A 2023 open-access book details the history of the technologies of the picture for print. Half the book looks at the pre-digital days when there was effectively nothing but print, and no scanners and hard-drives either. The other half looks at the change-over period.

This new digital culture arrived surprisingly late in time for some. In my university department we had around 20 filing cabinets in a ‘slide room’ aka Picture Library, each cabinet stuffed with rack-sliders and hangers containing slide transparencies of fine art and fine-art and some documentary photography. I think the date of change-over was about 2005 (roughly the date of the arrival of fast home broadband in the UK) when we got a new hot and young ‘slide room guy’. In short order we had a consignment of new digital projectors and people started getting their own laptops or mini laptops (the EEEs, which could run Windows XP quite happily and had standard VGA output).

The screen-projected quality on a wall wasn’t as good as slides on a proper slide-screen, and the digital + laptops classroom wrangling of the equipment was often as painful as setting up the slides and a screen. But it was kind of easier, because lecturers had started using Powerpoint rather than the blackboard (yes, our purpose-built department had fine blackboards and we used them) and photocopied handouts. So unless you printed the Powerpoint on acetates for an overhead projector, or on photocopies… and assuming you could find an overhead projector or a photocopier still working… well, you see some of the many ramifying problems.

And all this assumes you could get into what was often a locked room in the early morning, 30 minutes prior, to do all the needed setup, tidy the desks and air the room. An all-in-one digital solution just made things somewhat easier, though the visual quality of the projection was only about two-thirds that of a crisp and well-focused 35mm slide in a darkened room.

I cringe today when (finding pictures to illustrate local creative industries news) I occasionally see contemporary pictures of dedicated ‘art appreciation’ lessons inside middle school classrooms. The projector is often being used in daylight under strip-lights, and the kids are supposed to be ‘experiencing art’ through a really crappy washed-out image. Which I suspect is often also of a picture just ‘grabbed from the Internet’ without realising how colour-shifted and cropped the picture has become. One often has to really hunt to track down the best available and most faithful/largest version of a famous picture, and of course busy teachers don’t have the time or discovery skills for that. Even if they did, the picture would look poor when projected. I guess the ideal is that new-build schools should have their own cinema-like ‘dark room’ for quality projection, linked to online access to a quality-approved picture library.

Anyway, I thought that those readers of Tentaclii who are editors, publishers and artists might be interested in the new free book. Especially those who have lived through the change from print to digital…

from the pre-photographic 1830s to the post-digitized 2010s [the book examines] range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization.

Wormwoodiana takes a look at Gary Myers’s Dreamlands tales in their original 1975 form. Said elsewhere to be typo-ridden in its 1975 edition, but the problem is not mentioned here.

It’s noted that the more recent book was a “corrected edition” as well as expanded, and Wormwoodiana usefully draws my attention to a further “2022” edition which had escaped me.

Also new in affordable ebook, S.T. Joshi’s compilation Ooze and Others (2023), being the best pulp shockers of Anthony M. Rud. Rud was an influence on Lovecraft, since the otherwise lacklustre March 1923 issue of the fledgling Weird Tales featured his tales of the Alabama swamplands…

“a striking novelette, “Ooze” by Anthony M. Rud, which Lovecraft enjoyed” (Joshi, I Am Providence)

Available in Kindle ebook…

An unusual item from Germany…

Against Religion by H. P. Lovecraft, Festa. Only 250 copies were published and there will be no reprints and no e-book. The selection includes his most important essays and letters on religion, atheism and related subjects. The structure of the book includes topics such as religion and science, religion and society, as well as general reflections on God and religion and much more.

I assume this is the best atheist-related essays from the Collected Essays, translated? Appears to be new. I’m guessing this may be the result of a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign, perhaps?

Newly listed on Hippocampus Press website (now accessible from the UK without a VPN, I’m pleased to see) are…

For the Outsider: Poems Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft which collects… “a plethora of poetic tributes from friends, colleagues, and disciples” and later acolytes. What a great idea. The listing page has the full list of included poems.

Those wanting even more poetry can find it in the new Spectral Realms No. 19, which I’m pleased to see includes “The Nightmare” by Erasmus Darwin as a classic reprint. This must be an extract from the famous The Botanic Garden: the Economy of Vegetation. This section (if given in full, rather than just the ‘demon chapel’ scene) is set near to me in the Staffordshire Moorlands. The section follows the river underground (it vanishes underground each summer). Interestingly, it’s also the very same valley used as the setting of the final part of the supernatural classic Sir Gawain & The Green Knight. Though Erasmus had no idea about Gawain at that time. My recent book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire. An investigation has the details.

And… hurrah… another table-trembling slab of letters from Lovecraft, in the form of the near 600-page H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others. We also get letters to… “Richard Ely Morse, Margaret Sylvester, John J. Weir, and a pair of brilliant weird artists, Virgil Finlay and Frank Utpatel.” Despite the page-count it’s currently on Amazon UK at £22.95, rather than the now-usual £30+ price for the books of letters I don’t yet have.

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society ‘Summer News’ page reveals…

a new Kickstarter project. The Shunned House: Recluse Replica is a faithful re-creation of one of the rarest of Lovecraftian collectibles: the uncut pages from W. Paul Cook’s printing of “The Shunned House”. We acquired one of these earlier this year, and now we are bringing it to you!

The Shunned House: Recluse Replica on Kickstarter. This both “A facsimile of the original, uncut sheets” and “a pamphlet-bound reading copy of The Shunned House”.

Or you might just sell half a BitCoin and send off $12,500 via honest Abe for the slightly-scuffed original…