Category Archives: Scholarly works

Florida in the springtime

09 Wednesday Feb 2022

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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The latest edition of The Fossil (January 2022) has no Lovecraft-related articles, this time around. But there is a short activity-report which brings a snippet of good news on the forthcoming Florida book…

Adventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida has finally gone to the editor for final review. The book should be out in late spring.

Behind the camera, the likely cross-country stop at which Lovecraft would have arrived, in the centre of De Land.

Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns

08 Tuesday Feb 2022

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Here’s one more I missed back in 2016. The Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns had an expanded second edition in 2016. It’s from McFarland, so one has to double-check to see if it’s not one of their duff ones (the Dune encyclopedia, etc). But it’s reassuring to see that True West magazine gave the first edition a good review.

The second edition appears to have had no online reviews, other than a single Amazon U.S. one and a short one on a blog. Which carps on and on about ‘masked cowboys’ not being included, so it’s not much use. The lack of proper reviews seems a pity, and the book might be a candidate for someone casting around for a book to review.

By 2025 there’ll likely be a need for a third edition, given all the Weird West material that’ll have appeared in the decade since 2015. Even in the last five five years in comics, the task of updating would appear to be substantial, so a new edition is probably something for a dedicated ‘tracking blog’ to build up to over the next few years.

Litteraria Copernicana

31 Monday Jan 2022

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The Polish Litteraria Copernicana journal, Vol. 4 No. 40 (2021), is a Lovecraft special-issued titled “Lovecraftiana”. In mixed Polish and French, with a couple or articles using English if you click through to the actual PDF. All under permissive Creative Commons.

In rough translation:

* Introduction.

* Lovecraft Country, a TV series against Lovecraft?

* The Imaginary Universe of Lovecraft: through the prism of animated cinema. [Discusses History of the Necronomicon (Hideke Takayama, 1987); The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories (Ryo Shinagawa, 2008) – which also adapted “Picture in the House” and “The Festival”; and The Night Ocean (Maria Lorenzo Hernandez, 2015).]

* Messengers From Other Worlds: asteroids, science and mythology in The Color Out of Space and Fireball. [English PDF]

* Representing The Unrepresentable: videogame adaptation of Lovecraft and the question of figurability.

* Could Lovecraft Create An Appearance Of Normality? [English PDF. An off-putting title, but it turns out to be a close historical reception-study of how… “the works of Lovecraft were an important touchstone for the revival of Catalan non-mimetic fiction in the post-war era.”]

In the issue’s additional material the following seem relevant to the theme:

* The French Theatre of Fear [Review].

* Anders Fager and the tradition of post-Lovecraftian narrative. [Personal think-piece or appreciative overview?]

Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 – paperback listing on Amazon

24 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in Historical context, New books, REH, Scholarly works

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Amazon is now listing the Robert E. Howard Foundation’s The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 in the long-awaited paperback edition, with a publication date of 22nd January 2022.

Now seems to be shipping in both the UK and the USA. I recall that there was said to be a new cover for the paperback, different than the hardback’s cover. But that doesn’t now seem to be the case.

While you’re waiting for it to arrive you might peruse The World of Robert E. Howard. This website has scans of original letters to read online, and a call for “digital copies of any [original] letters” to show on the page.

Fourteen Weeks

22 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context, Scholarly works

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In a 1934 letter to Rimel Lovecraft remarks…

I have the entire series of Steele’s old ’14 Weeks’ textbooks […] which were wildly popular half a century ago [circa 1885] and which I still think are almost unsurpassed in giving beginners a good introduction to the science they cover.

These included Joel Dorman Steele’s A Fourteen Weeks Course in Descriptive Astronomy (1873), found in his library after his death. Joshi remarks in I Am Providence that of the old astronomy books found there…

some at least must have come from [his grandmother] Robie’s [astronomy] library. Of course, Lovecraft, ever the ardent used-bookstore hunter, could have picked up some of these titles on various book-hunting expeditions throughout his life.

Archive.org has several of the “Fourteen Weeks” series as scans, including the one on Descriptive Astronomy, though an 1875 edition.

In his reading guide for Anne Tillery Renshaw he calls the one in Physics “antediluvian” and classes it among the “whiskered reliques”, but still rates the ones on Chemistry and Zoology…

For a sound elementary introduction read Steele’s ancient Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry

Steele’s old Fourteen Weeks in Zoology is an easy start, and not at all misleading.

This might sound strange to us, but it’s no different than someone in 2022 recommending books from 1972 or thereabouts. Just as we might now still want to recommend a Carl Sagan or a Richard Feynman book to a beginner.

None of the mentions tell us when he acquired the set, though it must have been before 1934.

In other blogs

20 Thursday Jan 2022

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Deep Cuts has a useful post surveying the response of Lovecraft to the new talent of C. L. Moore, toward the end of his life.

M.C. Tuggle has a short review of S.T. Joshi’s new book The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft.

And S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, including further confirmation on the two Letters volumes planned for 2022…

this year we do hope to get out at least two other Lovecraft letters volumes: Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others (including letters to Zealia Bishop and others), and Miscellaneous Letters (a huge volume of letters to a wide array of individuals, as well as letters published in Lovecraft’s lifetime).

Also very tantalising is news of…

“Ellen Greenham’s fascinating book After Engulfment, a study of Lovecraft’s cosmicism and how it was adapted or amended” by later science-fiction writers.

However, this is still only at the copyediting stage. I assume the author is aware of the influence on Arthur C. Clarke, though Joshi doesn’t mention him in the list of influenced writers.