* Jack Adrian (online 2012), “An M.R. James Letter”, Ghosts & Scholars (first series) No.8, 1986. (Annotated version of a private 1926 letter which contains James’s comments on… “a disquisition of nearly 40 pages of double columns on Supernatural Horror in Literature by one H.P. Lovecraft, whose style is of the most offensive. He uses the word cosmic about 24 times.”)

* Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth (2010), “Life Forms: a keyword entry”, Representations 112, Fall 2010. (Detailed discussion of the history of the changing conception of the term ‘lifeforms’, including a discussion of scientific sources which strongly influenced Lovecraft)

* John J. Miller (2014), “Master of Modern Horror”, Claremont Review, Vol. XIV, Number 2, Spring 2014. (Long review essay of three volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction)

The latest issue of The Fossil is out now July 2014, #360. Including a detailed round-up of snippets of news on the status of various collections of amateur journalism items from the Lovecraft period, which are very slowly starting to get some basic indexing work done on them…

Joseph Ditta, Reference Librarian at The New York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, replied to an inquiry about their collections. “Our collection of amateur periodicals is fairly sizable, filling 28 boxes on 12 shelves. It is not cataloged, unfortunately, but in 2010 an intern went through most of the collection and created a spreadsheet listing the titles found in each box. Her list does not include holdings information, or dates, and she stopped at the second box of ‘S’ titles. Still, this partial list includes over 1,500 titles, which gives some sense of the extent of the collection.”

Library of Congress’s [amateur journalism] collection … After viewing Excel spreadsheets that Ivan Snyder and Tom Parson are in the process of creating to track their collections, I created one that lists the 6,804 publications held by the LoC. Although it is preliminary, I would be glad to share a copy upon request”

It seems the LoC’s ‘X Collection’ PDFs (on archive.org) were created simply as an initial index to their boxed collections of pamphlets and emphemera, to aid physical retrieval for scanning when an item is requested by a scholar. Presumably as individual items are scanned on request, the scans will then start to pop up on Archive.org. Inklings is perhaps one of the journals runs it would be most interesting to have in full.

Also included in The Fossil issue #360 is “A Visit to Haverhill” by David Goudsward, which covers almost the same ground as Goudsward’s recent book. And David M. Tribby on the “United APA: Gone But Not Forgotten”, the United Amateur Press Association being Lovecraft’s amateur alma mater.