We’re fast approaching the copyright release season, at the start of 2025. Authors who died in 1954, and books and magazines published in 1929. Here are some items I dug up, which may interest Tentaclii readers. Possibly there may be some I’ve missed, and if so please comment.

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Writers who died in 1954:

* Edwin Baird, first editor of Weird Tales. Books included…

The City Of Purple Dreams (anon)
The Heart Of Virginia Keep
Fay
Will-O’-The Wisp

In movies, the writers for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse.

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Individual unusual books of interest, from authors who died in 1954:

Verse and voice:

Aesop’s Fables Arranged For Voice.
The Poems Of Wales.
The Anthology Of Nonsense Verse. [Reed, 1925].

Potential for graphic-novel adaptations?:

Herodotus, Father Of History. [Presumably a popular biography].
Birth Of A Spitfire. [How they were made, 1941].
The Psychology & Tradition Of Colour.

Activities that don’t age:

Clog Dancing Made Easy.
Shell Collector’s Handbook.

And a couple of local items only of interest to myself, but I’ll note them anyway. Louis Mellard, whose 1920s books included the intriguingly titled Lost Romances Of The Midlands, Tramp Artist In Derbyshire, and others.

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Books and other publications of note from 1929:

Some of these may already be public-domain due to the author’s death-date.

* Aleister Crowley

Moonchild
The Stratagem and Other Stories

* Frank Owen

The Wind That Tramps the World

* Maurice Reynard

The Hands of Orlac

* Sax Rhomer

Book of Fu-Manchu

* M.P. Shiel.

The Purple Cloud (revision)

* William Seabrook

The Magic Island (first-hand book dealing with voodoo zombies, though a recent Lovecraft Annual essay convincingly shows that Lovecraft had invented the modern horror zombie)

* Joseph Gaer

Burning Bush (Jewish fairy tales)

* Richard Tooker

The Day of the Brown Horde (neolithic ‘ancient man’ novel, well-known in its day)

* John Taine

The Greatest Adventure (Antarctic horror-adventure)

* Forrest Reid

Walter De La Mare; A Critical Study.

* A. A. Milne

Toad of Toad Hall (from the world of Wind in the Willows).

* Lynd Ward

Gods’ Man: a novel in woodcuts. (proto graphic-novel)

* Anthologies

I see The Great Weird Stories (Duffield, 1929), and Master Detective Stories (Clode, 1929).

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Known to Lovecraft:

* Bertrand Hart

His Providence Journal “The Sideshow” columns for 1929, in which he jousted with Lovecraft and others.

* de Castro (Lovecraft revisionist)

Portrait of Ambrose Bierce (1929, actually revised by Frank Belknap Long).

* Myrta Alice Little

“Sweet Christmas Time” (published poem, 1929).

* Everett McNeil

The Shores of Adventure; or, Exploring in the New World with Jacques Cartier (1929, though some chicanery appears to have kept his later novels locked-down, when they should not be).

* John L. Balderston

Berkeley Square (1929 published play, later made into a time-travel movie greatly admired by Lovecraft).

Also note O’Brien’s The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age (1929), which was a book admired by Lovecraft.

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The 1929 run of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, and their contents. Note F.B. Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos”. I’m not looking at detectives in this brief survey, but I see Derleth’s first “Solar Pons” detective stories were written in 1929. Apparently they saw in print in the same year, along with the first tales of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade character.

In comics, Buck Rogers and Tintin first appeared in 1929. In cartoons, there’s Popeye the Sailor-man, and apparently the Silly Symphonies(?). Though trademark-trolls may still claim the names.

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Finally, in 1929 Gernsback first gave the name ‘science fiction’ to a new literary format. The first science-fiction fanzine appeared, Cosmic Stories. The first continuous science-fiction comic strip appeared, an adaptation of a novel. The first spur for modern ‘sword & sorcery’ also appeared, Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” (Kull, in Weird Tales). The anthology Beware After Dark! (1929) put Lovecraft’s horror “The Call of Cthulhu” between hardcovers, and the volume had wide popular distribution. The rest is history…

The Tearoom of Despair bemoans the lack of Marvels in the corner-shop…

you can’t just walk into a shop and buy a new Marvel comic book anywhere. So there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there. And they really did use to be everywhere…

Yes, I remember that well. Many small shops in the West Midlands of England had a spinner-rack of usually fairly random-but-recent American monthly imports, often visible from the window and priced for the British in pennies rather than U.S. cents. Sometimes they had a big job-lot of ship-ballast comics (cent-priced, U.S. news-stand returns?)… and then there were huge piles of American dynamite to sort through. And they were not sealed in bags for collectors to salt away unread either. Comics were later pre-bagged in the early dedicated comics-shops which emerged across the UK in the 1980s, and the buyer who wanted to peek inside was often treated as a pest. But in your corner-shops a comic was just cheap six-penny trash, and no-one assumed any lasting value. Which meant you could flip through and check out the art. Was that Incredible Hulk #122 one of the Herb Trimpe classics you had only seen in part in the British B&W Marvel reprint weekly? Or a rush-job where they used a fill-in artist? Nope, it was all Trimpe, and in colour…

I even recall encountering a huge ship-ballast hoard, age 10 in the unlikely spot of the newsagents in a tiny village of Banwell near the holiday resort of Weston-super-Mare. I guess the owner had probably got them dirt-cheap at auction in the port of Bristol or suchlike and hauled them back. The problem was, of course, that even if one could sift out a small run of one title, one lacked the pocket-money to buy them all up.

The British weekly B&W Marvel reprints, however (in which you could sometimes actually follow a story arc across multiple issues), were usually laid and layered on a newsagent’s wide horizontal counter. No spinner-racks, due to the difference in size and paper and the need to accommodate a thick stack of 40 or so. Weekly British comics sold well in those days. Often too well, as that week’s issue was often sold out by the time you arrived. Hence the joy of finding a complete story in an American issue. It wasn’t crudely cut up into three or four weekly parts, one of which you’d missed.

As Tearoom points out, it’s ironic that you can often find the cheesy spin-off Marvel merchandise, but not the actual comics. Still, it’s good that all the pre-PC classics are now easily available, albeit as garishly re-coloured and mummified reprints. For instance, £16 will now get you the Kindle ebook In The Hands Of Hydra, 440 pages of the classic 1968 Roy Thomas / Herb Trimpe Incredible Hulk. Whatever you missed and yearned for when younger, can now be had instantly, and perhaps also shared with interested young relatives. Great for getting boys to keep reading outside of school, I’d imagine. And boys do still read comics, even in an age of abundance with videogames, audiobooks, movies and TV shows galore. A robust National Literary Trust 2023 survey showed that 44% of British boys read comics for pleasure at least once a month, with a modest-but-expected 10% tail-off as they move from age 10 to 17. Sadly the huge survey doesn’t seem to have asked where these comics came from. Nor did they ask about any U.S. superhero / Japanese manga divide in reading tastes.

I would query Tearoom‘s statement that…

there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there.

Well, not physically. But if one ventures into the pirate websites, that is the very format. Covers, covers, covers, by date of arrival… and thus mixing new superhero comics, indies, kiddy-humour, and vintage reprints. No walled gardens, no locked-down reader apps. Pretty similar to the old spinner-rack at the corner store, I’d suggest. No sixpences required.

Of course, I’m not condoning piracy here, just pointing out it exists and kids can easily access it. If you have an income to spend, you should be supporting the artists and writers.

Complete Set of Weird Tales on eBay, in paper. Yours for $150,000 with Buy It Now, in what said to be overall Very Good condition.

Wormwoodania this week draws attention to a book of prose-poems by Arthur Machen. I see that the book, Ornaments in Jade (1924), has since arrived on Archive.org as a good scan. I blogged about it back in 2021, when I also weighed up the chances of Lovecraft having read it before writing Dream Quest.

Some final notes on Letters to Wilfred B. Talman, and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully.

Three small typos toward the end of the book, or at least that is what they appear to be: p. 484, begin = begun; p. 482, how = now; p. 478, had = hard.

Page 459. “The ancient brick building at the foot of the hill [is to go, in RISD modernisation, yet]… it will be some consolation to have the old familiar gable still in place, when one starts upwards from Market Square.” This indicates that, at least in 1936, Lovecraft’s route home from the commercial district was straight up College Hill. That would make sense if he was carrying heavy shopping and library books uphill in bags, since it was the shortest route home.

Page 460. He had been inside the cave system under “Lookout Mountain in Tennessee”. In 2020 I had a ‘picture postals’ post on the visit.

Page 460. Years ago, as a boy, he was fascinated by descriptions of Mount Rainier in the “juvenile books of Kirk Munroe”. The tale in question was serialised in Harper’s Round Table, a juvenile magazine, in summer 1896. Thus it’s not certain that Lovecraft read it in book form as Rick Dale, A Story of the Northwest Coast (1896), though he does recall “books”. Which also suggests he read more than one by the author.

Immediately after the Mount Rainier chapter in Harper’s Round Table is a long article for boys about small sail-boats, and we know the young Lovecraft was later a keen sailor on the Seekonk in such boats. I assume ‘keen’, because the Seekonk was a dangerous river and one would have to be keen to sail it alone and also land on its Twin Islands.

Later in his life his good friend Everett McNeil wrote books in much the same vein as Kirk Munroe.

Page 471. 1934. “Trips […] to certain historic of scenic spots […] leave a permanent imaginative residue which crops out again and again in dreams, waking thoughts, and literary attempts.”

Page 478. “… the giant oak with its brooding overtones of Druidic mystery. I have repeatedly dreamed of vast, night-black forests of gnarled, great-boled oaks, such as one sees in pictures of old England”.

Page 478. Lovecraft on swans. He associates the Northern lore of water ‘nixies’ with them.

Page 484. “I welcome any process which permits of duplicate or multiple creation [in works of art and sculpture].”

Page 486, 485. “Back to 1910″ […] I was a Shakespearean enthusiast and more of a theatregoer than I am now”.

Should you be visiting southern England or Normandy, appreciators of science-fiction cover-art might like to hop over to one of the Channel Islands. Throughout the rest of the summer, on the island of Guernsey, “Chris Foss: A Sci-Fi Journey Exhibition”.