The snow lies crisp around Tentaclii Towers. But, wrapped up in warm layers, I’ve still managed to keep up with the daily blogging. In my weekly ‘Picture Postals’ posts at Tentaclii I looked into De Leon Springs, the local attraction near the Barlow’s Florida homestead; at Lovecraft and soda-fountains; at the Providence Woolworth’s store where the low prices of genial Mr. Woolworth helped Lovecraft out in depths of the Great Depression: and finally I considered if prehistoric flying pterodactyls might have been one of the origins of Lovecraft’s childhood ‘night-gaunts’. They were mostly likely not, but it was worth looking into the possibility.

I also looked into the likely pre-America whereabouts of Helen Allgood (1820–1881), Lovecraft’s paternal grandmother (married 1839). It was she and her husband who gave him the (apparently now-unproveable) Northumberland connection in the north of England. As I’ve shown in one of my earlier essays, this connection strongly influenced the topography and details of “The Rats in the Walls”. I made a quick survey of Lovecraft and his Epicurean enjoyment of Thanksgiving. I was spurred (by The Living Age journal coming onto Archive.org) to look briefly at Lovecraft’s curious non-reading of Haggard in 1920, at a time when several correspondents were strongly urging it.

November brought a surprisingly good crop of books, when you might have expected most to have been out by Halloween. S.T. Joshi released the new The Recognition of H. P. Lovecraft; the scholarly booklet Copyright Questions and the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft appeared; there was news of a new uniform set called the Robert H. Waugh Library of Lovecraftian Criticism, including a wholly new third book of essays by Waugh; two substantial new non-fiction items on R. E. Howard; a festschrift of essays in Italian for the major Italian scholar and Lovecraftian anthologist Gianfranco de Turris, and the apparent arrival of the long-awaited book Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations.

There was nothing in academic journals this month, as the academic year is now in full pelt. Thankfully I’m no longer a part of all that, except remotely via JURN. But there was news of the forthcoming scholarly journal Wormwood #37. The ‘Gothic’ edition of the free Digital Art Live magazine was also circulating this month, in which I paid suitable attention to Lovecraft. The Christmas issue of Digital Art Live will be a bumper tribute to the comics artist ‘Moebius’.

November saw Sonia’s amateur journalism The Rainbow, Vol. 2 No. II (1922) arrive on Archive.org, an important Lovecraft document in an excellent scan. Also the stencil-duplicated book-a-zine Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium.

I linked the call for the work for the book Felis Futura: An Anthology of Future Cats, and noted the forthcoming symposium ‘The Inklings and Horror: Fantasy’s Dark Corners’ which may interest some and eventually result in a publication. I even found some sparse details of an academic mapping project titled ‘Visualizing Lovecraft’s Providence’.

It was a good month for open scholarly archives, I noticed that the Hevelin Fanzines collection scans are now 100% transcribed, including a number of key early Lovecraft ‘zines. I saw that the Keith-Albee Collection of Lovecraft-era Providence vaudeville theatre is now fully transcribed and publicly searchable online. Also newly freed from microfilm are Munsey’s Magazine, 1891-1929 and the Illustrated London News 1842-2003. These Archive.org runs may be of use to researchers on Lovecraft and his Circle.

Not much in podcasts this month, but I noted a one-hour one with S.T. Joshi on Arthur Machen. With the release of the new AIMP 5.0 software audio player, I also puzzled out its new audiobook bookmarking arrangements. And at last worked out how to make the BBC’s 1973 adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation series listenable on headphones, without being deafened by the music.

In the arts I noted there is a video-essay survey of “Weird Swords and Sandals” lurking on a new DVD, with a focus on obscure European cinema in the 1950-70s. Various bits of Lovecraftian visual art were of course noted here, as well as eBay sale pictures of the 1980 Necronomicon Press “Lovecraft Paper Cut-Outs” packet.

Various ‘Black Friday’ sales of likely use to scholars were noted and linked. At Chaosium I spotted deep discounts on three warehouse-clearance Robert E. Price anthologies of various cycles in the Mythos.

I’m still hoping that someone may be able to supply a zipped local folder of the missing Tentaclii images, which they may have acquired by spidering the blog to create a local archive. I’m fairly sure I had one, but the ill-timed hard-disk crash some months back likely took it.

My thanks to my patrons who have stuck with me during the abrupt Web address swop-over, and/or who have been able to increase or to begin their Patreon support this month. I’ve also for the first time ever made the same direct appeal to people who read my various other projects. I have not yet looked at the resulting current total (due in on the 5th), but I still have hopes of Patreon building to an increasingly-vital $100 or more a month. Tentaclii readers who want to help me out can also buy my books or the poster set, or just send a one-off PayPal donation. Many thanks.

66.6% off older Chaosium paperback titles that are lingering in the warehouse. Including Robert M. Price’s anthology The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab (2nd edition); his The Yith Cycle: Lovecraftian Tales of the Great Race and Time Travel; and his Antarktos Cycle: Horror and Wonder at the Ends of the Earth.

Plus get an additional 10% off your order site-wide until Nov 30th with the BLACKFRI21 coupon code.

A few discounts of likely interest to the books-and-publishing crowd…

* The latest PDF Index Generator, for making back-of-the-book indexes, 30% off with the BF30 coupon code. The best such budget-priced indexer, in my view.

* Serif currently has 30% off everything in its budget-priced Affinity range of software. Including their DTP software. I’ve never used it, knowing instead InDesign and Microsoft Publisher, but it gets good reviews.

* DxO Viewpoint 3 is deeply discounted. If you’re a researcher who makes lots of architectural photos on trips, it automatically straightens verticals and horizontals. Far more than just another ‘lens distortion fixer’ plugin, and recommended.

* Topaz GigaPixel AI can currently be had for $75 (25% off), for up-scaling pictures. It can’t work miracles all the time, but most of the time it does.

No discounts yet on Docfetcher Pro (full-text desktop search), or Booksorber (quickly digitize books).

Another Town on the Hudson visits Lovecraft’s Providence by train and goes walking on College Hill…

Watching the New England landscape — foliage, marshland, and coastline from my train seat, I felt as if I crossed a palpable, yet invisible boundary.

Currently on Abe, albeit at large prices.

1. HPL (1937)…

Eight poems by Lovecraft … Twenty-five copies were printed and given free to whoever paid a year’s subscription of 25¢ to Stickney’s AMATEUR CORRESPONDENT

2. Hail, Klarkash-ton! : Being Nine Missives Inscribed Upon Postcards by H.P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith (1971)

I presume these are now published in the Lovecraft-Smith letters.

Bloody, Spicy, Books has a new post The Shadow & Me, which points to the way in which even terrible movies can be formative experiences for kids who (at the time) knew no better. The 1990s screen world of Batman, Dick Tracy (ugh), The Rocketeer (Disney lavish version, ok-ish), and early Indiana Jones series all proved a formative environment for Bloody, Spicy, and led to print and to the ‘better Batman‘ of The Shadow, and Doc Savage. Of course, a lad who gets into print is perhaps a rarity, and I imagine that many other kids of the period may also have been influenced by the related pulpy games of the time (the classic videogame Crimson Skies springs to mind) and went haring off into a lifelong focus on videogames and RPGs.

But that was the 1990s, still largely a ‘take it when you can get it’ media world, even with VHS tapes and later DVDs. Even DVDs were expensive until the ‘3 for £10’ discounting of the early/mid 2000s allowed the creation of fledgling personal collections. The mass Internet only really arrived in 1995/6 and a lukewarm broadband and casual movie-downloading a decade later (for most people). 25 years later we are of course in a different world of abundance, with increasingly few rarities — usually obscurities that sit at the fringes.

As such it’s interesting to muse on how the ‘all you can eat, all tastes catered for’ superfast buffet of media has been affecting kids over the last decade, when ‘new’ is no longer a reliable synonym for ‘better than what came before’.

How do savvy kids now hack a way through the astro-turfing which serves to market the ‘latest thing’, and instead find routes to the best of the past? I guess careful roadmaps for pulp culture would be especially valuable here. Guides that highlight which would be the best item to introduce a character, author or sub-genre (‘sub-tropical lost world, with scientists’ etc), and if an audiobook has been produced for such. Perhaps we need a Big Bumper Guide to Powering into Powerful Pulp, aimed at 13 year olds rather than collectors or connoisseurs. A guide which discriminating lays out all the options and best starting points. Done in a visually attractive 8″ x 10″ manner, across 300 pages. So far as I’m aware, such a book does not yet exist. Though there are of course many worthy pulp history websites.

If you’re thinking of making such a guide book then the new non-PC guide to general children’s literature Before Austen Comes Aesop: The Children’s Great Books and How to Experience Them might be useful to look at, to see how such things can be structured and approached. There are also text-only survey books such as Don Hutchison’s The Great Pulp Heroes.

Legacies in wills might even help here. The affluent collector might set aside $20,000 to have a superb introductory for-teens guide produced, dedicated to a certain author or character which they have loved all their life. Better than a park bench or a 20-year plaque on a home for stray cats, I’d suggest.

A lot of those back-roads destinations in pulp culture can then be a bit bumpy to actually reach, especially with all the mis-selling on Amazon and the confusion generated by cynical reboots (the later dire Rocketeer cash-in comics spring to mind). As such it would probably also help to encourage a kid to break from the idle ‘just ask my clueless mates’ approach (Twitter, Reddit, insert this month’s teen social media fad) and instead cultivate good search-skills. In that case, simply being told that one can place good filters on one’s keywords and title searches (e.g. browser addons like Google Hit Hider by Domain, and about useful meta-engines like eTools), would be probably be a good start. (Sadly Google Hit Hider does not yet work with eTools, but hopefully it will soon).

Newly arrived at Abe Books, Famous Fantastic Mysteries (Complete 81 issues bound in 19 hardcover volumes). Rather expensive. But it may interest a Bitcoin millionaire or someone who wants a good archival copy of the complete run for their deep storage bunker in Antarctica.