Category Archives: Scholarly works

400 and counting

25 Saturday Feb 2023

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Congratulations to S.T. Joshi who posts that he’s now approaching his 400th book, not counting the various ‘revised and expanded’ editions.

He notes that…

My edition of the letters of Clark Ashton Smith, Donald and Howard Wandrei, and R.H. Barlow is also close to ready

Interesting. Presumably the letters not sent to Lovecraft or other major correspondents such as Derleth or R.E. Howard?

He’s also headed to New York City soon, to do research relating to the letters of Lovecraft’s friend Frank Belknap Long. He further notes his…

proposed volume of [early Lovecraft collaborator] Winifred Virginia Jackson’s collected poetry. David E. Schultz has already done an incredible amount of work on this project, but some of her poetry remains elusive.

Thus if you have any unique Winifred Virginia Jackson poetical items tucked away, now’s the time to speak up.

Deleuze on Lovecraft

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

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The Deleuze Seminars, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, given 1975-1976 in Paris and filmed for a ‘French philosophy as it is lived’ project of the period. Now online.

[He] focuses on the molecular multiplicities defined through their dimensions, specifically their maximal dimension that is the borderline. […] his extended example comes from H.P. Lovecraft [and he later] refers to Lovecraft’s story, “The Outsider”, which provides a term to describe the peripheral status in molecular multiplicities, “the one you don’t expect”, the unnamable, and from which another borderline can be acquired. […] A third, very brief fragment commences in mid-quotation from Lovecraft (located in print in A Thousand Plateaus, p. 251) that provides Deleuze with way to discuss the possibility of numerous dimensions possessed by molecular multiplicities. This brings him to propose the plane of consistency or the rhizosphere as the common intersection of all these multiplicities by a plane.

Henry Kuttner

21 Tuesday Feb 2023

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New on archive.org, Collected Fiction of Henry Kuttner, ordered by date across 8,400 pages. Including his Lovecraftian tales and his poem “H.P.L.” for Lovecraft.

The young Kuttner at an early SF convention.

For a short overview of his best Mythos tales see Shawn Ramsey’s “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Tales: An Overview”, Crypt of Cthulhu #51 (Hallowmas 1987). Also the anthology The Book Of Iod (1995) which collected ten Mythos tales by Kuttner and added an introduction by Robert M. Price, a collaboration, and one tale by Price himself. The book Discovering classic fantasy fiction: essays on the antecedents of fantastic literature (1996) has an essay of wider scope, “Henry Kuttner, Man of Many Voices”.

The Lovecraft letters to Kuttner were first published in the early 1990s, and these are now to be found at the back of the volume H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C.L. Moore and Others.

Also on Archive.org is The Best Of Henry Kuttner (1975) from Doubleday with an introduction by Ray Bradbury (the influence was ‘Kuttner influencing Bradbury’, rather than the other way around), and The Best Of Henry Kuttner Vol. 1 (1977) from Mayflower in the UK, with a very different story list.

Many of his magazine covers can be seen in date order at Dark Worlds Quarterly’s survey which starts with Henry Kuttner Part 1 – 1936-1939.

Kuttner’s ‘repeating character’ series are: the Hogben tales of a family of weird mutant hillbillies; and the Galloway Gallegher series about a brilliant but penniless inventor who can only invent when drunk, and when sober finds himself at a loss to explain his new inventions. We see him here considering a fabulous (but also fabulously vain and preening) robot he’s created.

The Providence Herbalist

19 Sunday Feb 2023

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A new eBay item, of reasonable crispness and thus of possible interest to makers of Lovecraftian RPG games set in Providence.

And talking of ephemera, advance news of a new book…

John D. Haefele and I actually have been slaving away on a book on Arkham House ephemera from the Classic Years — 1937-1972. We’ve got guys eyeballing some of the largest private collections (as I post, one stalwart has the legendary Phil Mays Collection under review), and we’re riding the whirlwind trying to juggle the info into order.

New book: Selection de lettres (1927-1929)

16 Thursday Feb 2023

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Newly listed, what appears to be a new book of translations of Lovecraft’s letters… or at least, new to the French in French. Selection de lettres (1927-1929): De vagues fragments d’un reve dans lequel je n’ai rien s faire (‘Vague fragments of a dream in which I have nothing to do’) was due in March but is now listed as shipping in early April 2023…

The translator Vincent-Pierre Angouillant offers us the translation of a hundred letters by Lovecraft. Knowing his impressive letters makes his fictional universe an even richer experience. Never before published in France, these letters are but a fragment of Lovecraft’s surviving correspondence. Often he reveals what seems an ordinary daily life, yet this is described in a style unique to Lovecraft and we can only marvel at the ways in which he interweaves his immense erudition. The reader will also encounter striking accounts of his dreams and nightmares, sometimes amounting to tales in their own right, in which the master instantly transports us into his horrific universe.

A chunky 600-page book, apparently. Looks good, if you’re a French Lovecraftian.

I see the same translator also has Selected Letters of an Anachronistic Gentleman (2022) which collected in one volume his two earlier volumes of translated letters and one booklet of 1925 letters. He seems to have started with his 1925 booklet in August 2021, and is rapidly working his way through the letters from there.

Ray Bradbury, dramatist

15 Wednesday Feb 2023

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New on Archive.org to borrow, a short survey of Ray Bradbury, dramatist (1989), a revised version of a 1977 edition. This 1989 Borgo edition is 56 pages. Amazon only sees one used copy of an out-of-print Borgo Press “second edition” from 1991. I’m guessing that 1989 was the hardback, and 1991 the paperback.

Also noted on Archive.org, and arrived in the last twelve months or so, Listen To The Echoes: the Ray Bradbury interviews and The Ray Bradbury Companion subtitled ‘a life and career history, photolog, and comprehensive checklist of writings, with facsimiles’.

Lovecraft and surrealism

07 Tuesday Feb 2023

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New on Archive.org, Cultural Correspondence #12-14 (1981)…

Some of [Frank Belnap Long’s] observations on the relationship between surrealism and the Lovecraft Circle were quoted in “Lovecraft, Surrealism & Revolution” in CC #10-11. The paragraphs below are excerpts from letters, published here with Mr. Long’s permission as a contribution to our symposium.”

The CC #10-11 article on Lovecraft, mentioned above, is also online.

Lovecraft’s letters in Spanish, for the first time

06 Monday Feb 2023

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Javier Calvo has translated Lovecraft’s letters into Spanish, and apparently this is the very first time there has been such a book-length translation. The new book is evidently a ‘selected letters’, focusing on Lovecraft’s labour and growth as a writer…

Edited by Javier Calvo, based on a corpus of more than twelve thousand pages, this first volume, ‘Writing Against Men’, focuses on Lovecraft’s literary career: his projects, goals, successes, and failures; his relationship with his literary circle; and the birth of the momentous mythology of it.

Apparently this is the first of three planned volumes, something which seems almost certain given the strong interest in the man in the Spanish-speaking world. Said to be shipping in February 2023, and listed on Amazon.es under the title “Escribir contra los hombres. Cartas de H. P. Lovecraft, Vol. I”. The Amazon listing reveals that the first volume is a table-trembler at a hefty 544 pages. The price is 35 Euro, which converts to around $38.

Also in Spain, the leftist newspaper El Pais ($ paywall) had a weekend article on The Commonplace Book of H.P. Lovecraft. I can’t get past the paywall, but perhaps there’s also a new translation of the Commonplace Book in Spain, occasioning the new article?

Volume six of the new French translation

30 Monday Jan 2023

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The French should today be unboxing their sixth volume of the complete H.P. Lovecraft. This is the new French translation from Mnemos. The book shipped last week, if the Amazon UK date can be trusted.

Not quite the final volume in the sumptuous set. The last will be Vol. 7 in March 2023, which is either “About Lovecraft” or “Lovecraft’s Circle” depending on how you translate its title.