Category Archives: Scholarly works

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.

Annotated Fungi

15 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Back in print, David E. Schultz’s Fungi from Yuggoth by H.P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Edition. A chunky 288 pages as a new $20 paperback. I hesitate to say ‘shipping now’, as I’m always wrong when it comes to Hippocampus. But it’s certainly listing on the Hippocampus site with what appears to be a live ‘Order now’ button.

Also listed there as new is the latest issue of the poetry journal Spectral Realms, with a book review titled “Born under Saturn Indeed”. Which may be for Born under Saturn: The Letters of Samuel Loveman and Clark Ashton Smith but more likely is for the new and greatly expanded edition of Out of the Immortal Night: Selected Works of Samuel Loveman. Or both.

Added to Open Lovecraft

09 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in Scholarly works

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* A. Sokol and J. Pevcikova, “Animal symbolism in the works of H.P. Lovecraft”, Ars Aeterna, December 2021.

* N.S. Scotuzzi, “Keziah Mason: a bruxa cientista de H.P. Lovecraft”, Literates, Vol. 1, No. 15, December 2021. (In Portuguese. Seeks to show how Lovecraft develops the witch figure in “Witch House”, and the extent to which she incorporates earlier Christian ideas of witches).

* B. Kowalczyk, “The Music of the Abyss: Nature in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann”, Forum of Poetics, Spring 2021.

Encyclopaedia Britannica 1926

05 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Newly liberated into the public domain, the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1926 supplement in three chunky volumes. They form “an entirely new survey of the march of events”, as the Preface has it.

These became the latest supplement to the 11th edition, and they provide a useful updating and snapshot of various emerging fields as they were understood in the ‘prime Lovecraft years’ of 1910-1926 (the dates given in the Preface). Lovecraft owned the 9th edition (1875-89), and its “A Guide to Systematic Reading In…”, the 9th edition being especially revered for its very high standards of scholarship. The dates of the 9th may seen antediluvian to us, but on most matters he was only about 20-25 years behind the current volumes… until 1926. Presumably for more modern topics he was able to consult the latest edition, and its most recent supplements, at the Public Library in Providence or New York City.

Sword-and-Sorcery Studies

04 Tuesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Historical context, REH, Scholarly works

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At DMR Brian Murphy offers a useful new article “Things That Are Undone and Ought Not To Be: A Sword-and-Sorcery Studies Wish List”.

A good ‘Not Conan or R.E. Howard’ critical survey of the genre in pre-PC comics would certainly be welcome, ideally including British (Karl the Viking etc) and European titles (e.g. in editor Toutain’s Heavy-Metal-alike magazines). And a lavish coffee-table book of related pinball-table art, perhaps with a DVD slotted in the back with the playable pinball table ROMs on it.

To his list I’d add:

* a survey-study of vintage paperback cover-art (as published) and its artists, though if the permissions could be obtained is perhaps doubtful now and one would have to rely on ‘fair use’ for covers;

* a close study of the curiously tepid cultural receptions and contexts of The Lord of the Rings in its ‘fallow period’ between publication and mass take-up. Say 1952-72, to add two years of run-up and take-off at either end;

* perhaps a study of the uses / re-workings sword-and-sorcery authors made of traditional works which were (by their time) effectively in the public domain (folklore, semi-fictional history, Arthur, Norse tales, Arabian Nights, the Northern fairy-tales, Ovid and ancient myth etc). They too had a ‘public domain’, though it was different than ours.

Cats and Creativity in the 18th century

02 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Found while updating my bibliography of North Staffordshire folklore, an item which seems relevant to two of Lovecraft’s abiding interests. In the newly published book of essays on Human-Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century ($ paywall), Chapter 12 is “‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry’: Cats and Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Britain”…

Cats became very popular pets during the eighteenth century, especially in the cities, as Britain gradually moved from being a predominantly agrarian society to an increasingly urbanised world. Yet cats did not lose their magical powers, as many popular folklore tales bore witness. Cats, purring by the fireside, were familiar domestic friends, whilst retaining their relative feline aloofness and ‘strangeness’. Their alliance of opposing characteristics was a source of great literary and intellectual creativity. Thus cats conveyed ‘electric’ messages….