I’d overlooked a book in summer 2019, Shapeshifters: A History. A short, but seemingly sound, historical survey of this cultural phenomenon. There appear to be no journal reviews of it, but then these days journal editors are increasingly refusing to review titles not published by a university or prestige press.
But looking for such a review led me to discover a new journal I wasn’t aware of, Gramarye: The Journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester in the south of England.
It has produced 16 issues so far, balancing articles with a healthy crop of reviews.
The latest Gramarye is issue 16 and has “In Search of Jenny Greenteeth” by Simon Young and “‘A Fairy, or Else an Insect’: Traditions at Fairy Wells” by Jeremy Harte, both topics on which I mused a couple of years ago (“On Jenny Green-teeth”, “‘Lady Wells’ in the High Peak”, “Mothlach”, and “On The Butts, Baggins, and Butterflies”). The same issue also has the review of Shapeshifters: A History.
As such I’m inclined to get No.16, but… it’s not on Amazon in either ebook or paper. It’s available from the university, but instead of a simple PayPal connection the eager buyer goes to one of those annoying clunky “sign-up before you can buy” shopping-carts. Which it appears only takes credit-cards. Then, a departmental assistant manually emails you the purchased PDFs. It’s not ideal.
It’s a pity that departmental journals are not also assigned an ‘impact rating’, in the same manner as a dept’s scholarly article-output. Such a official rating (which affects their taxpayer income) might chivvy up the publicity and distribution for such journals, and see a few summer interns or apprentices assigned to tasks such as getting them all on Amazon as ebooks. But of course the ideal in terms of ‘impact’ would be a big crowd-funder which would ‘buy out’ all the back-issues and make them open access, and then for a small legacy or bequest to ensure the journal continues to be open access.
Anyway, nothing very ‘Lovecraft’ except tangentially in some of the reviews. But other items of interest to me in other issues of Gramarye:
#14. ‘From Ogre to Woodlouse: A Journey through Names’, Jeremy Harte. [Presumably on the noted Gawain word ‘woodwose’].
#13. ‘Tolkien’s style’, Colin Manlove.
#6. ‘The American Fantasy Tradition’, Tom Shippey.
Shippey has always been a bit sniffy about Howard’s Conan, so it would be interesting to see his take on that aspect of fantasy and its place in the American tradition.
A two-year subscription to the PDF version of Gramarye is £20, about $26. The paper edition is not much more. It appears you can’t back-date a subscription and have it start from, say, #13.
