Apparently comic conventions across America are having to change their name, following a bizarre and absurd legal ruling that “Comic Con” is a trademark and infringement can carry a $4m liability. Techdirt has the details.

Presumably similar legal fears, unfounded or not, will now cause all other ‘Cons’ to have to change the ‘Con’ bit of their names. Since the same legal arm-twisting could be tried on conventions other than those for comics. Necronomicon Providence should be safe though, as the -con there is part of another name, arising from fiction that’s in the public domain. Perhaps that’s the trick for conventions — find a new public-domain name that naturally ends in ‘con’ and is associated with your topic.

Two recent posts on the increasing perils of having to rely on libraries, thrift stores and mainstream bookstores, to find local paper copies of Lovecraft:

1) “Where Have All the Books Gone?”…

Entire oeuvres of authors work have disappeared from the [local library] shelves, including Sheri S. Tepper, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Patricia A. McKillip – to name but a few of my favourites. I knew the main Library at least had a copy of The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. That is, after all, where it started. If I couldn’t find anything new, I’d just reread that, it’s been a while. [But] The one known Lovecraft book is gone.

Replaced by an ebook option, it seems. Nice if it’s free, is the same bona fide Joshi-edited Penguin Classics edition, and one has an dedicated ereader such as the original Kindle 3. Otherwise not so good. Even if you have one of the new budget Kindle Fire HD 10″ tablets, reading a long book on a glaring screen is not going to be as pleasant as it would be on a proper eInk ereader. But I’m guessing the library’s app probably only works on a tablet. One can see how these sort of tiresome logistics could get increasingly tangled, for the computer-phobic library user.

2) Also, found on an online Chess Forum, posted August 2018…

In my local used bookstore, I was looking for H.P. Lovecraft volumes and couldn’t find any. I asked about this at the front desk, and they said “Oh we keep these behind the counter.” I asked “Is that because you are afraid you will be boycotted and shamed for selling racist books?”

“No,” they lied. “He is so popular that people were stealing his books.”

I bought all they had — three volumes. It is only a matter of time before HPL is purged from school libraries as well as bookstores.

Of course, it seems faintly ridiculous — in the age of $60 digital tablets, eBay with local store pickup, and free Wayne June audiobooks all over YouTube — to go trudging down the town High Street looking for Lovecraft stories. Nevertheless, these two posts do point to the possibility that some sort of quiet and informal purge might be underway. I don’t think that’s actually the case. It seems more probable that it really is just about the global shift to ebooks and about Lovecraft’s popularity among light-fingered teenagers. But the possible evaporation of Lovecraft in locally accessible paper form is something we might usefully be alert to, in our own localities and districts. Can HPL still be found in your local library and bookstore?