30 Tuesday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
New at The Rise of Cthulhu, the long article “E.P. Berglund: Bibliographer of the Old Ones”…
He passed away on June 19th, 2019 and I decided it was high time to write a tribute to him and celebrate his accomplishments in weird fiction. This article will focus on his life, bibliographic, and editorial work.
29 Monday Apr 2024
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
“Ah, Sweet Idiocy!” (1948), being the fan memoirs of Francis T. Laney in a glorious Gestetner-vision PDF scan.
He fatefully encountered the Lovecraft-loving Duane Rimel, and begins by giving an evocative account of their friendship and (on pages 4-5) a detailed short biography and pen picture of “Duane Weldon Rimel”. As many Lovecraftians will recall, Laney didn’t stop there. He went on to be editor of the seminal Lovecraft ‘zine The Acolyte, and here we have the full story in his own words.
The find of the scanned original led me to find the free 2019 PDF and ePub OCR reprint in aid of the TAFF fund. The old inky text here becomes plain Times Roman. The new reprint also includes various expansions, explanations of acronyms, and some scholarly apparatus.
27 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
In Italian, an architectural thesis on “Visualizing Innsmouth” in 3D. Freely available in PDF. Well researched and richly illustrated and thus worth perusing even if you can’t read Italian. Of course these days you can also run an unlocked PDF through an auto-translator to get the basic gist of it.
Particular attention was paid to the urban and architectural distribution of the digital model, creating a virtual town that respects the imagined environment as much as possible. The purpose of this reconstruction is to offer the user the possibility of interacting with the space and the buildings.
Also found, in Spanish, “Platonic aesthetics in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key””.
25 Thursday Apr 2024
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
Who knew? The Robert M. Price edited anthology The Exham Cycle actually appeared in 2020, and is still both available and affordable (for now). Sources and sequels to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”, by the look of it. I recall hearing about this as once-again ‘forthcoming’, on his podcast, but then the podcast went into abeyance. But the book actually appeared.
24 Wednesday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
NecronomiCon 2024 Passes and Tickets now on sale.
No programme for the scholarly Armitage Symposium wing as yet, though. At the last NecronomiCon / Armitage Symposium event it looked to be like it would have been possible to devise a full personal schedule that centred around the scholarship at the Symposium / Omni Hotel, rather than the main hotel. I assume it’ll be similar again this time.
Poster by Providence’s own Michael Ezzell.
21 Sunday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
I’m pleased to say that S.T. Joshi has accepted my long article for the next Lovecraft Annual, and that I’ll be in the 2024 issue. No news of the rest of the 2024 contents as yet.
By the way, if you’re having trouble accessing the Hippocampus Press site, publisher of the Lovecraft Annual, I find the problem is the Web browser’s “DNS-over-HTTPS provider”. The default Cloudflare DNS “knows a’ nurthing” about Hippocampus, while switching it to use Google Public DNS gets you there.
20 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
A new issue of Mythlore, with a lead article on “Tolkien Augustinian Theodicy, and ‘Lovecraftian’ Evil”. Freely available online.
14 Sunday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he notes the title of the forthcoming Long letters, A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long, in one volume due later in 2024. He and Schultz are also considering a Letters to H.P. Lovecraft volume, which I would assume would be ‘selected’ rather than everything known? Since the Price letters would take up a volume on their own, and the whole lot might have to be two volumes?
Joshi also notes “I continue to work (with David E. Schultz) on Letters to R. H. Barlow“. Which I guess will then replace O Fortunate Floridian? (Update: No it won’t: it’s letters to Barlow from people other than Lovecraft).
Joshi anticipates that the Lovecraft Annual and a number of books of Lovecraft scholarship will appear toward the time of the NecronomiCon / Armitage Symposium in Providence, later in 2024. See his full 12th April 2024 blog post for the details.
13 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Useful for writers as well as RPG gamers, and new on Archive.org as a scan in PDF, Monograph #319, Miskatonic University – The Gaslight Equipment Catalogue (2005). ‘Gaslight’ = the game-setting of the British Empire in the 1890s.
10 Wednesday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
In the latest edition of the journal Brno Studies in English, “Mad scientists in H.G. Wells’s early fiction”. Freely available in open-access.
07 Sunday Apr 2024
Posted in REH, Scholarly works
The journal Zothique #17 (2024) is a R.E. Howard special issue in a chunky 190 pages and in Italian. Available now.
— Lovecraft and R.E. Howard;
— Howard and Lord Byron;
— Howard and Weird Tales;
— Howard’s western stories set in Bear Creek;
— Howard’s poetic production;
— A thorough and detailed guide to the Italian editions of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane;
— An autobiographical piece in which Howard talks about his “Celtic origins”;
— All of his letters sent to “The Eyrie” (Weird Tales);
— The mail address book (?) of Weird Tales;
— A memoir by Novalyne Price Ellis about the ‘real’ Bob Howard;
— Five Howard stories in their first Italian translation.
06 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted in Scholarly works
An important update for the excellent Anytxt ‘desktop search’ freeware. Regex is now supported with this new April 2024 version, for sophisticated search across and inside your PC’s local files. Of obvious use to scholars with large local collections in .PDF and .ePub etc.