New on Archive.org, and there for the first time, de Camp’s early Dark Valley Destiny: the life of Robert E. Howard. Howard scholars appear to have disliked the book’s Freudian ‘digging’ for neuroses and more, the fashionable ‘armchair psychoanalysis’ of the sort quite common in 1970s biographies. Seems to have been partly written 1970-74, at a guess as an offshoot of de Camp’s Lovecraft biography. Then published as a full book in a popular edition in 1983.

The Pulpster #32 now invites contributions for the August 2023 issue. Themes will be “Chilling Sports” (pulp sports, which I guess might include R.E. Howard’s boxing tales?) and “The Great Heroes!”.

A new blog post from S. T. Joshi gives the title of… “the next volume in the Lovecraft letters series”. It’s to be Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others. The book’s text is evidently still in the process of being assembled and edited, though, at present.

Bradofsky was an amateur journalist active in the NAPA, a collector of amateur journalism, and editor of his accomplished amateur journal The Californian.

After that book of letters should come the two-volumes of Long letters, and then the mega-index.

Another newly discovered open-access journal, Messengers From The Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy. From the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Current issue is 2022. No Lovecraft content, at least not yet.

New on Archive.org to borrow, The Twentieth Century British Supernatural Novel (1958). Includes an early positive appreciation of Tolkien as a supernatural writer. And by someone who had actually read The Lord of the Rings (most critics of the time didn’t, something which is obvious from their reviews and comments). The text also has some discussion of Lovecraft.

Possibly of interest to Tentaclii readers, a call for papers for “To sleep, perchance to dream”: Dreamscapes in Shakespearean Plays and Adaptations. For a British Shakespeare Association (BSA) 2023 Conference in Liverpool, a port city in the north-west of England, from 25th-28th July 2023.

Wormwoodiana looks at ‘Mazes and Labyrinths’…

There may well still be lost turf maze sites still to be discovered, using detailed place-name evidence or possibly local traditions: I came across one by chance a while ago in a church guide.

… and there’s the potential for newly-created ones, I imagine. One can of course make a temporary ‘summer maze’ of simple mown grass, which may better suit the hand-wringing nay-sayers on the Parish Council. But a more permanent turf-sod maze can’t be too difficult to make once you have a few tons of thick sods delivered to the land. Some drainage pipes too. Since, as Shakespeare pointed out, anything built as channels-in-turf is liable to gather muddy water in our British climate…

The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

The Wormwoodiana article usefully makes me aware of the Caerdroia journal, a long-running scholarly journal dedicated to the topic of mazes and their cultural uses. Possibly a home for your prospective article discussing notable pulp / early-SF mazes, such as the Lovecraft/Sterling story “In the Walls of Eryx”?

The Caerdroia Archive has a range of free public PDFs. Such as “Arthur Machen and the Maze Theme” (1991), which may interest some Tentaclii readers. Also out-of-print 2003-17 back-issues as free .PDFs. I’ve added the indexing URL to JURN and the .PDFs can now be found via my JURN search-engine.