The UK’s Heath Robinson Museum has an “Illustrating the Grotesque” exhibition, 23rd September to 10th December 2023. Focussing on his illustrations for The Works of Rabelais (1904, 2 vols., not on Archive.org), but probably also drawing on his earlier Poe work and others. The museum is in Pinner, about 12 miles north of central London.

Currently the Museum has an exhibition of Robinson, one the UK’s best-loved illustrators, “Illustrating Andersen & Perrault”.

The Irish fantasy writer Rosa Mulholland’s vivid fantasy for children The Walking Trees, now freely available in PDF at last. This is not the later handsome illustrated edition, which I find is utterly available except physically in a few Irish libraries. So my new assemblage from the original magazine serial will have to do for now. You’re welcome.

Also in ‘choice obscurities’, new on Archive.org is The Armchair Detective for July 1972, which considered “A. Merritt’s Mysteries”. Merritt being a Lovecraft fave. On the novel Creep, Shadow! (Argosy, August 1934) the author of the article writes…

The themes of the book — reincarnation, sympathetic magic through shadows, and the re-enactment of an ancient myth of Brittany — are methodically laid out and examined intellectually before the author proceeds to the action. There are flashes of the old poetic imagery, and some of Merritt’s finest writing is in the “shadowland” sequence. This book, which I consider to be one of Merritt’s finest works, is unusual in its pace and plot when compared to his other novels.

Newly uploaded to Archive.org, The Saturday Review for the Lovecraft years (1919-1938). A London weekly, so Lovecraft likely didn’t read it — unless perhaps the Providence Public Library took it for their Reading Rooms. But still useful today for getting a quick overview of ‘the currents of culture and concerns’ in any particular year, and with the British perspective which Lovecraft usually favoured.

Regrettably Archive.org won’t accept an inbound Web link formed as…

https://archive.org/details/pub_saturday-review-uk?tab=collection&sort=-date

Instead it auto-reverts, in a very annoying way, to filtering the collection by the pointless “weekly views” instead. So you’ll have to re-filter the issues by “date published” to make any sense of them.

Not the same as the Saturday Review of Literature which Lovecraft’s friend Vrest Orton was associated with. The latter currently only has two issues on Archive.org at present.

The book Old New England doorways (1920). It’s surprising that Lovecraft wasn’t dancing on the table about this book. It’s from a notable publisher. But I can find no mention of it in the letters or essays. Nor is it listed in Lovecraft’s Library. Still, its existence and date shows that Lovecraft was not as eccentric as he might seem to some today, in his fancy for such doors.

As an increasingly swamp-like summer ‘rainy season’ washes drearily against the mossy walls of Tentaclii Towers, I finally get around to posting a new monthly update. Two monthly updates in fact, since the last was for May. I skipped a month. Lovecraft related news became noticeably more sparse as we headed into the quieter end-of-term and summer silly-season, but Tentaclii’s tentacles have entangled enough to continue daily posting. Thus there’s a bit to get through. Here are just the highlights for June/July…

My regular ‘picture postals’ posts returned to Dunwich and to Innsmouth (Newburyport). At Dunwich I was pleased to find two cards suggesting a dead-ringer for ‘Cold Spring Glen’, located just behind what was most likely Mrs Miniter’s old school. At Newburyport, an excellent new picture of the bus that served the wide coastal marshlands just to the south — surely the spitting image of the bus which features in the Innsmouth story if not the actual bus Lovecraft rode on. Among other ‘picture postals’ places I looked at Dunedin, Florida, and Lovecraft’s Quebec with the aid of newly colorised pictures. I had another dig at Lovecraft’s among the postcards at the Brown University repository. Where I realised, in conjunction with my reading of the Talman letters, that this Brown collection must be just a very slim fragment of what was once a vast postcard collection owned by Lovecraft by the mid 1930s. Presumably all his un-used cards were thought to be of no literary value and were sold to a bookshop to be disposed of per-card. But what a record of his travels it would have let us piece together today. Oh well.

Talking of travels, I had a look at the possibility that Lovecraft once visited his friend Walter J. Coates at home. It seems not, as the fellow was just to far into the backwood mountains even for Lovecraft. Coates even over-wintered there, evidenced by one comment from Lovecraft to Talman. The actual Coates address eluded my researches, but along the way I dug up what may be the only vintage postcard of what passed for the centre of his North Montpelier. I also had a brief post on Lovecraft and tobacco.

The 600-page book H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others appeared for pre-order on Hippocampus (Amazon UK says shipping from 18th July). While you’re waiting for that, the old Miscellaneous Writings has popped up on Archive.org to borrow. Useful for those checking old references in Lovecraft Studies etc.

Hippocampus Press also has a page for the new book For the Outsider: Poems Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. A fine idea for a book. I was pleased to hear that Gary Myers’s Dreamlands tales had a new 2022 ebook edition. S.T. Joshi has collected the best of Anthony M. Rud, in Ooze and Others. In contemporary fiction I spotted that there’s to be a large post-lockdowns ‘Innsmouth Literary Festival’ meetup for UK Mythos writers in September 2023.

In scholarly work, I noticed the first review I’d seen of the new book After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft. The Lovecraft-adjacent book Victorian Alchemy: Science, magic and ancient Egypt was released for free. I also spotted Loremasters and Libraries in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was pleased to find an affordable ebook version. The book Pulp fiction of the ’20s and ’30s turned up on archive.org, thus making freely available good solid overviews of the work of Henry Kuttner and Frank Belknap Long.

In journals I noted the newly discovered Insolita (in Portuguese, mostly scholarship on horror) and LIJ Ibero (Spanish, scholarship on juvenile fiction), and a new edition of The Fossil in English. On Archive.org, a new scan of “The Necronomicon Mythos according to HPL” popped up in an old Grey Lodge Occult Review. My 10,000 word article was rejected from The Lovecraft Annual, but only because the journal is full and I’m too late for this year. S.T. Joshi will now consider it for 2024. He advises “May” as a rough Annual deadline in future.

My notes on Letters to Wilfred B. Talman has so far produced three long blog posts. Among other things it’s led me to discover a new ‘Everett McNeil as character’ story by Talman, aided by a newly-online run of his journal the Texaco Star. A sumptuous 1930s trade magazine which also ran an R.E. Howard article. In the Talman letters I found that Lovecraft did after all read his friend Everett McNeil’s fantasy / weird work. This month I also found another two newspaper/magazine texts by Everett McNeil, one of which illuminated ‘the tipping problem’ in restaurants that likely also affected Lovecraft.

Also found in the Talman letters was that Lovecraft did know (and cherished) “the lane back of the Athenaeum”, a hint of which was spotted in one of my ‘Picture Postals’ recently. He at least once visited the Eddys at their new 1930s address (which I dug up recently on a letter to Ghost Stories) — it’s nice to be able to add a new small dot on ‘the Lovecraft map of Providence’, a dot that still exists today as a fine-looking wooden house.

I found Lin Carter’s Beyond The Gate Of Dream on Archive.org, with his poignant memoir of his boyhood among the pulps and comics. Also in nostalgia I looked up some 2024 anniversaries, and also gave advance notice of Lovecraft’s Birthday (20th August, the 133rd).

In audio, the Italians released what sounds like a very sumptuous Lovecraft heavy-metal album and book, The Dream and the Nightmare. If you can’t afford it or it’s sold out already, I also linked to a 14-hour ‘Lovecraftian Metal Madness’ playlist on Spotify.

In movies, I found the well-made film Out Of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1998), now in full on YouTube at 720px. New to me. And a well-known horror movie maker was heard in the horror trade-press saying he’d like to have a go at “The Call of Cthulhu”.

The Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s olde time radio adaptation of “The Shunned House” is now available on CD or download. In Hamburg, Germany, the city had a ‘Summer of Lovecraft’ with outdoor theatre. A little earlier in the summer the German city of Bonn had a number of performances of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

In my own releases I published the #5 PDF ‘zine version of my Tolkien Gleanings. An ‘Evil in the Landscape’ special, with a number of scholarly essays and reviews added to the news Gleanings. Though it will be the last one with essays, since no-one seems very interested judging by the hits and downloads. Zero donations, for a bumper issue. Thus future PDF issues will just be handy anthology bundles of the Gleanings blog-posts, rather than being a full free 80-page magazine like #5.

As usual please consider dropping few dollars in my Patreon bowl, or buying one of my books. Amazon voucher-codes are also very welcome. Many thanks!

I’ve found a little more from Lovecraft’s friend Everett McNeil, “Good Old Mac”, courtesy of new uploads to Archive.org. Newly found there, his thoughts on tipping waiters, as verse in Good Housekeeping in June 1905…

Which makes me wonder why I’ve never heard Lovecraft on tipping. He was in restaurants and cafes often enough, and poor enough to resent having to tip. Maybe he just never tipped?

And his vivid account of Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, carried in the Lowell Sun in 1898…

As we turn the year and start to look toward 2024, what anniversaries might one want to start preparing for?

Here are a few. Perhaps Tentaclii readers can add more?

1944: 80 years

Winfield Townley Scott and others. Lovecraft’s likely long-term influence starts to be felt.

* Scott, W. T. “Howard Lovecraft’s Lengthening Shade.” The Providence Sunday Journal, 109, No. 47 (21st May 1944).
* Scott, W. T., “His Own Most Fantastic Creation : Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944).
* Fritz Leiber, Jr.,, “A Literary Copernicus”, Acolyte, Fall 1944.
* U.S. soldiers carry “The Dunwich Horror” into and across Europe, in Derleth’s special military paperback edition.
* Edmund ‘always dismally wrong’ Wilson attempts to blast Lovecraft’s emerging reputation, in The New Yorker in May 1944.

1924: 100 years

* Lovecraft leaves for New York City, marries Sonia. Begins his ‘New York exile’.
* Lovecraft completes “Imprisoned with the Pharoahs” for Houdini.
* Lovecraft writes “The Shunned House”.
* The ‘Kalem Club’ attains its recognisable form.
* Publication of “The Rats in the Walls”.

1874: 150 years

* Births of Charles Fort, Houdini.
* Lovecraft’s father all-but vanishes from the historical record. He turns up again in 1889 for his Boston marriage.

Good grief. The German covers for The Lord of the Rings, in the three volume paperback edition of 1996. What on earth were they thinking of? Chemical-green covers, modernist typography, and with The Two Towers seeming to feature… a pigeon and a worm?

Just a reminder that Lovecraft’s 133rd birthday is coming up, on 20th August 2023. There’s thus time for Lovecraftians to begin crafting a ‘birthday gift’ of some sort.

2023 is the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft’s 1973 breakthrough into a mass market readership in America and Great Britain, which may be a hook that some want to hang their ‘gift’ on.

August 2023 will also mark 100 years since Lovecraft penned “The Rats in the Walls” (August-September 1923).

A thoughtful U.S. essay about “Finding and Losing Train Culture”, something that Lovecraft was often immersed in. First as a railroad enthusiast, then an eager train traveller of various types. And finally as someone who somewhat lost that train culture, as poverty forced him onto cheaper buses and long-distance coaches. Which were made more enticing from spring 1932, since the coach and bus lines slashed prices as the Great Depression deepened.

From the thoughtful article…

The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. Trains come in at one or two points, and leave by those same points, on a more or less regular, but distinctly limited schedule.

I’m not sure if there are any bus or train tickets in the new Arkham Investigator’s Wallet Prop Set from the HPLHS. But if not you can pick up a few on eBay easily enough. Even a corpse needed a train ticket, it seems.