The venerable and trenchant British arts magazine The Jackdaw requires subscriptions to continue. This paper-only magazine, akin to a Private Eye magazine for the British arts world…

has been withdrawn from sale from every museum shop in the UK because of its trenchant criticism (most of it from working artists) of the arts establishment. It urgently needs new subscribers to continue.

And over in Providence, the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences 2023 Winter Fundraiser appears to be ongoing.

A nice job… Associate Editor, Alumni Magazine, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Enormous salary, so much so that you wonder if it’s true. In the UK this would be a $28k a year post. Indeed, if they’d let me do it remotely then I could save them $50k a year. No deadline given, but posted five days ago. Details.

The annual edition of The Pulpster is inviting bulk submissions of free items to accompany the main bagged journal, or individual items to serve as prizes for the August 2023 event…

donate material that will be provided free to our members or serve as door prizes.

Sponsors and advertisers for The Pulpster are also welcomed.

Thanks again for reading Tentaclii for another month, especially such a grim month as January. And thanks also to those who have donated recently, or who continue to do so. You made my Christmas and New Year a little merrier that it might otherwise have been.

In ‘Picture Postals’ I riffled through the growing online archives of the city of Boston. I came up with a tour of the Ancient Greek sculpture galleries in Boston, more or less as they would have been seen and enjoyed by the young Lovecraft (relevant to his later breakthrough poem “The City”); I took a ride on the Boston Elevated railway and Subway (“Pickman’s Model”, “At The Mountains of Madness”, and “Nyarlathotep”); and dived down into the Boylston St. subway (“Pickman’s Model”). Further, I found an evocative picture of the Reading Room of the Boston Public Library (Lovecraft knew it because he comments on a painting and some Grail tapestries he’d seen there), and I took a look at shops and old houses near Lovecraft’s bit of Clinton Street, New York City.

As a request from a Patreon patron I made a quick survey-list for his chosen topic of “Does HPL have any ‘lost’ manuscripts?”, as well as pointing him to a Lovecraft Annual article on the topic. My thanks to Martin A. for a couple of queries and suggestions on that post.

In books this month the French had their sixth volume of their sumptuous new ‘complete H.P. Lovecraft’, and the seventh and last volume is due next month. Congratulations to all concerned on (nearly) completing such a monumental project. In other books, S.T. Joshi’s new Horror Fiction Index was released, which appears to be a handy time-saving ‘story finding aid’ on which others will no doubt be able to build in future. It’s the sort of thing that perhaps needs to be made into a collective wiki-like enterprise in due course, I’d suggest. I was also pleased to see that the latest (and possible last) incarnation of the definitive Arthur C. Clarke biography had at last made it to the Kindle as an ebook.

I trawled Google News and confirmed that Derleth and Eddy Jr. have indeed slipped into the Public Domain in Canada, in perpetuity. Canada’s sneaky new ’70 year law’ change is not retrospective.

In events, the London Lovecraft Festival and the 28th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival both had dates or rosters, and there were also Tentaclii posts trailing the forthcoming Howard Days and Pulpfest.

In scholarly journals I was pleased to spot a new Crypt of Cthulhu #114 (July 2022), which I had missed hearing about. One blogger also noted in passing that the Crypt editor’s Eldritch Tales ‘zine is up and running again. In academic journals I noted Inklings: Jahrbuch fur Literatur und Asthetik, and ALPH: Approaches to Literary Phantasy, both new to me. Over in Tolkien-land I produced the first two issues of Tolkien Gleanings, free in PDF, which does for Tolkien what Tentaclii does for Lovecraft. Regrettably Tolkien Gleanings has yet to prompt even one purchase of my recent Tolkien books. Sadly people have simply stopped spending on such small purchases, in the face of enormous energy and food bills and rising mortgages. The buyers who used to think nothing of spending $50 a month on an ebook, a bit of software, a magazine, and a useful service on Fivver, have all gone.

I was pleased to release an expanded free PDF of “The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright” in collaboration with Ken Faig Jr. Both Tolkien and Wright are (were) local lads, so I’m able to put my local knowledge to some use there.

Not much this month in Lovecraft arts, other than noting the HPL Historical Society Lapel Pins and a few nice vintage book covers. Though there is a wave of AI-generated art out there, if you care to look. In audio the latest Voluminous podcast was a huge one (I still haven’t been brave enough to venture in, and it may have to wait for a long six-hour rail journey), while the Cromcast podcast surveyed “R.E. Howard’s Poetry Pals”. Librivox had an album’s worth of readings in January, all free and under Public Domain.

New on Archive.org is John Buscema : artist & inker a little book from the 2000s. It appears to have been aimed at school libraries and 9-12 year olds — in the days when they could also have Conan comics on the shelves. Buscema was of course a mainstay artist of Savage Sword of Conan, among others. If you ever wanted to give a local schools talk / slide-show on the man and his art, perhaps even as part of Howard Days 2023, this could give you a head-start on getting to the heart of the biography in a way accessible to children.

Also new on Archive.org, and for the first time, a scan of the 1944 collection Creeps by Night. For many this would have given them their first taste of Lovecraft, here represented by “Erich Zann”.

I was never into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, having been unable to get past page 60 on what was supposed to be the best book to start with. But many love the rambling series, especially if they grew up with it. In the UK there’s a “Denizens of Discworld – 30 Years of Paul Kidby’s Illustrations” exhibition, at the Saint Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Hampshire.

The exhibition contains a completely new selection of works, none of them seen in the last exhibition St Barbe organised with Paul in 2012, which subsequently toured across the UK and Ireland. Most have never been publicly exhibited before.

Until 18th February 2023. Between Southampton and Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. I’m guessing this new show may also tour.

A serious set of proposals has been assembled to restore the Pennsylvania Station in New York City. The three options, one of which appears to be an actual brick-by-brick rebuilding, are being debated tonight in New York.

The (later demolished) station was where a certain Mr. H.P. Lovecraft arrived on his first ever visit to New York City in April 1922.

Comic Book and Comic Art Auction Tops $13.5 Million. Including…

Conan the Cimmerian [who] made his first appearance in the December 1932 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Fine copies of that historic title have long been increasing in price, but it took a significant jump in this auction, realizing $19,200.

Just the thing for a dull Monday, Plant Monsters of Amazing Stories and Plant Monsters of Astounding. Both new illustrated surveys by G.W. Thomas at Dark Worlds Quarterly, with his survey of Thrilling Wonder Stories still to come.

There was also a survey of Plant Monsters in Weird Tales back in 2020, and a brief look at The Earliest Plant Monsters in 2019. Also to be found at Dark Worlds are various surveys of the subject in pre-Code comics.

Ugh. The new Archive.org search-results UI is here. Cramped, ugly, bad use of fonts and sizes, and ‘flashing and flickering’ as results load and scroll. And as I try workarounds I’m discovering more annoyances. It’s obviously never seen the touch of a designer or typographer. They’ve managed to make it worse, not better.

Update: There’s now a “return to legacy search” link that wasn’t there a few hours ago. Phew!

Ahead of the newly re-timed Robert E. Howard Days events on 28th-29th April 2023, there’s a call to support the town’s Project Pride, by joining for a very modest annual membership fee…

Howard Days and the Museum are not all they do: they are active in helping to keep Cross Plains a clean and attractive community, and in many charitable activities through the year.

Picture: via Cinema Treasures.