The Lovecraft Letters Vol 1: Mysteries of Time and Spirit from a UK seller at a quite reasonable £27 in hardback. Sadly it can’t be shipped to an Amazon locker, and the seller isn’t also listing it on eBay. So I can’t get it. But some lucky Lovecraftian will. Get it while it’s hot…

New on Archive.org, a good clean scan of the British hardback anthology Switch On The Light (1931). This was one of a series bundled the better Weird Tales stories for the British market, and the volume gave Lovecraft a hardcover wrapping for “The Rats in the Walls” and also his ghost-written tale “The Curse of Yig”.

Incidentally, I see that facsimile dustjackets are available for the series.

Also new on Archive.org, a scan of The hermaphrodite; a poem by Loveman.

The Brooklyn Museum is selling off its four period rooms (Neoclassical, Greek Revival, Southern USA, Gilded Age). The rooms in the Museum are said to have recreated the original dimensions and orientation, as well as the furnishings and fittings. The news and disposal are quite sudden and it’s reported the contents are to be auctioned by Brunk Auctions later in March 2024.

These were presumably the rooms were once admired by Lovecraft. We know he did the Museum solo in May 1930, seeing the new ‘Colonial furniture and interiors’ wing which newly offered complete rooms arranged for Lovecraft’s lingering delight. I imagine that the politically incorrect “Colonial” word of the 1930s now = the more innocuous “Neoclassical” and “Greek Revival”, but I’m certainly no expert on American architectural periods and I could be wrong. He likely visited the rooms several times over the years, and in one letter he also enjoyed the “new dutch rooms”.

In the latest H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society newsletter for winter 2023/24, a rare peep at the Barlow House. It’s is the “Featured Member” post re: a member in Cocoa, Florida. I kind of imagined it as much less rustic. Perhaps even more of a modern (for the early-30s) single-storey lakeside place, suiting a military man. But here it looks like an 1880s wooden building that one might find in a Lovecraft tale.

New on Archive.org, a scan of the 1937 Not At Night Omnibus. This had Lovecraft between hard covers, if only in the British Isles. In the form of his “Pickman’s Model”, and the revision tale “The Horror in the Museum”.

Weird Tales offered their most suitable grue-some stories, these being selected by the magazine’s London agent Charles Lovell. The Selwyn & Blount anthologist Christine Campbell Thomson then made the final selection and ordering for the chunky mass-market hardback. One might have thought it would appear for Halloween in the autumn lists, but it appears to have been published in April or May 1937.

A short month, and a chilly one. My new employment requires venturing out of the Tentaclii Towers grounds, and — lacking the requisite brazier-heated coach and fast horses — I have been re-acquainted with the delights of the English weather. Despite what hysterical cultists would have you believe, the English spring weather is definitely not “boiling” so far as I can tell. It’s set to be sub-zero with a heavy mist tomorrow, as I write.

In this month’s ‘Picture Postals’ posts I clambered up the mysterious Newport Tower in search of Vikings; I glimpsed the lower depths of Brooklyn Heights, which finally led me to a good artistic vision of what Lovecraft would have seen from atop those same heights; I gazed down Fulton Street in earlier times (which seemed to me to link with Lovecraft’s “The Street”); and peeped at the new excavations alongside the List building at Brown University (the site of Lovecraft’s house at 66 College Street). In another picture based post I wondered at the similarity of Lovecraft’s bibliophile ‘Great Race’, in “The Shadow Out Of Time”, to the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” of 1927.

For Valentine’s Day I examined Lovecraft’s one-time epistolary pseudonym ‘Valentine Boiling Fitz-Randolph Byrd’.

In scholarly work I found four new items. I also noted the use of Lovecraft for a new “Psychoanalysis of Wet Dreams”, which led me to dig up Lovecraft’s suitably soppy parody poem on the topic. I noticed that Fungi from Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition is back in print. In forthcoming books, S.T. Joshi announced a forthcoming volume of letters sent to R.H. Barlow, and also remarked on a new French screen documentary on Lovecraft.

In new books I noted: The Weird Tales Boys (2023) and Long Memories and Other Writings (2022) on Frank Belknap Long. Also the forthcoming artbooks Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: Weirdly Illustrated by Michael Bukowski; and H.P. Lovecraft: Zoomorphic Manual. In old books I was pleased to learn of the existence of The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1981), now on Archive.org.

My occasional highlighting of free AI ‘LORA’ image-generation plugins continued, and I linked to an AI generated video adaptation (Lovecraft’s cosmic “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” from 1916).

Also in freeware, I was pleased to recommend AnyTxt Searcher for scholars. Also free, though requiring a hefty and expensive graphics card for your PC, Nvidia released “Chat with RTX”. Which appears to be an easy way to locally build an in-depth ‘H.P. Lovebot’ AI chatbot from his letters and essays. Now all we need is the humanoid robot HPL to put it in. Ready when you are, Mr. Musk!

Definitely not freeware, a complete set of Weird Tales was put up for sale on eBay at around $150,000. Which if you have a mere three bitcoins lying around, would actually be quite affordable. Sadly I only have a tiny fraction of one bitcoin, worth about $80 at the last count.

I updated my PDF of letters from E.H. Price to Lovecraft, which triggered a small but pleasing round of new downloads. Also for the Lovecraft Circle, I was pleased to find a good map for the Conan tales. I’m a little surprised there aren’t more such maps, and that I had to dig it up from 1975. In audio I noted R.E. Howard’s Weird Tales horror stories had arrived on Librivox.

I also posted on “Brian Stableford as editor and scholar”, and sorted out which of Asimov’s many ‘robot tales’ are said to be the best to start with. In Tolkien, I made more progress with issue #8 PDF ‘zine version of my Tolkien Gleanings, which should be out in a few weeks and weigh in at 100 pages.

And… the blog passed 5,000 posts.

New to me, the term “loci numinosi”. Wonderful.

Found in a descriptive blurb for the new open access conference-proceedings Cult Practices and Cult Spaces in Hittite Anatolia. Half the volume is on… “the significance of various [sacred] places, such as rivers, loci numinosi, roofs, [etc]”

The term seems to have been invented relatively recently by Hittite historians, to describe places where a ‘numinous’ deity might have been found, ranging from a typical temple altar or throne to ‘the catch-bag’ of a day’s hunting. Possibly in a sacred grove. The term is thus somewhat more humdrum than it first appears. Borrowing lustre from the more widely-known idea of the genius loci, which means the more ineffable (but also protective or “tutelary” as Lovecraft calls it) spirit of a natural place.

Still, the delightful new term loci numinosi is definitely one for imaginative authors to consider borrowing. One might even make a slight tweak to loci luminosi to indicate the repository of glowing Lovecraftian crystal, a high niche illuminated by giant burnished mirrors, a sacred grove of bio-luminescent fungi, or a dark place into which light can only enter at certain key moments of the astronomical cycle.

Heritage Auctions is hosting an auction consignment from fantasy author Neil Gaiman on 14th March 2024, which includes Sandman artwork, Watchman artwork, and a Moebius original.

The sale will benefit The Hero Initiative which supports veteran comic-creators in need, and the Authors League Fund which helps impoverished… “professional authors, journalists, critics, poets and dramatists”.

I hadn’t known about these two before, and they sound very worthy. If you are perhaps thinking of making or varying your will soon, then I’m sure they’d welcome bequests.

Also noticed, newly up for sale from James Cummins Bookseller of New York, some items from Lovecraft’s library…

In parts of New England you can now pay your public-library fines in cats.

Now on eBay, a “COMPLETE SET of Weird Tales“. Yours for a mere £118,310 (about $150,000).

Some nice cover scans are to be found on the listing, including this one which I don’t recall seeing before…

Archive.org can only provide one abysmal and one very-poor cover scan for this issue. Despite the alluring cover, this was an issue from before the ‘golden age of WT’ run started. Lovecraft would not appear in his own right until February 1924, and even then it was the over-the-top self-parody “The Hound”. But March 1924 saw his “The Rats in the Walls” and the bumper May–June–July 1924 issue had his “Hypnos”.