A copy of the famous bound-storyboard book for the Moebius / Giger / Jodorowsky Dune movie is set to be auctioned at Christie’s in Paris. The movie was famously unmade, and there’s even an excellent documentary movie about the film not being made (Jodorowsky’s Dune, 2016). There are likely to be about ten copies of the bound storyboard in existence, which is thick enough to stun a sand-worm.

Yours for half a Bitcoin, perhaps. Though it could go as high as $100k, given the rarity. I mean, no-one else is likely to be selling their copy soon, and museums/archives should be interested. The book is on the block 22nd November in Paris, but before that it…

will be on public display at Christie’s Paris galleries from Nov 18th-22nd.

Update: Sold for $3 million!

Michel Houellebecq’s early Lovecraft essay is now available in translation in Argentina, and this triggers a local newspaper to note that a copy of the Necronomicon once resided at the University of Buenos Aires, and that the nation’s favourite son Jorge Luis Borges was influenced by Lovecraft. The translation gets colloquially fuzzy from that point on, but seems to imply that Borges once faked and placed a library card for the Necronomicon in the national library card catalogue (libraries used to be indexed with long wooden boxes of paper-cards, kids). What follows then appears to be an amusingly scattergun Borgesian attempt to link Lovecraft with the apparently well-known local pop-singer Gustavo Cerati, so perhaps the article is not quite to be taken at face value.

Pre-Halloween 2021 H.P. Lovecraft Walking Tour & Film Screening Tickets, October 2021 in Providence. Booking now.

Not sure what the best time of year is for hard up-and-down hillside walking in Providence, if there’s ever a good time for walking in what is apparently a very car-centric city. The Web is useless on that. Astro-turfed with what are obviously robo-written pages on ‘best time to visit’ for gullible tourists, written as it temperature and rainfall is all that matters. And the increasingly crappy search-engines are happy to rank them highly.

Back when NecronomiCon was a big thing for Lovecraftians, I recall that August was deemed a rather hot/humid time to visit and not ideal for strenuous walking tours. But I’d imagine that the first strong cold/dry snap at the end of the Autumn/Fall could be good. Cold enough to have driven the students and any lingering sneer-do-wells indoors, but the chilly breeze nicely cooling down a hot and puffing hill-walker. And at that point the leaves would be more or less off the trees, and not so thickly mushed on the sidewalks as they might be in October. Lack of leaves would also mean that the buildings and views could be seen better. Indeed, my hunch on the best timing seems to be backed up by Humble Fabulist. He evidently found 24th November a good date to try it.

If it were me I’d also want one of these in the backpack.

“Collecting Dreams: Odilon Redon” runs from 19th September 2021, through 23rd January 2022, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Includes a newly acquired…

“group of drawings that Redon termed ‘noirs’ for their use of black materials, such as charcoal, and their foreboding mood”

Meanwhile, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, “Bonger and Redon, Friendship and Collecting” from 29th October 2021 up and until 30th January 2022…

“The finest works by Redon will be presented at the museum from the end of October: dark charcoal drawings, but also colourful pastels, paintings and wall decorations, illuminating the special interplay between the artist and collector.”

“Hideous Larvae” (1896)

For sale on eBay, Frank Belknap Long’s “Throwback in Time”, aka Escape to Yesterday.

It appeared in Science-Fiction Plus, April 1953. Not Lovecraftian, and by the look of it a sugary sub-Bradbury sci-fi that was pitched to land in the springtime issue. Still, it’s interesting to compare the original and the resulting printed page.

A website for the many exhibitions and events to celebrate the seminal writer and historian Sir Walter Scott at 250. It seems the publicity did not extend far enough outside Scotland to reach me, and I find that many are now past. Yet the roster still includes choice items such as “Haunted Scott”, an online talk and event on 29th October 2021. There is also a London exhibition opening this Autumn/Fall.

S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence observed Scott’s influence on Lovecraft at a formative time…

One long weird poem […] is “Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme”. This 312-line poem was begun in the fall of 1917 but not completed until May or June of 1918. Unlike the bulk of Lovecraft’s weird verse written up to this time, the apparent influence on this poem […] is not Poe but the ballads of Sir Walter Scott.

At the other end of the nation, and also with a faint Lovecraft connection via his Devonshire/Cornish roots, an online lecture on 12th January 2022 on “The Cornish Gothic: Haunted Cornwall in Victorian Literature”.

Heritage Auctions now has pictures for the “Pickman’s Model” auction.

Weird Tales, 1927.

At Heritage Auctions, newly listed… H[oward] P[hillips] Lovecraft. Autographed Manuscript Signed. LotID #11039. Bidding begins 23rd September 2021. No photos as yet.

Autographed Manuscript Signed for the short story, Pickman’s Model. … Signed by the author on the first leaf. … Near fine.

A rare chance then to get hold of a Lovecraft original written by his hand in Providence, in early September 1926 to be exact. What will it fetch? Don’t know, but I guess anyone with three or four old Bitcoins lying around will be in with a chance.

Written on the backs of old letters to Lovecraft, which are itemised. Including…

Leaf 7: Unknown, signed “G. D,” Chelsea Book Shop stationary, 3 July [no date]. Regarding an upcoming visit to Providence.

G. D. — anyone have any ideas? Perhaps a George in New York City, who knew Kirk and had thus been given some of the shop’s surplus stationary? Kirk was ‘George Willard Kirk’, so it can’t be Kirk using just his first two initials.

The auction is part of the 14th October 2021 auction for the “The Gary Munson Collection of Horror and Fantasy Rare Books”. Includes choice editions of very key books, such as Dracula, The Time Machine and The Lord of the Rings.

September opens without the usual thunder-god downpours, and instead a dank greyness envelops Tentaclii Towers. Strange fungi emerge in the dewy meadows. Small birds begin to shiver and glance wistfully southward, while unusually large and never-before-seen black ravens strut around the moat. The summer, such as it was here, is obviously over and likely to stay that way.

Not many new books this month, as you might expect for August. But The Dark Man brought news and a review of Robert Weinberg’s The Weird Tales Story: Expanded and Enhanced (2021). I also linked to a useful review of the new journal Pulpster #30, which proved to be another must-have for anyone catching up with the growing amount of scholarly work of the history of Weird Tales magazine. A firm release-date was found for the eagerly awaited Vol. 2 of Francois Baranger’s oversized artbook for Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

As for scholarly work, I released a free index for the book The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H.P. Lovecraft (second revised edition). I also offered a few notes arising from the indexing work, and was able to identify the source of some very memorable Doctor Who Tennant-era monsters (and their library setting) in Lovecraft’s weird poem “The Wood”. I made a major “Dunwich” source discovery in my Patreon patrons-only post “Picture Postals from Lovecraft: Dunwich in Providence”. A number of new items were added to my Open Lovecraft page.

The table-of-contents was released for the forthcoming Lovecraft Annual 2021, and it looks very promising. On Archive.org, Lovecraft Studies #8 (Spring 1984) unexpectedly popped up, and had not previously been available as a scan. I spotted the Arthur C. Clarke letters, released in free digital form by the Smithsonian. These have some material of interest to Dunsanians and perhaps even (for those willing to dig) to Lovecraftians. Because Clarke was undoubtedly influenced by Lovecraft. I found and linked the University of Iowa video tour for their exhibition “Spirit Duplicators: Early 20th Century Copier Art, Fanzines, and the Mimeograph Revolution”, which tangentially relates to Lovecraft due to his pivotal position as the switch-man on the tracks that led from amateur journalism to early fandom.

In auctions I spotted a run of the Providence picture-magazine Netopian, 1921-27. Also the manuscript for Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”, due for auction soon.

It was a month for slightly unusual Lovecraftian arts, at least until the birthday presents arrived on the 20th. The Lone Animator had a ‘making of’ for his recent stop-motion/live-action short based on Derleth’s “The Dweller In the Hills”, and has a ‘making of’ for a much bigger Lovecraft production due soon. Pulp Flakes found a curious pop-up book inspired by 1920s readers of Weird Tales magazine. I was pleased to discover, via John Coulthart, an unusual old high-quality eight-page bio-comic centred on Barlow and Lovecraft.

In film S.T. Joshi brought news that a new two-hour Lovecraft documentary Exegesis: Lovecraft is expected to premiere in early October, lockdown permitting. There was also a surprise in-the-flesh return of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival to Providence, and I enlarged and colourised a vintage picture of the venue to celebrate.

Also newly found and colourised were three pictures from the Montague Street branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, which Lovecraft knew during his New York years. Then I finally got around to taking another look for Lovecraft’s “John’s” cafe in 1920s Brooklyn, but found I still need someone with U.S. database access to lookup the exact address for “Bristol’s Dining Room”. The new Letters to Family having revealed that Bristol’s was next-door to John’s.

I’ve finished reading Letters to Family, and now have to type up my final set of notes. Expect them in September.

In music this month Lovecraftians enjoyed a “A Symphony of Galpin”, Reber Clark’s new orchestration of Galpin’s “Lament for HPL”. No audio stories were linked this month, other than R.E. Howard’s “The Dwellers Under the Tomb”… which proved rather a disappointment. Sort of Lovecraftian, yes, but it was also a bit of an off-the-cuff pulp clunker from REH.

In publishing tools, I was pleased to find the venerable old DTP software QuarkXPress has been taking the rejuvenation tablets since 2015. It is now the sleek and gleaming QuarkXPress 2021. A great all-in alternative to the subscription InDesign, and for a one-time price. I brought Tentaclii readers the news that it could be had for just £181, half-price, during August. In other ‘blasts from the past’, elsewhere I was pleased to at last rescue the much-loved Windows abandonware Pointix Scroll++ 2.02, and I also found a near 1:1 replacement for the graphics abandonware Topaz Clean 3.1. Elsewhere I even wrote a “HeXen Quickstart in 2021 on Windows”, for installing HeXen: Beyond Heretic — this being the fantasy-horror DOOM videogame which I had played long forgotten aeons ago. Not as easy as it looks, and that’s just the install.

Right, well… that’s it for August. Please consider becoming my Patreon patron, or upping your Patreon amount a bit, or just dropping me a PayPal donation. It will really help me out.

Here’s how to remove the new ‘leaf’ icon on the “Write” button for your free WordPress blogs. It began to appear today, on the old Classic Editor. For frequent bloggers it’s going to get old very quickly, and it may be that the space will become a micro-platform for more ‘messaging’ in future. This trick will not work on the newer editor, which appears to use dynamic SVG icons.

1. In the Stylus addon for your Web browser, create a new UserStyle for your target blog: top icon, click, ‘create a style for this site’.

Your new style will override the site’s default design, but only on the small bit that you specify.

2. Paste the following into the new blank style…

#wpadminbar ul li#wp-admin-bar-ab-new-post a:before {
background-image: none !important;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
margin-top: 6px;
margin-left: -5px;
}

Note that you may also want the indenting, which is not being captured in the code block above and which should look like this…

This removes the leaf icon by setting it to ‘none’, and also removes the spacing area that it sits inside.

3. Down at the bottom of the new UserScript, also tweak the sites it applies to. Now it applies to all your wordpress.com blogs. No wildcard * is needed here…

Name and save the UserStyle. Reload the site and the leaf icon is gone.

You can also DIY and block any such small annoyances in a similar way. Use uBlock Origin’s right-click / ‘inspect element’ to see the target CSS code required, if they can’t be blocked more easily using the uBlock Origin eyedropper tool.

From the editorial accompanying the cover-story in the latest New Scientist magazine…

Many of the researchers who work [in the Arabian desert] were told not to bother because “there was no prehistory in Arabia” and were even laughed at. Those researchers are getting the last laugh. As the [magazine’s] feature explains, it turns out there is an enormous amount of prehistory in Arabia: [over just one decade the Palaeodeserts / DISPERSE teams found] dozens of archaeological sites, often with rich collections of artefacts, that date back 500,000 years and perhaps further.

Lovecraft in a letter of 1927, outlining the career of the author of The Necronomicon…

the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred [ventured into] the devil-haunted & untrodden wastes of the great southern deserts of Arabia — the Raba el Khaliyeh [‘Empty Quarter’] — where he claimed to have found records of things older than mankind, & to have learnt the worship of Yog-Sothoth & Cthulhu.