Category Archives: Odd scratchings

Some interesting authors entering the public domain at the start of 2021

17 Sunday May 2020

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Here’s my survey of interesting texts and authors set to enter the public domain in early 2021 in nations which follow “the 70 year rule”, the author having died in 1950. Some of their works may already be in the public domain, but soon all of them will be. Then I follow this section by briefly noting the names in the “50-year rule” nations.

Nations following the 70 year rule:

* Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Tarzan, Barsoom, old Venus and more.

* George Orwell, for the anti-authoritarian political classics, Animal Farm and 1984. His essays might also be selected from to make a new themed book.

* Olaf Stapledon, ground-breaking British science-fiction author. His seminal ‘future history’ Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are his best known books. His post-war Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fantasy (1949) was only issued in a limited edition of 500. Basil Davenport collected his best in To the End of Time: the Best of Olaf Stapledon (1953) and Sam Moskowitz gathered up the rest in Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon (1979).

* Ernest Haycox, an extremely prolific and popular author of what appear to be romping quality westerns and revolutionary war adventures, featuring tough and robust characters who live by their own rules. Had stories in the pulps of the 1920s, and he later graduated to the ‘slicks’ where he was admired by the likes of Ernest Hemingway. I would imagine he was being noticed by the likes of Robert E. Howard. One story was filmed as Stagecoach (1939), another as Union Pacific (1939). He had a vast output, and looks likely to be an excellent mine of brisk adventure plots that could be morphed into newly-told science-fiction works.

* Rafael Sabatini, a prolific English-Italian writer of historical adventure and mystery novels. His sea adventures The Sea Hawk (1915) and Captain Blood (1922) became best-sellers and were filmed. Blood became over time, effectively, a four-book set. Along with the works of Everett McNeil, the Blood books were among the very few books that librarians found it impossible to keep on the juvenile library shelves in the 1920s and 30s — as soon as they came back, another boy would take them out. He also published a three-book series The Historical Nights’ Entertainment, containing vivid re-tellings of real-life royal murders and intrigues, impersonations and similar bizarre doings in the upper echelons of society. His mystery stories were collected in The Evidence of the Sword and Other Mysteries (2006). At a guess, he’s now possibly of most interest today to makers of media productions looking for the next Game of Thrones with a pirate-y twist.

* Max Pemberton, a London dandy who had an early career as a boys’ magazine editor. Knowing what boys want, his The Iron Pirate was a best-seller of the 1890s — a tale of a giant new type of gas-powered ironclad ship which dominates the Atlantic. He went on to write many historical adventure novels and mystery-crime stories. His Wheels of Anarchy (1908) is an “adventure tale about anarchists and assassins that is set across Europe”.

* William Hovgaard, a naval historian. His early book The Voyages of the Norsemen in America (1914) has probably been superseded, but perhaps suitably updated with his 1925 article “The Norsemen in Greenland” and later scholarship, it might make the basis of an unusual non-fiction graphic novel?

* Erle Cox, an Australian science-fiction writer with a modest output. His novel Out of the Silence (1919 as a serial, 1925 as a book, 1928 in New York) was very popular in Australia and saw 13 reprints. This became a long-running comic strip and also a radio series in Australia. His Fools Harvest (1939) was a prophetic future-war tale. Short story collections available include Major Mendax: Tales of a Mad Scientist, and The Gift of Venus and Other Stories. He was perfectly timed, and with the right politics, to have been an occasional H.P. Lovecraft correspondent — but he doesn’t appear to have been.

* George Bernard Shaw, the once incredibly famous playwright and thinker. He had a vast output, but almost all of his work addressed ‘topical issues’ of his time and thus is not usually to modern tastes. Some of it has had a lasting popularity, such as his Pygmalion (famously filmed as My Fair Lady) which might be newly adapted into science-fiction, perhaps with themes of AI and robots. His Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) is a series of linked plays leading into the far-future in an Olaf Stapledon-like manner, and it is his only serious attempt at science-fiction. It was ambitiously presented as an unabridged full-cast broadcast for BBC radio in 1952, but no recording or reading-script appears to have survived. By the 1950s Back to Methuselah had become a running joke in the dressing-rooms of British theatre-land, for its difficult staging and long running-time. Like most of the British left at that time, he was avidly in favour of eugenic breeding — which may freak out today’s enfeebled left and cause further problems with any revival.

* R. R. Ryan. (Evelyn Bradley). Tense and ghoulish psychological horror novels of the 1930s, usually involving girls being menaced. From the descriptions, he seems to be an acquired taste for hardened connoisseurs of obscure British horror.

* Ralph Straus, a science-fiction and fantasy author with some novels that still sound interesting and are probably already in the public domain in most places. His The Dust which is God (1907) takes the Edwardian reader on a Dante-esque guided tour of several utopian planets, and it may be of interest to those who enjoy early ideas-led Edwardian cosmic science-fiction and attempts to imagine utopias. Apparently rather a good book, according to several reviewers in the 1970s, though he doesn’t appear in Science Fiction: The Early Years. In his later Pengard Awake (1920) he departed from his usual style, and has “An English book collector travel to Chicago where he meets an antiquarian bookseller in his shop in Chicago and tries to help him cope with a dark mystery.” The review in Punch said that the author “tells his queer story so plausibly and with so light a touch that even though you may affect to scoff at his dashing improbabilities you cannot escape their attraction.” The New York Tribune made it sound a little darker… “an amazing but plausible novel of dual personality. Not since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we had a more powerful delineation of the forces of good and evil at war in a man’s soul.” Possibly there are other interesting stories by Straus to be found and collected.

* Irving Bacheller was a successful American newspaperman who introduced American readers to the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, and who sponsored The Red Badge of Courage. He turned to writing his own enormously popular semi-autobiographical novels of early America, farm-life and war. He also wrote what appear to be vivid historical novels such as Vergilius: A Tale of the Coming of Christ, and his favourite A Man for the Ages: A Story of the Builders of Democracy (being the story of Abraham Lincoln).

* William Rose Benet the American encyclopedia-maker, reviewer, anthologist and poet. His more intriguing titles include The Flying King of Kurio: A Story of Children (1926) and the poetry pamphlet Mad Blake: A Poem (1937). The latter seemingly sunk without trace, but presumably being about the visionary William Blake. His dark poem “The Skater of Ghost Lake” is taught in American schools. His Pulitzer Prize winning poetry book The Dust which is God is not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Ralph Straus (see above).

* Frank Parker Day, whose novel Rockbound (1928) evokes the terrible powers of the Atlantic ocean, as it tells the story of bitterly feuding families on an isolated island off Nova Scotia. Not a novel to take away on your cheerful island holiday, by the sound of it, though it appears to have a cult following among modern gloomsters.

* Warwick Deeping, a once very popular British story and novel writer, who saw reprints in the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure. His early works were described as… “misty colour-shot, ultra-fantastic romances of pre-Arthurian days”, and he is is said to have gleefully re-worked Arthurian characters in a Marion Zimmer Bradley manner. But he was stung by vicious utilitarian critics for the crime of being both fantastical and middle-brow, and he appears to have tried to please the critics by turning to modern tales addressing worthy ‘social issues’. He apparently sometimes succeeded quite well at this, despite the continuing disdain of the critics — who made his name a by-word for popular mediocrity. But one wonders what he might have produced, if his lighter historical fantasies had been allowed to develop and deepen through the 1920s and 30s. But what we do have of the earlier historical and Arthurian novels are: Uther and Igraine; Love Among the Ruins; The Seven Streams; Bertrand of Brittany; The Red Saint; Joan of the Tower; The House of Spies (Napoleonic period); Martin Valliant, and also the posthumous The Sword and the Cross (1957). His time-travel story The Man Who Went Back popped up as the lead novel in Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine for Christmas 1947, and is essentially a historical work. Probably there are others like it…

* E.C. Bentley, a British poet who published a much-praised modern detective novel, Trent’s Last Case (1913) which was filmed three times. Later Trent short stories were collected in his Trent Intervenes (1938). A science-fiction story, “Flying Visit” (Evening Standard, 1953) has recently been re-discovered.

* Lawrence Donovan, a writer of nine Doc Savage novels, he may have died in 1948 or 1950 (Wikipedia has 1948, Gutenberg Australia has 1950). In the 1920s he landed stories in titles ranging from Argosy to Zeppelin Stories, and then continued publishing in the pulps and mystery magazines into the 1930s.

* Dorothy Kathleen Broster is now best known for a trilogy of historical Scottish novels set at the time of the Jacobites, but she also wrote some British ghost stories. These are said to be almost all collected in the wartime book Couching at the Door: Strange and Macabre Tales (1942).

* Percy K. Fitzhugh was an enormously popular writer of Boy Scout books in 1920s America, often humorous and most of them officially approved by the Boy Scouts of America. They sound vaguely like a sort of Scouting version of the British Just William tales, only with less grubby boys.

* Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, the Nobel Prize winner and a leading Danish author of the 20th century. His The Long Journey trilogy (in English 1923–24) “attempted to create a Darwinian alternative to the Biblical Genesis myth” by following “the development of mankind from the Ice Age to the times of Columbus”. Most of his work is in Danish, and some of it appears to be on ancient myths.

* Alfred Korzybski, a charlatan whose book General Semantics somewhat influenced early science fiction writers, with van Vogt using the ideas to fuel at least one imaginative work. General Semantics allegedly offered a way to “improve mental health through linguistic discipline”, and as such may have inspired Hubbard and perhaps even modern ‘political correctness’.

50-year rule nations:

E. M. Forster.

Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason books)

Rube Goldberg.

Yukio Mishima.

Lovecraft moves to 66 College Street

15 Friday May 2020

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On 15th May 1933 H.P. Lovecraft moved to his last home at 66 College Street.

Here we look down College Street, from the gates of the Brown Campus. Lovecraft’s pale yellow wooden house was hidden away in a secluded garden courtyard, reached down an unpaved little lane at the shadowy back of the John Hay Library. The Library is the tall white building seen on the right of the picture, and the lane entrance is on the corner — seen just a little ahead and in the centre of the picture.

At No. 66 he had more living space than formerly. This included access to a hoary old loft attic with age-encrusted nooks. Lovecraft also mentions “one of the attic rooms” to Bloch, shortly after moving in, and implies this was ‘shrine’ sized. There appear to have been loft windows (possibly shuttered, see below) in the ‘monitor’ roof, and there was an all round view. I recall reading that Brobst later found a way to open a mysterious attic door or hatchway, which the old gent had been unable to open himself, thus revealing another fine view. Presumably this was a door that gave workmen, chimney-sweeps and window-cleaners access to the roof. One imagines this was westerly-facing, as that would have also enabled a wider view across the sunset city than was obtainable from the small windows.

Some might imagine that this loft then became crammed with Lovecraft’s older and less-read books. In one letter he did anticipate using in in that way. But many of Lovecraft’s family items, and the childhood library of old long-s books, had to be stored in another and more distant loft which had stronger rafters. In 1934 Lovecraft mentioned to Barlow that the old books he had grown up with and inherited were stored in the loft of a friend’s nearby barn. There they had become inaccessible to him, because the removal men’s crates had been jammed between old family furniture and crates of heavy crockery. For those in search of this barn, the likely weight involved surely indicates that the loft’s boards and rafters were rather more substantial that those of 66 College Street. Thus a large and sturdy candidate is surely required for the barn.

What became of this inaccessible loft-library, that had once been so formative for Lovecraft in his isolated early childhood? We can be sure that his personal library retained his cherished old copies of the Spectator, similar works of his beloved 18th century wits and satirists, and the pick of the old library. But as for the rest, it’s uncertain, and Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library doesn’t seem to offer an easy answer. I’d imagine that the residue of the family library was eventually hauled out of its barn, perhaps in spring 1941 a short while after Mrs Gamwell’s death, and sent down wholesale to be sold via the Dana bookshop in Providence? The interest in crates of mouldering 18th century books was perhaps not high during the Second World War, but some of the choicer items — such as the books once requested in vain by Barlow — may have found their way to appreciative collectors.

My enlargement and colourisation of the above picture…

The gain in Spain…

08 Friday May 2020

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More good news on ebooks and tax. Spain has reduced VAT (sales tax) on e-books, e-magazines and e-journals to 4%. Brazil’s highest court has also confirmed their zero-rating. As with last month’s reduction in the UK from 20% to zero tax, the question is now — will sellers pass on the reduction, or just trouser the extra profit?

On making full-cast unabridged audiobooks

01 Friday May 2020

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One possibly silver-lining of the virus. It strikes me that there’s likely to be lots of opportunities for affordable production of full-cast unabridged audiobooks. This is because older actors are said to be set to be shunned by screen productions over the next two years, re: the risks posed to a production by the virus, and possibly the demands of insurers and producers. A major UK TV producer has already stated this will be the case on one of the nation’s leading soap operas.

Yet their voices are often fine, and they can sound far younger. You often hear podcasts where someone sounds 35 but turns out to be 65. Audio technicians can also do wonders with subtle pitch-shifting. If the predictions I’m hearing from the screen industries come true, then there may well be plenty of discarded older talent looking for work. And audio can of course be produced from a home-studio, which many such actors already have for their side-gigs.

Younger voice actors may also become far more available, at least for a while, until tourism and retail/restaurants and personal services are back on their feet. Similarly, audio FX guys may also become more affordable, so the full-cast unabridged production could also add a Phil Dragash-like weave of sound-effects. Music may be trickier to source at a relatively low cost of course, but there’s always the likes of SonicFire.

So, if you did have a big Lovecraftian or science-fiction audio production in mind, now might be the time to start polishing the reading script.

VAT scrapped early for ebooks

30 Thursday Apr 2020

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Excellent news for ebook sellers, “Plans to scrap VAT on e-publications fast-tracked and will come into force tomorrow”, the British Chancellor has just announced. VAT is the UK’s chunky 20% sales tax, and it had been due to be abolished in November for digital newspapers, books, magazines, and academic e-journals. The zero rate doesn’t cover audiobooks. Assuming Amazon and the big publishers don’t just trouser the 20% as extra profit, by keeping prices the same, then this should mean cheaper reading in the UK. Although The Guardian newspaper has already announced it will pocket the extra profit, and won’t reduce prices.

April on Tentaclii

30 Thursday Apr 2020

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The verdant greenwood once again embowers Tentaclii Towers, and an eerie hush covers the rolling acres. The new springtime heat imparts heat-shimmers to the air, their undulations disturbed only by the faint pulse of ambulance sirens. Stoke-on-Trent, for all its rumbustious reputation, seems to be taking the ‘bat flu’ (as I’ve heard it called here) well. And surprisingly quietly, given the usual levels of noise-pollution. Most adults are treating the lockdown as paid gardening-leave and the surprisingly chilled kids see it as school-holidays. This attitude is aided by the chance occurrence of a glorious run of weather — which has been both not-too-hot and relatively insect-free. One suspects the city won’t be so quiet once the UK lockdown is effectively and officially over, which at my guess will perhaps be Week Nine (Friday 22nd May). At which point Stokies will roar out of their homes seeking a Bank Holiday weekend of beer and beats, bonking and biffing, shopping and re-stocking.

The arboreal stillness has been a suitable atmosphere for my final stretch of reading into the Barlow-Lovecraft letters, O Fortunate Floridian. The letters inspired a post on The Haunted Castle, a 1927 study of the weird, in which I pin down its dates in relation to Lovecraft’s own survey in the same year. Another mention in the Barlow letters also inspired me to peep inside the Annmary Brown Memorial at Brown, a curious mausoleum-museum-library which Lovecraft showed to Barlow on a Providence visit. The Annmary Brown Memorial is yet another example of the Brown-Lovecraft overlap, something which existed despite Lovecraft having no formal connection with the university other than tangentially via his aunts and their circle. I suspect we may learn even more about such small points of informal Brunonian connection when ‘the aunts letters’ are released this summer.

A few weeks ago ‘Sci-Fi-Bookworm’ kindly posted a 1949 Arkham Sampler on Archive.org. This led to a chain of events which culminated in my making a major discovery. The Sampler had lauded S. Fowler Wright as the author of one of the key pre-1948 science fiction classics, and tantalisingly noted a similarity with Wells’s The Time Machine. That alone was enough to interest me, but I was also pleased to learn that Wright was from my own Birmingham / Staffordshire / West Midlands, which led to a long biographical post on Tentaclii.

Talking of aeon-lost scrolls wot the olde master writ himself, this month my bookshelves have been slightly re-organised to accommodate my growing number of Lovecraft items. I’m now a proud ‘one-and-a-half shelf’ Lovecraftian, with the remainder of the ‘new’ shelf accommodating my former pile of recent Tolkien print books. Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll be a ‘two-shelf Lovecraftian’. My thanks to my Patreon patrons who’ve helped me acquire several chunky new volumes of letters and a handful of Lovecraft Annual issues. I’m currently reading through the latest Lovecraft Annual, with a view to a review-post in May.

Rather less momentously than my “Shadow” discovery, this blog’s Kittee Tuesday post-series made a return after its paws for thought, showing a fabulous rooftop ‘court of the cats’ from among the etchings in Chats et Autres Betes (1933). Again, this post was inspired by a brief mention in the Barlow-Lovecraft letters, and my online research dug up the marvellous picture at a good size.

Another excavation of a lost gem included my discovering the seemingly forgotten author Christoper Anvil and his fun 1960s Interstellar Patrol series, this time found due to my needing to find ‘sci-fi jungle’ paperback art for a Digital Art Live magazine feature. Like many of those Cold War guys from the U.S. Air Force, Anvil could could certainly write compelling fiction. Did they have some Top Secret Psy-ops training in hypnotic writing, during the Cold War? It seems so, and as such the forthcoming Tantor audiobook of his Interstellar Patrol should be a corker. Incidentally the ‘sci-fi jungle’ paperback art feature is to be found in Digital Art Live #48. At the back of the same issue there’s also a new ‘composite’ interview with movie director and FX pioneer George Pal, illustrated with newly colourised old press pictures. He made one of my all-time favourite movies, The Time Machine (1960), so I was pleased to do quite a bit of work digging the interview out of hard-coded subtitles and other deeply buried and utterly forgotten sources. As with S. Fowler Wright, George Pal is a 20th century science-fiction pioneer who is in dire need of a good book-length biography.

Various freebies were noted here, though not so many as of late. These included Conversations with Ray Bradbury, and Archive.org’s lockdown easing of its “Borrow” library arrangements. I also released a handy bundle of early H.G. Wells ebooks for your possible lockdown perusal, plus a book cover for possible POD use by my Patreon patrons.

In the arts, I made another survey of the best new Lovecraftian art on DeviantArt, with the charcoal art of ‘NikolaUzelac’ being a major find. I spotted that Gou Tanabe’s graphic novel of “Innsmouth” begins publishing in Japanese in May 2020, and found that his “The Shadow Out of Time” adaptation has still only had a French edition. I enlarged and coloured a reasonably good yearbook picture of Anna Helen Crofts, collaborator with Lovecraft on “Poetry and the Gods” (1920). There was a Patreon-only post here on the almost-movie The Cry of Cthulhu.

This month was light on links to podcasts, but I noted a strong episode of The Lovecraft Geek podcast (#4, new series), and Perfect Bound had a podcast survey of Lovecraftian horror in comics.

Several strong scholarly items were found and added to my Open Lovecraft page, and I’m pleased to see the major Tolkien scholar Thomas Honegger is turning his attention to Lovecraft.

Newly published books noted here included: a new edition of Bookery’s Guide to Pulps & Related Magazines; the Algis Budrys collection Beyond the Outposts: Essays on SF and Fantasy, 1955-1996; the free Fandom in the UK, 1939-1945; and the expensive academic book Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle. New ‘forthcoming’ academic books noted included Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson; and another on some of the gothic influences to be detected in the apparently rationalist Sherlock Holmes tales.

Well, that’s it for this month’s round-up. If you can help boost my Patreon by a dollar or two, please, it would be much appreciated. If the virus doesn’t carry me off, then it’s quite possible that later in 2020 my Patreon patrons may get ‘early access’ to a chapter or two from my big Tolkien book.

Ol’ Abe

29 Wednesday Apr 2020

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Currently going through AbeBooks, a whole lot of editions carrying early Lovecraft material, such as the Tryout, National Amateur, Wolverine etc.

Sample titles:

* The National Amateur, May 1926, with “Polaris” by H. P. Lovecraft.
* The Vagrant, July 1918, with “The Poe-et’s Nightmare: A Fable” by H. P. Lovecraft.
* The National Amateur, January 1922, with “The Street” by H. P. Lovecraft.

Also items such as In Memoriam Howard Philips Lovecraft. Recollections, Appreciations, Estimates by Paul Cook, The Driftwood Press, Vermont, 1941.

All at ‘rich collector prices’, unfortunately, but some may be interested.

Grand Comics Database

27 Monday Apr 2020

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The Grand Comics Database. It’s more or less the ‘IMDb for comic-books’. Back in 2016 Mike Monaco of The University of Akron gave it an assessment for librarians. As of 2020 they have 850,000 cover scans, so it’s also a resource for historic illustrations. The service is probably something that makers of Lovecraftian and related comics want to be sure they’re listed on, and listed correctly with a cover picture.