Posted slightly ahead Lovecraft’s birthday, an edition of Weird Tales which appears to have been unavailable on Archive.org until now, nicely scanned and uploaded. Weird Tales for March 1939, containing the first news-stand appearance of Lovecraft’s “The Quest of Iranon” (1921).

“Wright [the 1920s editor of Weird Tales, has] just rejected The Quest of Iranon with high disdain…” (H.P. Lovecraft, December 1927).

There are of course other maintained sources online for Weird Tales, dependent on goodwill and ongoing hosting fees, but it’s good to see another being uploaded in perpetuity to Archive.org.

New on Archive.org, Street and Smith’s Shadow Magazine 1931-1949. Albeit in dark microfilmed b&w, and only to borrow.

What the “Double Z” cover should look like…

The Great British Summer lasted all of a week here, as usual, with temperatures nicely nudging above 80 degrees each day — while our increasingly ridiculous Met Office sternly warned daily of ‘extreme’ weather. Perfectly normal summer temperatures are not extreme. It’s all vanished now, of course. The mighty walls of Tentaclii Towers are once again bathed in cool rains.

Thanks to my loyal Patreons, who this month helped me restore the Lovecraft Panther paperbacks I had as a lad. These were almost my first encounter with Lovecraft but were lost in 1990s. I’ve now bagged the three key books for a pittance, and yet they are also in excellent condition. It was ‘now or never’, given their increasing scarcity and silly prices. Drool-worthy macro photos are coming soon, possibly for my Patreons only.

Not many new Lovecraft discoveries on Tentaclii this month, but I did find a picture of The Bijou on Westminster St., Providence, which seems to me the most likely candidate for Lovecraft’s cinema ticket-selling job. A new Arthur Leeds article was also found, on movie special effects, along with others newly arrived on Archive.org. Lovecraft’s friend Leeds had been a studio executive before the movie industry moved from New York City to California, a move which left him and McNeil, Dench and Houtain all high-and-dry.

Talking of movies, The Green Knight is a long and fairly faithful adaptation of the supernatural classic. The movie is now widely available in the USA and is being well reviewed. If you’re curious about the background to it, then you want my book Strange Country: Sir Gawain in the moorlands of North Staffordshire. Sadly the movie has been pulled from cinemas here in the UK, where it was due to screen on 6th August.

S.T. Joshi’s blog brought the titles for the forthcoming final books containing Lovecraft’s letters, and also the welcome news that Mark Griffin is making a combined index to all the published letters. In new Lovecraft-related books, I noted the greatly expanded new edition of Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman, and Born under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith, both of which appear to be set to ship relatively soon — September. Also noted was the hardback for Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1, shipping now.

Tentaclii did not feature a great deal of my research on Lovecraft this month, as I’m taking a bit of a break from that. But my “Notes on Letters to Family, Vol. II – part two” did appeared, and part three may be posted in a week or two. I also mused briefly on Lovecraft’s interest in glands.

Several useful scholarly sources for movies were noted, including the movie-history search tool Lantern and a full searchable run of Variety 1905-2017. I also found the open journal Victorian Popular Fictions. The Tolkien journal Mallorn is also now open, though with a two-year paywall for members. These and others have been added to my JURN search-engine for open-access arts & humanities journals (and now much more). JURN has also had its usual midsummer overhaul and update on the back-end.

Newly arrived on Archive.org I spotted Frank Gruber’s collectable pulp industry memoir The Pulp Jungle, and a readable copy of the Lovecraft-inspired The Werewolf of Ponkert. Also the uploading of a run of microfilmed Popular Mechanics 1902-2016, among which I found an interesting item on infra-red photography — perhaps a partial inspiration for “The Colour Out of Space”. Other new arrivals there were more scans of Derleth’s Arkham Sampler, Popular Astronomy for 1893-1951, and Midwest Folklore 1951-1964 which may interest R.E. Howard scholars. I was pleased to see more issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland arrive there too, and it looks like Archive.org must now be nearing a complete set. Wilum Pugmire, who was once forced by his parents to burn his precious collection of Famous Monsters, must be smiling somewhere.

Not much in podcasts and audio this month, and I imagine several people are holding items back and waiting for Lovecraft’s birthday in August. But I did link to “Howard Days 2021 – all audio recordings”.

In art, I made not one but two surveys of new and Lovecraft-y art on DeviantArt. By chance I found some nice old creepy woodcuts of Newport, a favourite haunt for Lovecraft. I showed these here and rectified/upscaled one of them. I was also pleased to see several new stop-motion Lovecraftian animations, including “The Other Gods”. A ComicCraft sale was noted, and the horror fonts pointed out.

Also in comics, this month I produced a bumper edition of VisNews with a long Kristian Donaldson (The Dark, Supermarket) interview, as well as a bumper “Oceans” issue of the free Digital Art Live magazine. Lovecraft did not make it to the final cut of the DAL Gallery, but he’ll be in the Halloween issue. The “Oceans” issue of DAL should be out in a few days, as I’m not the one who gets to press the ‘publish’ button on it.

I’m pleased to say I’ve now effectively completed the rescue of my old failed PC and have worked through nearly all of the required software wrangling. I had been running the ancient Linkbot Pro link-checking software and the FeedDemon RSS reader software, but I find that SEO Spider and QuietRSS are fine replacements. The new SSD drive is proving very enjoyable in terms of speed, as is my XP-PEN Artist 22 (2021 2nd Gen, a magazine review-unit) draw-on-the-screen monitor. Thanks again to my Patreons for helping out at a difficult time and helping to fund this vital SSD purchase.

If you can spare a few dollars a month via Patreon, please, it really does help me out. Many thanks.

Currently for sale, Tryout for September 1934, which has with it the Mrs Miniter memorial chapbook.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve finished work on making Lovecraft’s 131st birthday present for 2021, and with just over a month to go. I hope it will be something that all Lovecraftians will find very useful — and repeatedly so.

Your target date this year is 20th August 2021, should you also wish to make or write something or to stage a small event etc. This year it coincides with the PulpFest 2021 weekend.

The U.S. entertainment trade-journal Variety, 1905-2017 is being loaded onto Archive.org from microfilm. This resource should make it somewhat easier to discover more about the entertainment H.P. Lovecraft saw and heard during his lifetime. Including theatre and radio.

September 1929

Tentaclii Towers displayed itself in many moods this month, as the changeable weather of a typical English June settled in. Sometimes the walls were mist shrouded, sometimes basking in sun as if the Towers were a Mediterranean chateau. Inside the hoary Towers I relaxed my daily posting schedule. The vast Library of Ye Olde Postcards has also been locked up for the summer, to make time for other matters.

But in June my last few regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts offered a view across “Night in Providence, 1933”, newly colorised; walked on “a hot day under the Brooklyn Elevated”; and I also spotted the man himself via a pleasing Dessin Jullia postcard portrait from France. Then, just as I thought the time-consuming ‘Postcard’ posts were in abeyance for a while, up pop some eBay pictures that appear to show Lovecraft’s childhood ‘ground zero’. The Seekonk near York Pond, before the extensive road-grading work. These pictures will appear enlarged and colourised and geo-checked in due course.

In scholarly work, a number of links to scholarly items were added to my Open Lovecraft page at Tentaclii. I noted a call for papers for the German book H.P. Lovecraft and Germany: Cultural Reflections, and offered some additional topic suggestions. I reviewed The Lovecraft Annual for 2020 at some length. I began the reading of Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, Vol. II, and I’ll be posting sets of notes here as I go.

In books I noticed that Lovecraft’s poetry is now in a Swedish translation, and that there’s a Dream Quest semi-artbook from the same publisher. I tracked down exactly who was interviewed in the way out-of-print book Speaking of Science Fiction, and along the way discovered there are now three volumes of Darrell Schweitzer’s Speaking of the Fantastic interviews with authors and editors. Wormwoodania brought news that there is a weighty Robert Aickman biography forthcoming, and I rescued and colourised a bad scan of a fine Ida Kar portrait of him to accompany my post on this news.

I’m always pleased when people record audio readings of Lovecraft’s more interesting poems, and this month it was Lovecraft’s early anti-booze poem, “The Power Of Wine” (1916) from SFFAudio. Which was not without macabre interest. In other audio I linked to several items from the successful Robert E. Howard Days 2021, and I noticed the most recent Voluminous podcast which surveyed the Long letters newly acquired by Brown University.

A passing notice here of a Lovecraft mention in the memoir Literary Lamas of New York led to me noticing the same author’s Evangelical Cockroach book of stories. This was later reprinted by Richard A. Lupoff and, in a lengthy trailer post for the reprint, I found that Lupoff had slipped in another comment on George Sylvester Viereck… “Woodford also published a late fantasy novel by the controversial German-American poet-journalist-propagandist George Sylvester Viereck”. See my earlier post on Tentaclii on Lupoff and his claims re: Viereck and Lovecraft.

In the visual arts I spotted the new 64-page comic, Nightmares of Providence #1 which is a stretch-goal anthology as part of an Alan Moore fundraiser and as such has major talent in it. I found several new items for the ‘Lovecraft as character’ category of posts, one of these also being a recent comic. Also on Tentaclii this month, more of my surveys of DeviantArt. Another such is to come in a few days.

There appears to be a lot of activity going on in the Lovecraftian games market, as usual, way too much for me to cover. But I have a soft spot for the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim etc) and so was pleased to note the substantial DLC/mod “Here There Be Monsters” – The Call Of Cthulhu for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. I believe there’s also a well-made Lovecraftian indie movie out and called The Deep Ones, though as yet I’ve not looked at reviews.

I’m pleased to also say I have a new ‘draw on the screen’ pen monitor, a £500 XP-Pen Artist 22 (2nd Gen, 2021). The 16-page technical review that earned me this beauty is to be found in the latest issue of Digital Art Live magazine, if you were thinking of getting one too. My ‘old’ PC is also back up and running, and nothing was lost from the hard-drive failure on the now-defunct ‘new’ one. Nothing except time, as it’s taken a solid two weeks of work, on and off, to get back to something like normal. The situation is still not ideal, but I don’t have the price of a new £1,000 PC that would be reasonable future-proof. My thanks to my Pateons, whose June Patreon donations helped be put a good 500Gb SSD drive in the ‘old’ PC. It’s fast enough that it should get me back the two lost weeks of time, before Christmas.

That’s it for June. Please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, or upping your regular donation. It really helps me out. One-off PayPal donations are also welcome via the sidebar link on the blog, to help buy new books of Lovecraft letters. I still have about eight of those to get.

A final thought: how will you mark Lovecraft’s birthday later in 2021?

The H. P. Lovecraft Walking Tour & Film Screening Tickets. 16th-24th October 2021, in Providence. Booking now.

A new and tentacular Edward Lear poem has been discovered, “Lays of the Octapods” (1882), a companion to his known short poem “The Octopods and Reptiles”. It begins…

When the leaves were turning brown
Five hundred thousand Octopods
All painfully came down
And on the back of every one
A Pofflikopp held fast …

These appear, judging by the rest of the nonsense poem, to have been air-octopii that fell to earth because they had died of indigestion.

Arthur C. Clarke’s chunky book Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998, now on Archive.org in open PDF. Not a great scan, but you can see what you would get if you were to pick up the hardback for $8 used on Amazon. It appears there is no ebook edition other than this Archive.org scan, at least in the UK.

The book opens with an essay on Dunsany, and also includes a “Tribute to Robert Bloch”, “Save the Giant Squid!”, and a short survey of fierce gay warlords and generals in history.