New to me, Ornaments in Jade by Arthur Machen. Now on Librivox as a free 100-minute audiobook read by Chuck Williamson.

Ornaments in Jade is a collection of short narrative experiments from Arthur Machen, ten dreamlike tales that are in equal parts enigmatic, sumptuous, and phantasmagoric…

Interesting. Issued in 1924 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York, in a 1000-copy limited edition. Turn-of-the-century literary decadence was coming back into view at that time, as the taint of the trial of Oscar Wilde faded. With this trend and Knopf’s publicists behind it, one imagines that the bookmen of New York City were at least aware of this edition when Lovecraft first arrived in the city. Lovecraft first discovered Machen’s work in the summer of 1923, so he may well have discovered news of it by himself.

If he was then able to see a copy of Jade must remain debatable. Yet, according to Joshi, he likely learned of Machen through Frank Belknap Long and a letter reveals he was “rereading” Long’s Machen collection in 1926. Long would have had both the savvy and contacts to be aware of the limited-edition being issued on his doorstep in 1924, and would also have had the funds to purchase it. Thus is seems reasonable to suppose that Lovecraft at least perused the book in 1926, if not soon after publication in 1924. It could also have become available for reading circa 1925, in the reading-rooms of the larger libraries in the city. This leads to the possibility that aspects of it may have inspired or influenced his own Dream Quest.

Centipede Press nicely reprinted the book a few years ago, and S.T. Joshi had his copy up for bags at $30 in 2018.

Here’s an unusual one. There’s a new two-hour Librivox recording of Henry Kuttner’s story “Crypt-city of the Deathless One” (Planet Stories, Winter 1943). It appears to be throwaway pulp, a late lost-race jungle-story that’s been pepped up by being transplanted to the science-lite “hell-forests” of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.

Also new on Librivox as a free audiobook, another curiosity. Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright’s “An Adventure In The Fourth Dimension” (October 1923)…

an uproarious skit on the four-dimensional theories of the mathematicians, and inter-planetary stories in general.

The Voluminous podcast, which reads Lovecraft’s letters, “is going monthly”. But this week, in place of a podcast, there is an item of historical context and curiosity, re: the previous letter and its mention of.. “extravagant claims about creating artificial life in a laboratory that got a fair amount of press coverage in the spring of 1926”. Lovecraft’s Aunt Lillian had saved and sent the press clippings.

The enclosures were perhaps unconsciously ironic, as Lovecraft was then seeking to escape a different kind of “artificial life”, as he found it in the…

cosmopolitan chaos [of] New York — which has no central identity or meaning, & no clean-cut relationship either to its own past or to anything else in particular — but of course I realise that different minds have different requirements, & that there are those who find in the intense surge of artificial life a certain stimulation which brings out what is already in them. But [a young writer considering coming to the city] ought to be warned in advance that all life in New York is purely artificial & affected…