Category Archives: Scholarly works

The Conservative, complete run reprint

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Arktos has a new complete book collection of The Conservative, Lovecraft’s own journal which ran between 1915 and 1923. I seem to remember this run has been reprinted before. Yup, I just looked: there was a 1976 Necronomicon Press collection of c.400 copies in two variants, edited by Marc A. Michaud and with a Foreword by Frank Belknap Long. In 1990 S.T. Joshi also published a selection of essays from The Conservative, also from Necronomicon Press. I doubt this new one is a facsimile edition, or else the blurb would have said so.

conslove

Free book on the early pulps

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Now free, Sam Moskowitz’s 1970 book Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920. On Archive.org, with .ePub and Kindle .mobi versions available.

under

munseys

Put the Munsey magazines in context with SFFAudio’s .mp3 podcast interview with Robert Weinberg about the history of pulps before Amazing. Starts at 5:54.

Fantastika and the Classical World / Translating Myth

03 Saturday Aug 2013

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Totally missed hearing about this one… The Fantastika and the Classical World (29th June – 1st July 2013, Liverpool UK)…

“scholars of Classical Reception are increasingly investigating all aspects of popular culture, and have begun looking at science fiction. However, scholars of the one are not often enough in contact with scholars of the other. This conference aims to bridge the divide, and provide a forum in which SF and Classical Reception scholars can meet and exchange ideas.”

But this one is still yet to happen… Translating Myth, a conference in Colchester, UK, from 5th-7th September 2013. On…

“all aspects of myth that involve the idea of translation … [i.e.] the process of conversion or transfer of cultural sources construed as mythic”

Archival Research in Science Fiction #1

03 Saturday Aug 2013

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The open access Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction has its issue No.1 available. Articles that caught my eye…

“Terraforming and Proto-Gaian Narratives in American Pulp SF of the 1930s-1940s”.

“Aerofuturism in the Archive” (fascinating hindsight article, recalling the pinball-like research strategies used in discovering the literature of aerofuturism in American culture).

Monstrous Antiquities: archaeology and the uncanny in popular culture

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

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News of a new conference in London, 1st-3rd November 2013: Monstrous Antiquities: archaeology and the uncanny in popular culture…

“This conference aims to study and celebrate this long and productive relationship [between archaeology and the uncanny]. We are keen to hear from scholars and aficionados of the fictional world of uncanny archaeology including archaeologists, historians, writers and artists. The programme will include all genres where the ancient meets the ghastly including music, television, literature, film, and art. The conference will be held at UCL on 1st—3rd November 2013.”

Three days, so I expect there’s probably going to be a book or an open set of online conference proceedings coming out of this one?

For those who can also afford to spend a further five nights in the UK after the conference, this event segways nicely with the one-day London research conference The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genre, on 8th November 2013.

Piranesi_Pyramid_RomeAbove: Pyramid in the Ruins of Ancient Rome, copper engraving by Piranesi.

More Open Lovecraft

28 Sunday Jul 2013

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More additions to the Open Lovecraft page:

* Richard Palvik (2013), H.P. Lovecraft: narratologisk analys av atmosfar och fasor (Masters dissertation. Title translates as “H.P. Lovecraft: a narratological analysis of atmospheres and horrors”. In Swedish, with English abstract).

* James Odelle Butler (2012), “Name, Place, and Emotional Space: Themed Semantics in Literary Onomastic Research” (PhD thesis for University of Glasgow, UK. Examines “The Interlaced Realities of Lovecraft County” on pp. 172-188).

* Gert Jan Willem Bekenkamp (2006), The World of Wonder: on children’s lust for terror (PhD thesis for the University of Leuven, Netherlands. With an introduction by Ramsey Campbell).

* Bruce Lord (2004), The Genetics of Horror: Sex and Racism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction (Part of Lord’s archive of writings at www.contrasoma.com).

New book on Kirk’s NYC bookshop

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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There’s another new biographical book about the Lovecraft Circle in New York, hot on the heels of my biographical book on Everett McNeil. So Many Lovely Days is by Mara Kirk Hart, daughter of George and Lucy Kirk. Her book tells the story of Kirk’s Chelsea Book Shop, 1927-1939.

lovely

By August 1925 the shop operated for about four months from Kirk’s rooms at 317 West 14th Street in Manhattan (the inspiration for the setting of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”). Kirk also sold book by printed catalogue. Then the shop moved to retail premises at 365 West 15th Street. In late January 1927 Kirk took out a new shop lease at 58 West Eighth Street (“the south side of Eighth Street near Sixth Avenue”) where…

“He [Kirk] had a circulating library, mainly, but he was also interested in first editions and remainders. His shop [at 58 West Eighth] was taken over by somebody who could pay four times as much rent — that was in the days just when Eighth Street was starting to boom — either Marboro [Marlboro cigarettes?] or some other kind of shop took over his place and paid some fantastic rent, which he could not possibly touch. So he had to go out of business. And it was just at that time when I put my brother into the [book] auction business, and George became his partner.” (from New York City Bookshops in the 1930s and 1940s: The Recollections of Walter Goldwater).

Samuel Loveman of the Lovecraft circle wrote two poems “For the Chelsea Book-Shop” of which this is one…

loveman-chelsea

  [ Hat-tip: Hippocampus, and The Tippler for the picture. ]

New book on the impact and influence of Weird Tales

27 Saturday Jul 2013

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“Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine and the evolution of American fantasy and horror”. Call for chapter proposals for a collection of essays. Abstracts due 31st August 2013.

“This volume will collect critical essays that seek to provide a broader understanding of the magazine Weird Tales and its authors, artists, readers, and editorial practices, as well as the larger impact that the periodical had on popular culture and genre fiction.”

The flyer doesn’t say who’s going to publish it, and at what price. One suspects it’ll be an academic publisher, with a “for academic libraries only” $90-$100 price.

Brumal: research journal on the fantastic

27 Saturday Jul 2013

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From Barcelona, Spain, Brumal: research journal on the fantastic. Out now, under Creative Commons, Vol.1, No.1, Spring 2013 (PDF link). Mostly in Spanish, but with an Introduction and lead essay in English, “The Fantastic Hole: towards a theorisation of the fantastic transgression as a phenomenon of space”.

brumal1

The Brumal website also has a link to another new open access journal, Pasavento: revista de estudios hispanicos. This also has its inaugural Vol.1, No.1 issue out now, and begins its run with a special Monsters issue. All Pasavento contents are in Spanish.

Also news from Brumal of…

* The first conference in Costa Rica (Central America) on fantastic literature, set for mid September 2013.

* A conference in Brazil in 2014, (Re)Visions of the Fantastic, for which the website is currently dead for me in the UK.