New edition of S.T. Joshi’s The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, set for 2015…

Upon my return [from the Dunsany castle in Ireland], I hope to undertake extensive work on my revised edition of The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Mythos Books, 2008), which will be retitled The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. This new edition should appear next year from Hippocampus Press. It will be difficult to incorporate discussions of all the new Mythos writing that has appeared over the last decade or so, so I will restrict myself to some of the more noteworthy items; I will also revise earlier parts of the text where needed. The book could well be substantially larger than the original edition.

An entertaining essay-by-essay fisking of New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (2013), an expensive book aimed at academic libraries and the shelves of tenured academics.

By the time Simmons [the editor] mentions Donald Tyson’s The Dream World of H.P. Lovecraft as “an interesting biographical reading of Lovecraft’s writing” alarm bells were going off in my head.

“half of them [the essay writers] really haven’t even done the proper research”

Encyclopaedia of ancient Egyptian demons, coming soon(ish) from the UK, via a “Leverhulme Trust grant worth £158,000”. The organisers say that… “no such resource currently exists”. Hopefully the finished work will be open access.

Interesting to learn about the ancient world’s tradition of “dream-sending” which was apparently strongest in Ancient Egypt, where almost every book of magic has spells and suchlike for doing so. Possibly relevant to Lovecraft’s idea for the “dream-calling” of Cthulhu.

“Luven-Kerapht, High-Priest of Bastet”, by Richard Svensson.

Poe and the Visual Arts, just published by Penn State University Press.

“the first comprehensive study of how Poe’s work relates to the visual culture of his time [and how] his enduring love of beauty and knowledge of the visual arts richly informed his corpus”

1. Poe’s Exposure to Art Exhibited in Philadelphia and Manhattan, 1838–1845.
2. Artists and Artwork in Poe’s Short Stories and Sketches.
3. Poe’s Homely Interiors.
4. Poe’s Visual Tricks.
5. Poe’s Art Criticism.

“Poe integrated visual art into sketches, tales, and literary criticism, paying close attention to the sculptures and paintings he saw in books, magazines, and museums”

It strikes me that this was one of the lessons Lovecraft learned from Poe. It would be interesting to have a similar art history book on Lovecraft.

New to me is Haffner Press. They’ve developed a substantial line of expensive limited-edition print reprints of vintage pulpsters, for collectors. Sadly they haven’t then followed through later with cheaper paper or ebook editions, with some of the volumes most interesting to Lovecraft fans now being out-of-print. Such as Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One. And Manly Wade Wellman’s Complete John Thunstone, a sort of 1940s proto Doctor Strange. Wellman occasionally made passing homage references to the Lovecraft mythos in his work.

Complete John Thunstone art, by Raymond Swanland.

Oh flubbin’ ‘eck, now even the paperbacks are going limited-edition. S.T. Joshi’s edited collection The Ghost of Fear and Others: H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories is available as a… “100 signed and numbered trade paperback edition”. The book was last spotted on Tentaclii when it came out as a limited-edition hardback.

Thankfully all the contents are online for free, to anyone who cares to spend literally five minutes looking for them — albeit without Joshi’s fine textual polishings etc, and with “House of Sounds” being only the earlier version…

Introduction by S.T. Joshi.
Idle Days on the Yann by Lord Dunsany.
Fragments from The Journal of a Solitary Man by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Man Who Went Too Far by E.F. Benson.
The Mark Of The Beast by Rudyard Kipling.
The Sin-Eater by Fiona Macleod.
The House of Sounds by M.P. Shiel.
The Phantom Farmhouse by Seabury Quinn.
One of Cleopatra’s Nights by Theophile Gautier.
The Stranger from Kurdistan by E. Hoffmann Price.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe.
Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen.
The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford.
The Ghost of Fear (aka The Red Room) by H.G. Wells.
Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White.
Bells of Oceana by Arthur J. Burks.
The Wind in the Portico by John Buchan.

Adept’s Gambit: The Original Version by Fritz Leiber edited by S.T. Joshi. Limited edition hardback, 300 copies.

In 1936, the young Fritz Leiber wrote a 38,000-word novella entitled Adept’s Gambit and sent it to his new correspondent, H.P. Lovecraft. The older writer was thrilled at this sprawling narrative that mixed fantasy, sorcery, and historical fiction, and wrote an enormous letter expressing his praise and pointing out possible points that needed revision. […] the manuscript has recently surfaced, and it is now being published for the first time. This version differs radically from the later version [and the book also has] the complete text of Lovecraft’s letter commenting on it

Fritz Leiber in 1936. Hat-tip: Will Hart.

S.T. Joshi’s new blog post notes The Lovecraft Circle and Others, a new book I very briefly noted on Tentaclii back in 2012, but could find nothing about. The publisher has no sample or even a blurb, and the book is unlisted on Amazon etc. Joshi says…

“It is a most engaging work of reminiscence, with some surprising little tidbits — such as the fact that, in the late 1920s, Mary Elizabeth Counselman (then only a callow teenager) wrote a fan letter to Lovecraft, which he uncharacteristically never answered. Perhaps it never reached him. It would be hard to imagine the gentlemanly author not replying to a missive from a young lady. There is some other illuminating information that I will highlight in a review for the [next] Lovecraft Annual.”