There’s a new David Goudsward publication. He has made Old World Footprints available again in a new Kindle ebook edition at a modest price.
In 1928, Mrs. William B. Symmes gave her family and friends 300 copies of her 32-page travelogue. The book’s printer was amateur pressman W. Paul Cook … Mrs. Symmes’ nephew, Frank Belknap Long is credited for the preface, actually ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft proofread the book for Cook, and may have edited it as well.
The work is a very minor footnote in Lovecraft’s life and writing. But many will still welcome this new edition which is annotated and has photos.
It’s presented in 58 pages. I’m uncertain what “revised” means. The Amazon listing has it that it’s a “Print Replica” and “revised”. My guess is that “revised” may mean that errors of fact may have been corrected via the annotations? Or perhaps it’s just an Amazon thing, a way to get a clean listing so that Amazon’s idiot-bots don’t confuse it with the original?
Lovecraft’s ghost-written preface can also be found in Collected Essays of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume 5: Philosophy; Autobiography. David Goudsward’s article “Cassie Symmes: Inadvertent Lovecraftian” was in The Fossil, April 2017, and presumably the new book builds on this and provides the definitive version of it.
