S.T. Joshi’s new essay collection The Progression of the Weird Tale is now available in an affordable £2.60 Kindle ebook. The second half is substantially Lovecraft and Barlow, plus a critical assessment of two novels by Frank Belknap Long and memoirs of several fellow Lovecraftians. Also many short encyclopaedia entries, but judging by the one on Arnold Bennett they only cover supernatural novels not short-stories.

His latest blog post also reveals a worthy new mammoth project, A World History of Atheism, expected to take about six or seven years. Sounds great. Grab the graphic novel rights now.

H.P. Lovecraft… way ahead of the curve as usual. He was interested in, and read deeply into, the Ancient Roman Stoics and Epicureans. After about 1930 he came increasingly to live aspects of such a life, in a modified personal form well-adapted to shrugging off the turmoils and tribulations of the 1930s.

Now, like Lovecraft himself, these philosophies have become a small industry. The TLS this week reviews a shelf on new books on the topic (e.g. How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life) and reveals that the movement also has its share of get-rich-quick empire-builders…

… the Stoic revival extends beyond the bookstore. … The Stoa-curious can now head to dailystoic.com to have philosophical wisdom delivered to their inboxes or order a “Memento Mori medallion” from the online store. At modernstoicism.com they can sign up to “live like a Stoic for a week”. Real enthusiasts can attend an annual convention, Stoicon, held (at least before Covid) in cities across the world, to hear talks by classical scholars like Long or movement luminaries

Yet the reviewer finds the movement’s recent crop of short manuals and introductions, all from weighty university presses, to be worthy and faithful to the originals…

to a perhaps surprising degree, [these modern] Stoic treatises really are self-help manuals.

So it sounds like you could do worse, if you wanted a modern and readable introduction to this aspect of Lovecraft’s life in the 1930s. The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft is also your go-to book on this aspect of his thought, paired with Joshi’s Decline of the West, though both will be heavy going. Ideally, at some point we need an accessible H.P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy For Beginners book presented in the style of the leftist For Beginners series. Here’s a sample page from Linguistics for Beginners to show the approach I’m thinking of…

Having a cat as a narrator would probably be a useful conceit, since the text would need to draw the parallels between these philosophies and the natural bearing and attitude of cats.

Lovecraft also advises Epicureanism to young sceptics among his correspondents…

As to any especial “creed of speculative scepticism” … I would advise Epicureanism as a base. That old geezer had the right idea, and drew from the right sources, largely my old friend Democritus. Read Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura for the best possible exposition of this unsurpassed philosophy.

I see that the first issue of S. T. Joshi’s new journal Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism is now available on Amazon as an affordable £4.65 ebook for download. Even if you don’t care to add yet more fiction to your tottering reading-pile, there are also enough non-fiction pieces to find something of interest for your fivver. Such as…

* The Cosmic Scale of Elfland.

* The Idea of the North in the Fiction of Simon Strantzas.

* Finding Sherlock Holmes in Weird Fiction.

* “The Weird Dominions of the Infinite”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Scientific Gothic.

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.