biographies [between the two writers]…
2. …but not too much.
3. Shared readings.
4. William Morris and George MacDonald.
5. Edgar Allan Poe.
6. Herbert George Wells and William Hope Hodgson.
7. Algernon Blackwood and Montague Rhodes Tames.
8. Eric Rucker [E.R.] Eddison.
9. Lord Dunsany and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
10. Tolkien’s gothic and Lovecraft’s fantasy: the beauty of Perilous Realms.
Bibliography.
Parallel biographies: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

And here is the English translation for the one-page “Premise [of the book]”, clarified for sense and fluency in English:

‘In their mastery of the narrative of the imaginary, a mastery never again attainable, it is commonly supposed that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are polar opposites. Even now this is still the view, after these writers have over many decades achieved deep worldwide resonance with scholars and readers. When they have both strongly contributed to the modern re-foundation of a mode of storytelling whose ancestral roots are lost in ancient epics and the very beginnings of man’s literary adventure. When they have both laid the foundations of a real philosophy of the ontological sustainability of alternative worlds born from the creative imagination. Yet on the surface, one has to admit that there does seem an evident and apparently unbridgeable difference between these two master-artisans of the fantastic. Tolkien with his luminous living fairy tale of Arda, crafted with all the slow rigour of the world’s leading philologist combined with the aesthetic wisdom of a medieval amanuensis. The dark, pre-human cosmic horrors of the dreamer of Providence, tempered only by his occasional ventures into the fabulous and otherworldly ‘dreamlands’. Of course, these two writers seem two extremes of what critics would like to deem an irreconcilable dichotomy. One ‘light’ and the other ‘shadow’. Yet does not this seeming dualism assure us of the vast range of the narrative territory which they have mapped? They have shown us new worlds alternately capable of arousing enduring hope or sudden terror, visions of divine providence or blindly impersonal cosmogonies. In these wide gaps, where on earth might one find points of significant contact? The aim of this work is to at least shorten the distances — perhaps inevitably only via my circumstantial inferences — firstly by showing their common literary reading and their appreciation of earlier or contemporary authors. Then by discussing some subtle similarities in artistic and aesthetic sensitivity. I hope these twin approaches will make their paths to the fantastic seem less antithetical than some might have been led to believe.’

Turns out the full £10 ebook runs to only 98 pages, which works out in a Word document at 24,000 words for the body-text minus the biographies at the back. Regrettably these biogs do not run side-by-side by-date for quick comparison.

Via the screenshots for the whole book, and via Abbyy Finereader, I got a Word .DOCX file. This then went through Google Translate. Who knew auto-translating short Kindle ebooks was so easy?

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.