Passes and Tickets for NecronomiCon Providence, on sale 12th January 2024, for the event in August in Providence.

Early promo art for the event, by Maegan LeMay.

New on Archive.org, a microfilm run of The Author & Journalist 1916-1969 magazine (initially The Student Writer, to 1923). November 1952 has one of a series giving August Derleth’s memories of “Becoming a writer”. In the same issue “New Pulps”…

“The pulp magazines, booming again [after the post-war shortages and disruption, and] … science-fiction is hot”

There are also short summary articles on the trade, such as “The Pulp Situation” in March 1941, which writes… “The terror and horror mystery period is over” due to the war.

Includes the 1948 “Lovecraft on Story Construction”, via Rimel.

Doubtless there’s more to be found in such a long run, and one can search across the full-text. The run is “to borrow” only.

Popping rather more fully into public availability… the entire digitized copyright-expired artwork of the British Isles. A UK Court of Appeal ruling… “confirms that museums do not have valid copyright in photographs of (two-dimensional) works which are themselves out of copyright. It means these photographs are in the public domain, and free to use.” Feel free to use for book covers, AI training, t-shirts, etc.

In my previous survey of what’s in the public domain as of 1st January, I noted Charles R. Knight, a fine prehistoric artist, whose works are now in the public domain as of 1st January 2024. I had the impression he was a dinosaur artist. He was, and Google Images very firmly gives the impression he was a dinosaur artist. But he was also an artist of prehistoric man, which brings his work into the realm of potential sources for later fantasy art styles. I note for instance his 336-page book Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventurer (1949) is billed as “The saga of man’s beginnings in word and pictures”, by which the Stone Age is meant and apparently depicted in 25 plates.

This is not on Archive.org, and all they have is his Life through the ages in B&W pencil-work, which covers the earliest ocean life through to the cave bears of the Stone Age. In the book one will also find some deliciously malign looking shellfish…

The depiction of some of his early prehistoric hunters, obviously not very popular today (but accessible via a museum site), reminds me of the style of Frazetta…

Earlier work reminds me of the Brothers Hildebrant.

Turns out he was also the artist who did some of the astronomical hallway murals for New York City’s major Hayden Planetarium, which Lovecraft enjoyed late in his life.

Also now in the public domain, and which I was unaware of before, the early American children’s storybook Millions of cats (1928). Interestingly it shares some features with Lovecraft’s tales of Ulthar’s cats… namely the old cotter and his wife, and the encounter with a massed army of ‘cats’.

One wonders if Lovecraft ever saw it? The dating is right, and he must at least have seen reviews in the 1928 magazines.

A quick round-up of Lovecraft in 2023:

In the volumes collecting Lovecraft’s letters, we had Lovecraft’s Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others, and a new hardback edition of The Spirit of Revision: Lovecraft’s Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop. Sadly all the great Amazon Warehouse sub-£10 deals have dried up for books of Lovecraft’s letters, and they’ve also gone up from £30 to £40 each. From his Circle we had To Worlds Unknown: The Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Howard Wandrei, and R.H. Barlow. The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard completed shipping, after a bit of a hiccup with an error found in the third and final volume.

There’s still no sign of the new long-promised Belknap Long letters arriving on the public-facing Brown University repository for free, with the project presumably delayed by the lockdowns. The physical library itself reopened in spring 2023, and it seems the S.T. Joshi Fellowship has survived too. Applications for the Fellowship should open again in Spring 2024. Since I haven’t heard that anyone bagged it in 2023, I assume that 2024 is the re-start date.

Lovecraftian scholarly books included When the Stars Are Right: H.P. Lovecraft and Astronomy; L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy; and Beyond the Black Stranger and Others: New Essays on Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Ken Faig’s Lovecraftian People and Places (2022) had an affordable Kindle ebook edition in 2023. As did After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (2022). In Lovecraftian topography the book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham appeared in late 2023, and I’m now waiting for the Lovecraft in Florida book (2024?) to accompany it, so as to do a joint review. Academic publishers offered two books of essays on contemporary culture and politics (usually the same thing, these days), with Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, But Still Dreaming; and The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games.

In France, the French Lovecraftians had their sixth volume of their sumptuous new ‘complete H.P. Lovecraft’ translation. The French also had the new volume Selection de lettres (1927-1929). A successful crowdfunder has enabled the translation of the REH / HPL letters translation into French. For the masses, the French “Pop Icons” books series produced one on H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently a new screen documentary on Lovecraft, Lovecraft’s World, premiered in France in November 2023?

The Germans published their handsome new book of the translated poetry, based around Lovecraft’s poem cycle “Fungi from Yuggoth”. The German annual Lovecrafter magazine was a “Lovecraft’s poetry” special-issue. Work is ongoing on “the planned volume of Lovecraft’s essays in German, and an end is now in sight”. The German city of Hamburg enjoyed a “Summer of Lovecraft” with many open air promenade performances. The best of early Weird Tales was published in German as a 100th anniversary slipcase edition containing five hardcover books. The German open-source Lovecraft-faithful base RPG FHTAGN appeared in English, enabling anyone to build a royalty-free and ‘proper Lovecraft’ RPG on top.

In Italy the book Tolkien e Lovecraft: Alle origini del fantastico appeared. The Italians appear to have released no Studi Lovecraftiani journal in 2023, but a chunky new issue of Italy’s Linus magazine devoted itself to H.P. Lovecraft. The Italian Zothique journal was a Clark Ashton Smith special.

Spaniards had the first volume of Lovecraft’s letters in translation, along with H.P. Lovecraft: Ensayos filosoficos (philosophical essays). A ‘Sui Generis’ Madrid event had a significant Lovecraft strand. A Spanish artist who del Toro has called “one the great modern engravers”, Tomas Jr., released his “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” book.

In Russia, Joshi’s monumental I Am Providence biography had a Russian translation. And their The Worlds of Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Artifacts and Legendary Lands (2022) was apparently the first attempt to “systematise and present to the public a digest of information about the unimaginable creations of H.P. Lovecraft” in Russian.

I reviewed the Lovecraft Annual 2022 at length, on the eve of the 2023 volume appearing. Which it did, though too late for me. Due to the deadline S.T. Joshi was only able to accept one of my articles for the 2024 rather than 2023 edition, and I’ll be polishing its references and sending the final-cut to him shortly. Brazilian journal Das Questoes has an ‘After Speculative Realism’ special as its latest issue, and led with “The Cthulhu Ascendancy: H.P. Lovecraft and the Tentacles of Speculative Realism” in English. More generally various scholarly articles on Lovecraft popped up here and there, often in obscure journals from South America or Europe where they are not aware of the diktat of the Central Committee.

The Christmas with H.P. Lovecraft book appeared, collecting his Xmas poems and story. In Lovecraft-related books we had the anthology For the Outsider: Poems Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft; and the revised and greatly expanded Eyes of the God: Selected Writings of R.H. Barlow.

Out-of-print and seemingly no longer available are the PDF back issues of Crypt of Cthulhu. The purchasable run of old Crypt of Cthulhu PDFs have gone offline, along with the more recent 2017-2022 run, all of which which now join most of the run of Lovecraft Studies in unobtainable limbo. In 2023 they were also joined by the graphic novel Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft.

In zines, The Pulpster issued its annual edition. The online Dark Worlds Quarterly continued its sterling work among the pulps and comics of yester-year. SFCrowsnest continued to run regular detailed reviews of non-fiction Lovecraft books. The Tentaculum PDF magazine had occasional non-fiction articles of Lovecraft interest. In work on R.E. Howard, The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies released 13.1 in January and 13.2 at the end of November 2023.

The Deep Cuts blog also continued to showcase biographical scholarship related to Lovecraft, and we also saw The Fossil continuing to investigate the history of amateur journalism. Your daily Tentaclii took various looks at people and places known to Lovecraft, often with the aid of pictures. My weekly ‘Picture Postals’ posts even unearthed a number of new discoveries. Various other discoveries were made. I also went back and tagged previous posts, for instance with ‘REH’ for R.E. Howard posts. Also tagged were old posts on Kipling and Conan Doyle.

In events there was a London Lovecraft Festival, the 28th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (at two or even three venues I think?), the big PulpFest, and the Howard Days in Texas. There was also a Lovecraft film festival down in Mexico. In the UK there was a large post-lockdowns ‘Innsmouth Literary Festival’ meetup for UK Mythos writers in September 2023. NecronomiCon Providence announced 2024 dates.

In podcasts, the Voluminous series of Lovecraft letter readings came to an end, leaving a lasting legacy of free shows and exemplary long readings. For Lovecraft’s birthday I offered a free enhanced audiobook reading of Lovecraft’s “Vermont, a first impression”, enhanced with music and SFX. Henrik Moller’s 150th podcast interviewed living members of the ‘Providence pals’, early Lovecraft researchers.

In comics, Unknown Kadath had a trade paperback collection and Gou Tanabe’s acclaimed Lovecraft adaptations continue to be published in English translation. The French had a substantial ‘BD’ (short graphic novel) Le dernier jour de Howard Phillips Lovecraft (‘The Last Day of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’). A special three-volume collector’s edition appeared of Called by Cthulhu: The Eldritch Art of Dave Carson, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman.

There were of course also the usual waves of Lovecraftian videogames, dark ambient and heavy metal music, crafts, single-piece artwork and more. No doubt there was also a good deal of cultural activity in Japan that I haven’t heard about, and of course Mythos fiction galore. But I’ll let someone more qualified tackle those two.

Some of the Lovecraft Circle entered the public domain. Both Derleth and Eddy Jr. slipped into the public domain in Canada, in perpetuity, as Canada’s sneaky new ’70 year law’ change is not retrospective. It looks as though the three core Munn ‘werewolf’ books all finally entered the public domain a few days ago, as the copyright on the third expired.

On Archive.org, among many useful items posted was a scan of Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Writings. The book Pulp fiction of the ’20s and ’30s also turned up on archive.org, thus making freely available good solid overviews of the work of Henry Kuttner and Frank Belknap Long.

In 2023 I began an occasional series looking at Lovecraft’s publication The Conservative, though that’s somewhat in abeyance for now. I also got bogged down in the Sully part of the Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully, and have yet to complete my notes for that volume. Among other things the notes have so far led me to discover a new ‘Everett McNeil as character’ story by Talman complete with illustration, aided by a newly-online run of his journal the Texaco Star. I was also pleased to find that Lovecraft at least once visited the Eddys at their new 1930s address, an address which I dug up recently on an old letter to Ghost Stories. Which adds another ‘Lovecraft in Providence’ dot to the city map. Look for more Conservative and Letters notes in 2024.

Unrelated to Lovecraft, I released an expanded free PDF of “The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright” in collaboration with Ken Faig Jr. Wright being a key early fantasy/SF writer, and a Birmingham contemporary of Tolkien. Over in Tolkien-land I produced seven issues of Tolkien Gleanings, and I also released a third expanded edition of my The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth. I finally pushed my big scholarly Tolkien book Tree & Star out in Lulu paperback. December saw another expanded edition of my The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire annotated bibliography. I also found time to get into AI image generation, which is a whole new mind-boggling terrain compared to 3D models and figures.

That’s all for now. Apologies if I’ve missed your fave HPL item of 2023. Let me know in the comments, if I have.

New to me, ‘Adventures in Time and Space: 60 years of Doctor Who art’. This is a large free exhibition running until 27th January 2024, at the Weston Museum in the probably rather wind-swept seaside resort-town of Weston-super-Mare, England. Might be combined with the more sedate ‘The Wonderful World of the Ladybird book artists’, which opens in Bath (20 miles east of Weston-super-Mare) on 19th January 2024.

Footnote fans may be interested in a new release of the free open-source DTP software Scribus 1.6. Now has “foot and end notes (experimental feature)” along with a new dark mode, a “new PDF-based output preview”, and even (it’s claimed) import of Microsoft Publisher .PUB and Quark files. Still works on Windows 7 too.

The download is here. I’m downloading now, and I’ll believe the .PUB import when I see it. But the footnotes and other changes make it a must-install.

Update: I knew it was too good to be true. The 64-bit installs, launches and then… completely and utterly freezes. Rebooting the PC made no difference. I then tried the 32-bit, but the same problem there. Scribus also then managed to make my old Microsoft Publisher un-launchable, due to the new C++ runtime installers Scribus needed to install.

Wild Yorkshire notes that 2024 is the Baring-Gould Centenary year…

In 2024, the Baring-Gould Centenary year, we’re celebrating – in artwork and animation – his work inspired by the time he spent as a young curate in Horbury: the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, his folklore study ‘The Book of Were-Wolves’ and his semi-autobiographical novel, set in a thinly disguised version of Horbury, ‘Through Flood and Flame’. Cue thwarted love, dramatic disasters and the villainous Richard Grover, man-monkey and firebrand preacher.

Currently on Abe Books at a silly $22k, the book History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), with a questionable Lovecraft inscription.

Advance notice for ‘The World of Tim Burton’, a big retrospective exhibition at the Design Museum in London, opening shortly before Halloween 2024.