Found in an obscure Spanish arts ‘zine from the late 1987, newly on Archive.org. Punto y Coma, No. 8 had a long section on Lovecraft. Several articles but basic introductory stuff, by the look of it. Yet there is this unusual map, which attempted to trace the movements of Abdul Alhazred, the mad poet.

I seem to recall there’s at least one chunky novel that tells the ‘life story of Alhazred’, and I guess it probably has maps. But this map may interest some.

Around Tentaclii Towers the verdant summer sward swoons and wilts, and certain leaf-edges begin to hint of a wistful Autumn. But first, most likely, the Towers will be enveloped in a typical English August of brooding thunderstorms and heavy rains. The dark cloudscapes may perhaps be made all the more eerie to behold, by the fact that everyone is now masked up like so many Lovecraftian cultists. The Tentaclii choice of face-mask is suitably cosmic, in dark dusk-blue cotton scattered with small white stars.

This month, in considering Lovecraft’s life and inspirations I purled through Lovecraft’s Dictionary; noted the Hope Street Reservoir as a possible inspiration for his “The Colour of of Space”; spotted various clues to the whereabouts of some of Lovecraft’s older books shortly before and after his death; considered the possible link between elephants and the Lovecraftian tentacular; looked into the fate of the lost Providence drawings of Henry J. Peck, once so admired by Lovecraft; and in an answer to a $6 Patreon patron’s question I wrote the post “On Lovecraft and Hemingway” (now newly updated a bit at the end, to note that Hemingway actually had his start as a writer in very pulpy circumstances).

In new books, I noted the new expanded H. P. Lovecraft: Letters to Alfred Galpin and Others; and that Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill has finally gone into paperback in two volumes. The latter has the Lovecraft-CAS correspondence. In other languages I noted the new book Il linguaggio di Cthulhu: Filosofia e Dizionario di H.P.Lovecraft (‘On the Language of Cthulhu: A Philosophical Dictionary for H.P. Lovecraft’).

In older books newly-discovered, The pageant of Benefit Street down through the years (1945) has appeared at long last on Archive.org; the erudite A Letter Book was a nice discovery on Archive.org, offering a history of letter-writing to 1922 in 100 pages; I was pleased to learn of Brian Stableford’s three-volume scholarly history The Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950 (1985). His first volume, The Origins of Scientific Romance, sounds especially interesting. But sadly I find I can’t get the UK’s self-employed cash bailout, so from now on it’s back to cat-food dinners and few book purchases.

In new scholarly/fan journals: I noted the June 2020 edition of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies; that Monster Maniacs #2 has appeared, along with No. 27 of the review Dead Reckonings; and I also looked into recent relevant material the Vastarien journal. In academic journals, I was pleased to find Zanzala: Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Ficcao Cientifica (trans. ‘Zanzala: Brazilian journal for the study of science-fiction’); the new Journal of Gods and Monsters from Texas; and also an outstanding free French journal of comics and juvenile books which will be linked here in a few days. The worthy historical Providence blog Architecture Here and There was also noted and linked here.

Elsewhere in journals the new issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review surveyed “H. P. Lovecraft’s Odd Couples”. Incidentally, that reminds me that in my reading of the Moe letters I’ve spotted a rare comment — in which Lovecraft revealed his awareness of how his own string of “grandsons” might be misconstrued by others. A correspondent had remarked on a priest suddenly acquiring a “son” after returning from a long holiday in Europe. Lovecraft remarked wryly to Moe that… “Possibly he was being modernistically candid about what most priests call their “nephews”” (page 385).

In the arts, I spotted two excellent bronze cast busts of Lovecraft by the Joyner Studio; Heavy Metal magazine kindly placed the the missing pages for Druillet’s Necronomicon online; The Ring of the Nibelung was found in a fine comics adaptation, this being a handy way to discover the stories without spending 18 hours listening to German opera. This latter led me to discover that Archive.org has a new “one-hour borrow” feature available. A call for a forthcoming Mythos anthology, Shadows Over Avalon, was noted here due to its unusual British and historical theme. The major fact-and-fiction exhibition “Monsters of the Deep” was noted at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall, UK.

A couple of nice RPG items were prised from the Archives, these being an envelope from Brown and a curious bookmark from a naturalist’s notebook. Also relevant to the RPG world, a couple of apparently forthcoming ‘Lovecraft Country’ books were noted, Tour de Lovecraft: The Destinations, and Miskatonic Country.

In scholarly software, I noted that the fine PDF Index Generator 2.9 had appeared, and that it now handles footnotes nicely and no longer requires a Java install.

A bit of blog housekeeping was done at Tentaclii and my blog’s ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ Directory was updated and repaired by hand.

As for other authors, I was pleased to see that Christopher Anvil’s 1960s Interstellar Patrol series of stories is now available as a new 17-hour audiobook, with the promise of the rest of the stories in audio by September 2020. The start of a new series of podcast interviews on Ray Bradbury was noted. Marvel’s Savage Sword of Conan mega-reprint #3 is shipping, and #4 is dated. There’s also a handy new Who’s Who In New Pulp guide to writers, and I noted Doc Vandal as being an especially interesting-sounding series. The new Who’s Who is probably also of interest to indie comics artists seeking suitably enthusiastic writers.

That’s it for this month. This blog’s weekly ‘Kitty Tuesday’ feature may have to ‘paws for thought’ in August, due to paucity of material. Expect such posts when you see them.

Just to remind keen readers know that H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday is now only a month away, 20th August 2020. If you were thinking of preparing special artwork or a text for the occasion, or an audio reading, or planning a trip and photos, now is likely the time to make a start.

If you’re not able to produce anything this year, you might still help out another old gent. Robert M. Price’s kitchen repairs fund still has a way to go to hit the needed target.

The top result on the Bing-powered search-engine DuckDuckGo, for a quick search for call of cthulhu. Note the bizarre and irrelevant choice of snippet, to represent a page about a literary classic…

For a short while in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, Amazing Stories decided to throw caution to the winds and go with what was then ultra-modern typography and highly stylised covers. Here’s the sequence in date order. They’re obviously feeling their way forward with a new cover type with art (and probably typography and layout) by one A. Sigmond, and the idea behind the new covers was probably to emulate the new movie title sequences in cinemas, and perhaps also the new style of book jackets. Gernsback doesn’t really nail it until May and June. But then he backtracks and by the August/September issue is nudging it back toward the conventional pulp-style cover showing humans, having by then picked up a new artist and a snappy new logo.

Who knew? Roy Thomas and Gil Kane produced a faithful and polished comics adaptation of Wagner’s grand opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung (DC in four parts from 1989-1991, then a hardback collection in 2002), sans the music. Which may be a blessing, if your ears are averse to screeching Rhine-maidens.

If you want to know the story that Tolkien and Lovecraft knew, this is an accessible way to get it. 200 pages of fine brisk comics cram in 16 hours of opera, but since Roy Thomas is at the helm it’s done very deftly. His translation is fairly straight and not an attempt at “modern and slangy”. The art was by Gil Kane in his prime, doing full-on ‘costume-opera meets superhero’, and he was paired with a top colourist.

Not to be confused with the later 500-page adaptation of the operas by P. Craig Russell. Incidentally, P. Craig Russell’s very lacklustre Jewels of Gawahiar Conan adaptation (seemingly meant to entice dim-witted 10 years old boys into reading) had made me wary of such things, and in researching the worth of the Thomas/Kane Ring of the Nibelung I discovered that Archive.org has once again expanded the scope of the “Borrow” books. Researchers can now ‘nip in and out’ for an hour on a “Borrow” book…

Here at Tentaclii Towers the month of June proved to be a curious in-between sort of thing, partly because the UK continues to wrestle with the flapping and tattered vestiges of lockdown. Somewhere, distantly, there were the unseen howlings of midsummer rites. But here at the Towers the only ceremony was that of the tentacular air-conditioner being wheeled out of its lair for the annual five-day thrumming. Now the Towers loom silent amid a curiously grey and chilly interregnum, as the UK awaits the long-awaited 4th of July — when the pubs and much else will finally re-open.

New or recent books noted here at Tentaclii included: a new essay collection from S.T. Joshi, The Advance of the Weird Tale; a new book in Spanish translation containing Lovecraft’s selected essays on literature, Ensayos Literarios; and a three-volume set of Russian translations of Clark Ashton Smith. I also found a huge free PDF book on Underground Rivers, and noted that Brian Murphy’s well-reviewed book on the history of sword and sorcery is now available in a £5 Kindle ebook edition.

Several magazine-journals were noted, either new or with new issues: The Digest Enthusiast; Occult Detective Magazine; and the new British magazine Hellebore. These were noted because they include non-fiction essays. I don’t normally note magazines if they’re fiction-only.

June saw links to scholarly work and reviews, including: a substantial four-part instructional series on how to do Natural Language Processing, using the Lovecraft fiction corpus as the test set; a call for chapters from the editors of the forthcoming academic book The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft; and a possible call for papers for Mythcon 51 in 2021. I was pleased to see Bobby Derie revisit The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft (1985), this being a memoir booklet by Lovecraft’s wife Sonia H. Davis, and to see Derie draw on some dates to place a question-mark over the very late and uncorroborated claim that Lovecraft had once read Mein Kampf. Derie’s slightly earlier blog post on Kthulhu Reich (2019) also coincided with my reading the relevant bits of the Bloch letters, and I then usefully correlated the timelines on exactly what Lovecraft would have known of Hitler and the Nazis when writing to Bloch of such things.

I further found a new snippet of data in the Bloch letters which helped me fill a gap in my biography of Kalem member Arthur Leeds. I also became more aware of how Bloch effectively became a sort of ‘substitute Lovecraft’ for a while. I’d welcome a professionally-read audiobook of these ‘in the style of Lovecraft’ early Bloch stories, but there doesn’t appear to be one. In fact, Bloch seems to be singularly ill-served in audio, unless you want Psycho.

My Friday feature ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ made substantial visits to the Hayden Planetarium, and to the Silver River. Less substantial, but still evocative, peeps were take into Mammoth Cave and Red Hook. My ‘Kittee Tuesday’ blog feature also found enough material to keep the whiskers twitching. One of these kittee posts, on Bloch’s early story “Bubastis”, arose from my reading of the Bloch letters and led me to find yet another early appearance of ‘Lovecraft as character’. I now have so many of these that I’ve started a new ‘Lovecraft as character’ tag on this blog, and I will eventually get around to a neat tabulation of such stories in date order.

In audio, I spotted a new Graham Plowman album; two new and relevant editions of the venerable Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast; a new Lovecraft Geek podcast; and in video the acclaimed documentary The Rise and Fall of Penn Station (the place Lovecraft alighted when he first entered New York City). Also in audio, I was pleased to learn that VLC can handle a ‘playlist edit’ and I coded a VLC Playlist Edit Maker 1.0 to help make such a thing. Basically, you can edit audio and video without having to wrassle it into and out of editing software. The playlist does it for you, in a mere snippet of text. At present, only VLC does this, but it’s a feature other players should copy.

I’ve also just finished an in-depth interview with Lovecraft illustrator and graphic novelist Jason Thompson (‘Mockman’), for the forthcoming VisNews #11. The next issue of the free Digital Art Live magazine (due any day now) will also have my in-depth review of the PhotoLine software, in which I effectively document how I switched from Photoshop to PhotoLine in June.

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