“More on Tolkien and Bingo”. Which, quite possibly, at last answers the scholarly question of: “Why did Tolkien have Frodo named as ‘Bingo’ throughout the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings?”
Bingo!
30 Thursday Jun 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Category Archives: Scholarly works
The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe
27 Monday Jun 2022
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Online for free, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe in the revised two volume Gordian Press edition: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (both 1966).
Also, from the same worthy press and site, Poe’s collected Imaginary Voyages (1994). This is also on Archive.org “to borrow”, but here it’s free in full-text.
New book: Pike’s Peak or Bust: The Life and Works of David V. Bush
21 Tuesday Jun 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog brings news of a new book by Ken Faig Jr, in the form of Pike’s Peak or Bust: The Life and Works of David V. Bush (Sarnath Press, June 2022). Available now in paper, or as a budget Kindle ebook.
The new book is described by the blurb as an “exhaustive biography of Bush … a dynamic salesman with boundless self-confidence who was part guru and part charlatan”, and typical of a type that emerged in the 1920s.
He had his poetry and some of his booklets revised by H.P. Lovecraft. Bush gave Lovecraft steady revision work in the 1920s, which helped Lovecraft to get through that decade. Bush was also an early promoter of ‘marital advice’ sex books as I recall, some of which Lovecraft may have perused before his marriage. So far as we know he never ghosted any of the sex material, though he is said to have done whole chapters of Bush’s homespun popular psychology booklets. No doubt Ken Faig Jr. has all the details on that.
Archive.org’s search has become as flaky and unreliable as Amazon, and is no longer trustworthy as a guide to what an author has in there. But here are the Bush-isms I could find there after some digging and round-the-houses trips.
What to Eat (1924)
Psychology of Sex : how to make love and marry (1924)
Affirmations and how to use them (1923)
Character Analysis (1923)
Applied Psychology and Scientific Living (1923)
Psycho-analysis, kinks in the mind : how to analyze yourself and others for health and prosperity (1923)
Poems of Mastery and Love Verse (1922)
Grit and Gumption (1921)
The Silence: What It Is, How To Use It (unknown date, audiobook version only)
Inspirational poems (1921)
Humorous verse on current events and other topics (1916)
Soul poems, and other verse (1916)
Peace poems and sausages (1916)
eBay shows he was still trying to pack them in to his lectures, by then for ‘health foods’, in 1950…
Old-Time New England, 1910-1981
15 Wednesday Jun 2022
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Back in March I noted that the journal Old-time New England was freely available to 1925.
Hathi now has a few more into 1926, though the issues from 1926/27 onward are in a pointless copyright lockdown.
You won’t find them at Archive.org via the title search-box, curiously. But Google sees them there, and reveals that Archive.org now has them (from microfilm) all the way to 1981, as Old-Time New England 1910-1981.
New book: The Parameters of the Weird Tale
11 Saturday Jun 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog announces his new book The Parameters of the Weird Tale, which includes “old bibliographical articles from the New Lovecraft Collector (1993–99)” among other items. I don’t see the Lovecraft items in his World in Transition collection, and the old Lovecraft Collector is not on Archive.org.
The contents include, among others…
* An Annotated List of Lovecraft’s Juvenile Manuscripts in the John Hay Library.
* Lovecraft’s Earliest Writings.
* Lovecraft’s Amateur Pamphlets.
* The Sense of Place in Lovecraft’s Early Tales.
Parameters can be had on the Kindle as an ebook, or in paper.
New book: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft
06 Monday Jun 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Newly listed on Hippocampus, Ellen J. Greenham’s book Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert…
In Greenham’s analysis, Lovecraft’s cosmicism offers human beings limited options in madness or death as responses to the inescapable revelation of their own insignificance and ephemerality in the universe. The neocosmicism of Dick, Heinlein, and Herbert offers another pathway in the framework for how humans might respond when facing engulfment. Rather than yielding to despair, neocosmicism offers an experience that leads to the revitalisation of the human’s relationship with the universe it inhabits.
Lovecraft’s maps
03 Friday Jun 2022
Posted in Lovecraftian places, Maps, Scholarly works
Along with the forthcoming mega-index to the completed volumes of Letters, it struck me that we could also use a companion volume containing maps. ‘Orienting’ maps, in outline but still somewhat detailed. Map that quickly tell readers where one place was in relation to another. I’d suggest the following:
1. Lovecraft’s Providence (the topography and places known as a boy)
2. Lovecraft’s Providence (post-1914).
3. Lovecraft’s College Hill and Marketplace (including tunnels).
4. ” Places near Providence (Dark Swamp etc).
5. ” Brooklyn.
6. ” New York City.
7. ” New England coastline.
8. ” Dots-on-the-map. A general ‘dot-map’ of Lovecraft’s excursion and trip destinations east of the Mississippi and up into Canada.
9. ” Florida and his southern excursions.
10. ” Circle locations (their origins, places).
11. ” Far-flung Empire (his interest in particular far-flung places, places used in fiction etc).
Appendix: Map and mapping sources known to have been owned, used, consulted by Lovecraft.
Appendix: Bibliography of maps known to exist, relating to the original Lovecraft material (i.e. not the wider and later Mythos).
Appendix: List of important addresses in Lovecraft’s life.
Might be done in a suitable period style…
The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
31 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Kipling, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Online Books recently catalogued The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, which it had spotted in a nice clean .TXT version at Gutenberg. A fascinating curiosity, it seems, is Mrs. Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827). A lively proto-steampunk and partly aerial adventure by all accounts, albeit stretching over three volumes. And perhaps thus a possibility for adaptation to expand Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control (“With the Night Mail”) universe, on which Tentaclii has had several posts.
Three volumes is a bit daunting though. Has it been abridged? Yes, it has, “The only modern edition is abridged” says L.W. Currey, but doesn’t name the edition. Amazon reveals this as a “University of Michigan Press; Abridged edition (1995)”, aka “Ann Arbour”. Google Books reveals it was a paperback and also “illustrated”.
The SF Encyclopedia has “one of the very earliest Proto SF texts … a somewhat melodramatic plot”. Sounds great, and apparently lots of early sci-fi inventiveness too.
The SF Encyclopedia perhaps usefully comments on the University of Michigan edition is a “much cut bowdlerization”, basing this on one negative review. Some 100 pages cut and touches of new smoothing added at the joins, it seems. I’m fine with that, for reading enjoyment rather than scholarship. If the feminists who claim her (very much ‘in passing’) want to produce a sumptuous critical edition of the three volume table-trembler, then go ahead.
It looks like the abridged University of Michigan edition sells for £30 on eBay, and would be tricky to get via Amazon. Since there’s Amazon’s usual utter confusion on editions, and you might end up buying some public domain shovelware you could get free elsewhere.
Archive.org refuses a search for “The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century”, presumably because of the ! mark, and has “No results matched your criteria” for “A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century” in the title. So it’s difficult to compare editions there. But eventually, via Google and then an author search, deep down the Archive.org results (she wrote a lot about gardening after her marriage to a botanist) one finds the University of Michigan Press edition is available to borrow.
Also there is an 1828 second edition of the three-volume work: I, II, and III. But Gutenberg’s clean .TXT compilation of all three volumes will be preferred for some e-ink devices such as the original Kindle 3. This, together with judicious skimming, is perhaps the best option for reading.
I should also note the 18 hour LibriVox recording, which again is a bit daunting.
It never seems to have been adapted for media or comics.
I’m not alone in only just hearing about this novel. A 2018 blog post by Gothic Wanderer (not linked due to absolutely massive plot spoilers) remarks that she is vastly superior to Mary Shelley. And, yet despite being claimed by feminists…
The novel has received almost no critical attention. I have spent twenty years reading and studying Gothic fiction and yet I only learned of the novel’s existence in the last year. It is time for it to be studied more.
S.T. Joshi observes, in his weighty survey Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, that Loudon does not share Shelley’s radical politics — which may perhaps explain some of the neglect. Joshi also points up a few of the horror passages, before passing on to Poe in his survey of early mummies.
It seems that Lovecraft and his circle did not know the novel.
PDF Index Generator 3.2
24 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
PDF Index Generator 3.2 has been released today, the first update for a year. It’s the best relatively easy and affordable back-of-the-book index creator, and thus useful for scholars who may produce two or three books a year requiring an index. Note the coupon-code…
Theosophy across Boundaries
24 Tuesday May 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Were there actual Theosophists publishing stories in Weird Tales in Lovecraft’s day? Rather than just the occasional Theosophical Press advert and some writers who used a sprinkling of Theosophist notions to ginger up their tales? Tellers of Weird Tales investigates this week.
There’s also a new book on their wider influence, Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement, from the State University of New York Press (SUNY)…
This book successfully demonstrates that the Theosophical Society and its derivatives crossed all sorts of intellectual and cultural boundaries, and it makes a strong case that these phenomena — long ignored because of their heterodox nature — must be given the attention they deserve.
Spanish edition of ‘I Am Providence’
23 Monday May 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. Of interest is that he has copies of both Lovecraftian People and Places and Lovecraftian Proceedings #4, so they are shipping in paper. He also notes that…
the Spanish edition of I Am Providence is out
It appears that this edition manages to pack the two volumes into a mammoth 830-page table-trembler.
And all for 32 euros, which equates to $33.
The continent appear to do book pricing differently. For instance a few days ago I had a new Polish book arrive, Mitologia Polnocy a Chrzescijanstwo which I had to have for my Tolkien book since it has a chapter on Earendel (not so hot as was touted in a review, as it happens). The book managed to reach the UK, new, for just over £10 ($12.50), including shipping. The low cost was why it was my first new in-paper book for quite a while. It was found to be very handsomely designed and somewhat thick, obviously not print-on-demand. How publisher Avalon can make a zolty of profit on such a price I can’t imagine. I surmised there was perhaps some state-subsidy for worthy books related to national heritage, but the book had no subsidy credits or state logos. Such a nicely-made and rarefied scholarly book in the UK would automatically be around £26 ($33), and I know from my interest in open access that academic humanities publishers whine like hell about (apparently) barely scraping a profit even on £60 monographs featuring unpaid authors. And yet now comes the whole of I Am Providence in Spanish for just $33.
What is the secret? Has some impoverished former Soviet nation in Whereizitagain decided to corner the market in offering cheap book design and printing? Have such presses just found a couple of generous Bitcoin billionaires? Or did the supposed ‘paper shortage’ perversely lead to such an over-supply that the book-paper and printing market is now flooded and thus dirt cheap? Answers written on a night-gaunt’s wing, please, addressed to ‘Tentaclii Towers’.
Year Book of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers
22 Sunday May 2022
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Of possible interest to Lovecraftian researchers, Year Book of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers, 1923-1931. Turning on a U.S. VPN gets me the full-view at Hathi.
