A new article on “H.P. Lovecraft and Block Island”. By Edward Guimont, a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, who looks deeply and diligently for connections to the place but comes up rather empty handed. He does however end on the fascinating point that Lovecaft was very distantly related to Barlow….

R. H. Barlow, a young collaborator [was, as] Lovecraft discussed in an August 27, 1936 letter to their mutual friend Elizabeth Toldridge […] descended from Rathbone¹. In a visit to Lovecraft in the summer of 1936, Barlow and Lovecraft discovered that Barlow’s family tree split with the original Rathbone’s son, making the two authors sixth cousins.

Lovecraft also had had some distant family-tree members living on Block Island, but I’ve never yet found any mention of him going there to check the graveyards etc.

1. John Rathbone = “one of the original 16 purchasers of Block Island from 1661 now immortalized (under the spelling John Rathbun) on the Settlers’ Rock plaque near the North Light.”

Bobby Derie, at the Deep Cuts blog today, has a new appreciation of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923) by Sonia H. Greene & H. P. Lovecraft.

I see there’s also a new PDF scan of its appearance in Weird Tales as “The Invisible Monster”, because it’s now in the public domain. It can also be seen in its original Weird Tales context.

Magnolia, Gloucester was evidently the inspiration for the moonlight/ropes elements of the story. Though one was to wonder if Lovecraft’s earlier story “The Moon-Bog” (written 1921) didn’t play its part in Lovecraft’s ‘instant inspiration’ on the beach at Magnolia, with its similar moonlight-ladders and bewitched chain of people being drawn to their watery doom. Only published in June 1926, it’s possible that Sonia had not yet seen or heard a reading of “The Moon-Bog” in the early 1920s.

I’d suggest that for the first part of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (the capture and display of the sea-monster) Lovecraft was also splicing the Magnolia atmosphere with the fabled sea-monster of Sheepshead Bay. That was where the amateurs often met, at Dench’s house on the waterfront, and to hint that the setting was similar would add a slick veneer of Jaws-like local interest. Possibly that part had significant input from Sonia? The twist ending in the final line is also a bit ‘off’ in the believability of its twist, I think, and I’m not sure that’s from Lovecraft either.

New and free on Archive.org…

Hugh B. Cave, Magazines I Remember: Some Pulps, Their Editors, And What it Was Like to Write For Them, 1994. A 185 page book, with story-header illustrations from the pulps. Amazon and used book sellers will happily ding! your wallet for between £15 – £172 for this, in paper.

Hugh Barnett Cave (1910-2004) was a prolific pulp writer and a lifelong correspondent of Carl Jacobi. The book looks like an excellent mine of information, and the first five chapters appear to be extracts from the on-the-spot letters from one immersed in the pulp market — rather than a hazy attempt to recall matters from a distance of more than 50 years.

Definitely a book to cue up for proper reading on my Amazon Fire tablet! Sadly, I see that the PDF version has mangled the pictures, though.

Actually, this problem has usefully made me aware that Archive.org is now also offering a “COMIC BOOK ZIP” format for some types of content, which I had never noticed or tried before. This turns out to actually be the .CBZ format which can be read in any comic-book reading software. Superb quality, if 95Mb. So please forget my advice from a few days ago, about doing a manual conversion of the Archive.org .JP2s to .CBZ format. Archive.org now does it for you, if only on some types of content.

This means that you can drag-and-drop a link on a private Trello board for the relevant Archive.org page, to send a live clickable Web link from desktop to tablet. Then you can download the .CBZ directly from the tablet, rather than wrestle with a wi-fi or cable file-transfer. A simple Trello board saves having to use a mega-corp cloud service that wants to slurp up your entire bookmarks and every site URL you visit, just to send the occasional clickable URL from your desktop Web browser over to your Kindle or iPad tablet. Also works fine with YouTube videos. It’s a home-brew solution to the surprisingly difficult problem of sending a live clickable Web link from desktop to tablet, but it’s quick and it works.

On the Kindle, ComittoNxN (Comic Viewer) (paid) and Comic Time Reader (wholly free, ad-free, but needs to be sideloaded on a Kindle) are the best reader apps for free comics, in my experience, untethered from the locked-down offerings at Comixology and Marvel and similar services.