Super-Science Fiction, a ‘monsters will eat everyone’ special from 1959, new on Archive.org and here with an enlarged Kelly Freas Cover.

The mighty sun-ward wall of Tentaclii Towers slowly thaws, in the earliest spring sunshine. In the groves beyond the moat, the pussy-willow buds fluff a little. Catkins dangle and twist in the chill wind. A low sunlight browses over a stack of bargain-priced books containing Lovecraft’s letters, each begging to be read with note-taking. But for now three Tolkien tomes must take precedence.

February brought many new discoveries about Lovecraft’s places and people. I took a look at the Providence Courthouse and especially the louver-boarded tower that Lovecraft could see from his windows at 66 College St., and found there an unexpected connection with “The Haunter of the Dark”. I also sauntered down Riverside Drive, NYC, in the 1920s, a place where we almost lost Lovecraft — had he taken up a dare he could easily have become a gory squish on the railroad tracks that lay far below a Riverside Drive bridge. This led to me considering the place in relation to Morton’s apartment in Harlem and the Roerich Gallery — I saw that one could walk between these points by going down the pleasant shorewalk. Lovecraft and Morton might even have walked on south along the shore and into Hell’s Kitchen to see McNeil, but that possibility is not yet confirmed. I also took a look at Morton’s actual north Harlem building at No. 211 and discovered more about the curious fellow who owned it. I was also pleased to discover more about the whereabouts and doings of Lovecraft’s friend Arthur Leeds, including the possible location of an unpublished memoir of his life among 1930s crime writers and new data on his fronting of a Chicago human freak show in 1927. As a lead-in to this Leeds post, a ‘Picture postals’ post was on Jean Libbera, a freak-show attraction and (accordingly to Leeds) a Lovecraft fan.

This month a Patreon patron asked for more about the attempts of “HPL & Robert E. Howard” to meet. Not having much Howard material to hand yet, my answer may have appeared a bit basic to Howard scholars. But I think I successfully outlined the three points in time at which they could have met. I also looked this month at some of the historical context for Lovecraft’s ‘cats fly to the moon’ idea in his Dream Quest, and along the way noticed a new source for his early local newspaper column on the possibility of man one day reaching the Moon.

Not many new non-fiction books in this short month. Lovecraft: The Great Tales is a weighty new non-fiction survey of the tales. Old World Footprints also reappeared as a reprint book, newly annotated and richly illustrated. In Lovecraft-related books, I noted a crop of new introductory books of interest to those curious about ‘the Stoic Lovecraft’, and pointed out the need for a more accessible ‘For Beginners’ type book on Lovecraft’s philosophy.

In journals, the first issue of S.T. Joshi’s annual scholarly mega-journal Penumbra became available in ebook, and the new Spectral Realms #14 is said to be a themed ‘poems about Lovecraft’ issue. The Fossil #386 appeared and in it David Goudsward presented a rich seam of new data about the early life of Lovecraft’s friend Mrs Miniter. One can see why she appreciated the sober Lovecraft and the amateur journalism life, after an early life with a drunken husband. Several reviews of Lovecraft items popped up in newspapers and zines, and were linked to and partly translated if needed.

In music, Joshi’s Songs from Lovecraft and Others is forthcoming. Another Tentaclii post brought news of a forthcoming new psychobilly album by the band The Arkhams (U.S. backwoods rockabilly with Lovecraftian lyrics), and a successful Kickstarter for Dunsany Dreaming: An Eldritch Folk Album. In audio I noted that the novel The Wanderings of Alhazred is now available as a nine-hour audiobook, a fictional account of the life of Lovecraft’s Alhazred.

In the visual arts, I gathered the Druillet covers used for a popular edition of Lovecraft in French. A Call of Cthulhu Graphic Novel is forthcoming, seemingly pitched at the slow readers in the youth/schools market. Apparently Netflix is also planning a one-off TV-movie vaguely involving Cthulhu. But don’t get too excited, as the title makes it sound like a quickie Indiana Jones spoof/parody. The Myst-like Lovecraftian videogame The Shore was released and seems to have been a modest critical success but with the usual first-day technical niggles taking the shine off reviews. The lone developer of The Shore is said to be working on a VR expansion for it, so it’s probably one for occasional gamers to keep on hold for a year until there’s a bug-fix patch and expansion.

Finally, a big crowdfunder was launched to purchase the Lovecraft-Long letters (not to be confused with the Long-Lovecraft letters, mentioned by S.T. Joshi in a recent blog post). The letters will go to the Brown repository if the campaign is a success. Many are said to be unpublished.

That’s it for February 2021. Please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon to help Tentaclii continue through 2021. Even $1 a month is encouraging.

A while back I noted here that the Publishers Weekly is online at Archive.org for 1872-2016. Now comes a British equivalent, British Book News in a run from 1940-1993. The upload appears not to be complete yet, though probably will be in a few days. Useful for tracking down exact publication dates, in terms of possible influences of writers on other writers.

Cover shows “Tomb of Thomas Sayers” in Highgate Cemetery, picture made by Fay Godwin circa 1980. “Sayers was a famous bare-knuckle fighter and the first to be declared ‘World Heavyweight Champion’. The giant dog is his pet, Lion”.

Saving Rhode Island’s Historic Lighthouses. All the surviving sites and their current conservation / restoration status. Might also be useful for film-makers seeking Lovecraft-local filming sites.

Need some weekend listening? The Norman Rockwell Museum has a new weekly video podcast series, “The Illustrator’s Studio”. Those set to be featured in the 2021 series will all be connected with or relatives of the artists in their 2021 blockbuster exhibition “Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration”. The series launches 14th February 2021.

In Strasbourg, the exhibition “Phantasmagoria, the Fantasy World of the Magic Lantern”. A “Phantasmagoria” was a ghoulish sub-genre of the magic-lantern show and thus a likely progenitor of spiritualist fakery. Closing on 8th February 2021, though, if it’s even open in the lockdowns. But some may wish to enquire if there’s a catalogue or the possibility of bringing it to their city as a touring show.

See also the new book, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera.

The snow has melted and here in the English Midlands one can just about feel the springtime around the corner. Or one could if one was allowed out-of-doors, as the UK’s futile lockdown drags ever onward. It’s been a while since a monthly summary was posted here, as I took a long Christmas/New Year break from posting. This summary thus covers December and January at Tentaclii.

In useful research tools, I spotted a complete run on Editor & Publisher (1901-2015) arriving on Archive.org, and also Publishers Weekly (1872-2016). Both runs should be useful for those researching publications related to Lovecraft and his circle, and both have microfilmed photos.

In my weekly “Picture Postals” posts I found a fine modernist-gothic view of what had been H.P. Lovecraft’s home at 66 College Street; I cruised past the exterior of the Strand cinema, Providence and researched what might have been showing there during the week Lovecraft returned from New York City; I briefly visited the Art dept. of the Providence Public Library in 1906; and the Brooklyn dockside in 1925 to get a good look at a tramp steamer of the sort found in “Red Hook” the same year. More recently I found a Providence-at-night card series (more next week); and I hovered the magnifying glass over a new up-for-auction postcard from Lovecraft, sent 17th November 1931. I also noted that Lovecraft’s copy of Virgil is apparently up for auction. I delved more deeply into Lovecraft’s life and times with the long post “On Lovecraft and Prohibition”.

In discoveries I spotted that a 1964 article titled “The Other Lovecraft”, by science-fiction author James Blish, is seemingly still unpublished. I also caught a scan of a rare Cthulhu still from The Cry of Cthulhu movie, as it zipped through eBay. On Lovecraft’s copyrights, it appears that “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind” by C. M. Eddy, Jr. and Lovecraft has now entered the public domain in the USA.

In scholarly works, I learned that the recent Ideology and Scientific Thought book on Lovecraft is in English and not Spanish. Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard is now officially out, from the University of Texas Press. S.T. Joshi noted the passing of the early French Lovecraft scholar and publisher Joseph Altairac (1957-2020). More cheerfully, Joshi announced on his blog that the editions of Lovecraft letters could be complete relatively soon. I’m please to say that I’ve acquired more of these and that your Patreon patronage has enabled me to bag two chunky new books of the Lovecraft letters, the newly expanded Galpin letters and the Nils Frome et al letters. £24 got me both inc. free shipping to an Amazon locker, meaning I’ll have them half-price. They should arrive in a few days. I’ve also made a few random dips into the as-yet-unread Letters to Family volumes.

Also from Joshi, news of his forthcoming The Progression of the Weird Tale collection of essays and memoirs — with sections on Lovecraft and Barlow, and critiques of two novels by Frank Belknap Long. The Italian Lovecraftians have also shipped the translation of his I Am Providence, the second volume of three.

In the arts the masterful comics artist Richard Corben passed away, and I wrote a short survey of his career and pointed to the relatively recent Lovecraft books. The major Lovecraftian videogame Call of the Sea was successfully launched, and seemingly with only one negative anti-fan review rather than the usual howling mob; Richard Stanley’s movie of “The Dunwich Horror” is now ‘greenlit’ and set for 2021 production; in comics I found the fine cover of the Italian book I gatti di Ulthar e altri racconti da H.P. Lovecraft, which bodes well for an eventual English translation. Also in comics, I had a new post “More on Horacio Lalia” in which I found he has three more books of Lovecraft material ripe for translation. The interactive comics titled iLovecraft were noted.

In fiction from Lovecraft’s circle, Donald Wandrei’s The Complete Ivy Frost finally shipped in hardcover. I looked at exactly what F.B. Long’s John Carstairs, Curator of the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens series of stories was, and where it might now be found at an affordable price. This inadvertently led me to Richard A. Lupoff’s Marblehead novel, and thus to test a curious and somewhat oblique claim made for it in Lupoff’s Introduction to the budget-priced John Carstairs ebook. I also got around to listening to the audiobook of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame”, and this spurred me to work out what its kin were. Of which, Smith’s Captain Volmar tales are not in audio, but the Venusian “The Immeasurable Horror” is and it sounds promising. Henry Kuttner was evidently producing similar pulp during the war and his “Crypt-city of the Deathless One” also sounds like a similarly fun trek through the “hell-forests” — in this case on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. Both are now in free audio and they could be a double-bill for me, at some point. Evidently there was an ‘alien plants’ theme going on during the war, with Belknap Long, Kuttner and Smith, and it might offer someone an entertaining topic for a survey article. “Triffids Have Roots” might be one title. Possibly these writers were in part also responding to the few earlier ‘plant tales’ (Wells and others) that can be gleaned from the Edwardian period of proto sci-fi. There is an academic book on the topic forthcoming, but it barely scratches the surface of the history (e.g. “Belknap” does not occur anywhere in the text) and is more concerned with the contemporary political angles.

A new issue of the free Digital Art Live magazine was also produced as Editor, and can be perused for free at Issuu as a flipbook.

If you can help me with a few dollars via Patreon or a Paypal donation, it would be very welcome, thanks. That’s it, more next month.

Nocturnal Revelries extracts Henry Kuttner’s The Book of Iod: The Eater of Souls and other Tales from the vaults and gives it a new review. This was one of Robert M. Price’s usefully affordable ‘cycle’ collections, made for wide distribution by RPG company Chaosium in the mid 1990s.

Not Derlethian formula and not… “hugely original, but they are least varied” […] “Some of the stories are so shamelessly Lovecraftian that they almost read like rewritten versions of Lovecraft’s work. “The Black Kiss” comes directly from “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. “The Salem Horror” is “The Dreams in the Witch House”. “Hydra”, “The Secret of Krallitz” and a few of the other tales also felt remarkably familiar. Still though, Kuttner was about 21 when he was writing these tales, and after he wrote them, he’d send them to Lovecraft in the post. […] Kuttner stopped writing Lovecraftian horror a few years after Lovecraft died, but he continued to write for another 20 years or so. I know Ray Bradbury thought very highly of his writing.

With a little contrast adjustment, an eBay listing supplies the complete TOCs…

New on Archive.org, a scan of The Armchair Detective, Spring 1980. Including a short but engaging personal account of all the shoe-leather and touring of obscure bookstores needed to find Sax Rohmer (Fu-Manchu etc) books in the 1960s and 70s.

Here in the UK Rohmer does not enter the public domain until 2029. But American buyers can get budget-priced Tantor (aka Trantor) audiobook readings of the first three Fu-Manchu books.