New on Archive.org, Stories from The Pall Mall Gazette and Magazine, six bundles of the British weird, supernatural and early science-fiction from the last years of Queen Victoria and the subsequent Edwardian period. Plus some prehistoric ‘cave man’ tales. A representative sample from the table-of-contents…

Here’s a curious little coincidence.

Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook” states that one of the protagonists, the detective Malone, had in his younger days published… “many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review”. At circa 1926 Malone was 42 years old. Thus he was about age 25-32 when a young man and likely to be writing publishable poetry, at which point the editor of the real Dublin Review was one Wilfrid Philip Ward. Ward was editor from 1903 until his death in 1916.

“Ward Phillips” was one of Lovecraft’s own pseudonyms, and this name emerged at around this time, drawing on his own family name and history. The name was later revived for a character in Lovecraft’s fiction.

The similarity of the names must be sheer co-incidence, as I can see no reason why Lovecraft would be interested in the real Wilfrid Philip Ward. But it’s a small point that a Lovecraftian fiction writer might hang a new story on. Such a story might open with the re-discovery that Lovecraft had published immensely subtle anti-Catholic poetry in the Dublin Review at that time, under the nose of Philip Ward, in part by posing as Ward’s long-lost American relation. These poems being published under the name of Malone. And that this lost poem cycle is now revealed to be a sort of Da Vinci Code leading to… etc etc.

Now that the paperback volumes of Lovecraft’s letters are growing in both number and page-count, would a single unified online A-Z index for all the volumes be useful for researchers?

Free and public, such a mega-index would serve as a cow-catcher for sales of these print-on-demand books, and would be expanded as each new volume is published.

It shouldn’t take more than an hour to make, for an intern with access to the digital copies. Being a simple matter of copy-pasting out each back-of-the-book index to an Excel spreadsheet, thus…

Brown University 183, 196

Then use a standard plugin to place a volume identifier at the end of each index entry. Here [AG] = Alfred Galpin …

Brown University 183, 196 [AG]

Then append this index to the combined multi-book index in Excel. Once done, have Excel re-sort the whole lot by A-Z, and copy it all out to a Web page.

There would be problems with sorting items which begin “ of course. As in: “Tree, The”. But since all such entries have a closing ”, one would simply delete all initial “’s. Then, once A-Z sorted, have Excel add back the starting “ for any cell that contains a closing ” mark anywhere in it. One could do this by identifying such cells by using a simple highlight any cell containing ” formula, then add back the “ to the start of those cells.

Someone on Fivver could probably do this for $10, if sent a .ZIP file of the copy-pasted indexes (I think there are about twenty such books now?).

Project Gutenberg has a partial run of The Fantasy Fan, albeit in OCR’d ePub rather than page scans…

September 1933

October 1933

November 1933

December 1933

January 1934

March 1934

April 1934

This important publication ran 18 issues, from September 1933 to February 1935.

Newly uploaded to Archive.org, Thrust 20, Summer 1984 has an interview with the editor…

I wrote to many of the prominent authors of the day – H P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August W. Derleth, Eando Binder, and others, begging for manuscripts to start my modest effort, which I would call The Fantasy Fan. I was pleasantly surprised at the willing responses, and soon had a small stack of good short stories and articles

The Horrible Conclusion blog has a useful new set of summary synopses of all of Lovecraft’s “ghost-written and collaborative works”. It runs to 13,000 words on a single Web page, and can be easily copy-pasted to Word and thence saved to a handy PDF.

A useful new definition from Rise Again Comics, this week… “an anti-fan is someone who claims to be a fan of something while advocating for everything that destroys it and the fandom surrounding it”. And, I’d add, while often also lining their own pockets — via side-tracking clueless newbies toward their own ersatz products.

It’s the end of the month again. Here in the English West Midlands the month of July did its usual dance of sun and rain. Large pools now creep ominously across the wasteland toward Tentaclii Towers. The air-conditioning unit was ceremonially wheeled out of the darkness and dusted down for its usual three-day stint, in what passes for a British summer. Much ginger beer was sipped, with the aid of $59 from 19 kind Patreon patrons.

As for Tentaclii, daily posting continued and the usual haul of new items was hauled.

Forthcoming ‘collected’ books noted included Lovecraft’s best poems and best essays in new Joshi-tastic editions. In ebooks I noted the imminent affordable ebook of the stories of the late Wilum Pugmire, An Imp of Aether; and discovered that the older A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos is now available as an equally affordable third-edition ebook.

In survey books, noted were the new Encyclopedia of Weird Detectives; the new Weird Tales of Modernity; the free Worlds Imagined: the Maps of Imaginary Places in PDF; and a new edition of S.T. Joshi’s critical survey Weird Fiction in the Later 20th Century.

As for non-fiction Lovecraft or related journals, noted were: The Fossil #380 (free); Brumal’s huge Lovecraft special issue (free); the forthcoming Crypt of Cthulhu #113; and the Italian Providence Tales #4. Also two recent issues on the Russian Gothic / Magic & Magicians from the paywalled academic journal Russian Literature.

Various free scholarly items were linked up from my own Open Lovecraft page. The free Howard Days videos at YouTube, several scholarly, were also linked here in a couple of structured posts.

Scholarly ‘calls’ included S.T. Joshi’s new project Penumbra, a journal for criticism and scholarship of weird fiction, and The Dark Man journal (Robert E. Howard, and now also other pulpsters of his era), for which I made the suggestion that ‘The Small Town’ would make a good themed issue. Also noted here was the S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship.

In comics I was pleased to find the genuinely experimental Secuencia Grafica 1 from Spain, adapting “At The Mountains of Madness” in lively wordless storyboard form. I hope to have an interview with the maker in the next issue of Digital Art Live magazine, which will be themed around comics.

Outside print, a number of musical items were noted, including a CD and symphony performance, and a notable heavy rock album in place of fireworks for the 4th of July. Also news of several art shows, a theatre show, a new radio theatre CD, and a podcast or two. A couple of mildly promising indie games, Gibbous and Moons of Madness, seemed deserving of note.

For historical context there was a deep dive into “Around Brattleboro” which wrestled with the exact geography of the place and which may have found some new pictures of the 1927 floods that inspired Lovecraft. The Guest Post: “Lovecraft, alive in Paris!” gave an insight into Paris in 1970, its politics and its response to Lovecraft.

Feeling deprived of either a seaside holiday or a RPG jaunt into the Sahara, my Friday “Picture Postals” took a stroll down to the beach shacks of Marblehead and along the Newburyport shoreline, though nothing very remarkable was discovered there.

Some suggestions were made in “Toward an ‘Open Cthulhu’” and “Lovecraft’s Diary: a project proposal”.

As for my new discoveries, I’m pleased to say that several were made this month…

i) “On Buzrael” solved a small source problem in “The Dunwich Horror”.

ii) A possible new discovery was that Commonplace Book item #11 links with “The Cats of Ulthar” — though I’ve never been able to see Shultz’s Annotated Commonplace Book (1987), so perhaps he notes it there. (Is he going to get a new edition of that out, at some point soon?)

iii) “A letter from Marblehead” was a more substantial discovery, offering a very strong and previously unrecognised source for “The Strange High House in the Mist”. Possibly it’s now un-provable as a source, although someone with boots-on-the-ground in Marblehead, full access to the Lovecraft letters, and access to the Ward family records might be able to do something more with adding context to the discovery.

In the background, I’ve done a comprehensively annotated “The Cats of Ulthar” which will be released on Lovecraft’s Birthday (20th August) and which runs to 6,000 words. Also a fully annotated Lovecraft poem, which will be released for the 100th anniversary of the Mythos later this year and which is set to run to 10,000 words of annotations.

Coming in August here at Tentaclii, among other items: ‘HPL in an aquarium’ with many pictures; and a comic-strip drawn by Frank Belknap Long and featuring Lovecraft.

For my Patreon patrons, as protected posts here in July 2019…

* Lovecraft’s Unused Monsters, Cultists and Story-Settings: No.2 — the Ignis Phaunos.

* Cosmology and Harmony from the 1980s.

* Wayne June’s “The Shadow Out of Time” (for free)

Just $1 a month (or more, ideally more) gets you access to these posts and other occasional goodies.

A small addition to my “Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Newburyport” posts. Here’s a possible prop for gamers seeking an additional plot-prompt. While not huge or 300dpi it should be printable if making a small card at perhaps 4½”.

Is the apparently mundane new ‘shellfish treatment plant’ at Plum Island what it seems? Why are the cars of two marine biologists seen to visit it? What of the new rumours among the older fishermen of monstrously tentacular things being seen in the tidal pools…? Why does the place emit a faint phosphorescent glow at night? Etc.

A reminder that Lovecraft’s 129th birthday is coming soon, one month away on 20th August 2019.