Added to Open Lovecraft

* S.P. Schultz, “An Integral Analysis of the Life and Works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)”. (November 2019 Masters dissertation for University of Saskatchewan. Finds Lovecraft’s work to have been successful, in terms of evoking and integrating the challenges faced by those living through the turbulent 1917-1937 period).

* A. Molnar, A Review of Lovecraftian Proceedings 2, Americana: e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, Spring 2018.

A small faun

A delightful 1922 poetry book cover from Eastern Europe, that could be re-purposed as a public-domain cover of a collection of Lovecraft’s earliest memories of his childhood. I’ve downloaded the hi-res scans, extracted the cover and cleaned. There’s space for an artist to carefully add a few small tentacles in the same style.

Very light cleaning and desaturation…

My clean cut-out in PNG with transparency and defringing…

Audiobook: H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations

New to me and seemingly to Google, H.P. Lovecraft – The Collaborations in unabridged audiobook from the Historical Society…

The HPLHS is pleased to present the first original audiobook of Lovecraft’s collaborations and revisions, covering 32 stories and comprising more than twenty-three hours of professionally recorded audio. The stories are read by HPLHS founders and trained actors Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, from texts prepared by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi. … Two years in the making… These are NOT dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre.

No Eddy collaborations, though…

The Eddy estate does not wish for any of C.M. Eddy’s stories to appear in any collections of Lovecraft collaboration tales.

The Web page is currently rather confusing, mentioning the “The Collected Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft Audiobook” and also having a link to the purchase page for that, rather than H.P. Lovecraft : The Collaborations.

Once at that page, what you have to do to solve this apparent conundrum is to spot the hidden drop-down of descending delight, and it will reveal the well-concealed eldritch wisdom within…

This then reveals the Collaborations as a £23 download for the UK.

More on trademark trolls

More on trademark trolls, a nasty instance of which was recently covered here at Tentaclii. In the UK there’s been a ridiculous and expensive case against the 1960s band ‘The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’, over their own use of their own name no less. This stupid state of affairs has finally roused the ire of Parliament. Apparently, if a sensible British government is returned at next Thursday’s general election, such matters…

will be pursued further in Westminster with the assistance of some supportive MPs, so that other bands do not have to suffer the same nightmare.

… and hopefully any resulting legislation will also spill over to benefit many other indie creatives.

Le Monde du Lovecraft

S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated…

French scholar Gilles Menegaldo, one of several figures whom I met during my trip to France in May, is now seeking funding for his planned documentary of Lovecraft (for which he has interviewed me), entitled Le Monde du Lovecraft (The World of Lovecraft). He is seeking to raise 30,000 euros [about $33,000 or £25,000] for this 60-minute film. I have high confidence in Gilles’s ability to produce a worthy product, so his project should certainly be generously supported. Here is a link to the crowdfunding site: https://www.ulule.com/le-monde-de-lovecraft/.

Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges (1980)

Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges” was written in 1980, and has been collected in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi. The digital version of the paper appears on The Garden of Forking Paths and Shipwreck Library courtesy of Barton Levi St. Armand and Hippocampus Press.

Selected Letters – beware con-artists

When looking for copies of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, beware con-artists and their enablers on eBay, Amazon and elsewhere, selling a $40 paperback purporting to be a Selected Letters volume. The key tell-tale is that it’s a paperback, and the Selected Letters have never been in paperback. I assume these so-called ‘books’ must be robo-assembled compilations of Wikipedia articles, printed on-demand in large-print.

On the table

Nerdstash interviews

T.R. Knight at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. He is teaching a class called the Tabletop Game Writing Lab. Its specific focus is teaching the art of designing a tabletop roleplaying game, more specifically, Call of Cthulhu.

In other news from the gamer-verse, Open Cthulhu is now online. An old-school RPG, it seems to be aiming to be properly Lovecraftian rather than ‘machine-guns vs. Cthulhu’. And more importantly, to be free of trademark entanglements. See the background discussion on the project and the legal elements.