A little more on used bookshops in Providence

05 Thursday Sep 2019

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1) An issue of The Antiquarian Bookman from 1959 has an article called “New England Triple-play” which, judging by the snippets on Google Books, gives a fairly detailed multi-page boots-on-the-ground tour of Providence’s used book shops as they were at the end of the 1950s, including addresses. Regrettably, such a useful journal is not digitised and online.

2) A few weeks ago I wrote here about ‘uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop and Lovecraft. I see that later there was also a Dick’s Book Shop in Providence, and that the owner made a claim to Lovecraft in the 1960s. Like uncle Eddy’s Book Shop this shop also dealt in second-hand books. This other book shop was announced in Publishers Weekly as moving from 487 Westminster St. in 1939, to 70 Richmond St. It then pops up in Antiquarian Bookman and a trade directory at 102 Broad St., for a few years circa 1958-61. Then it appears back at Richmond St., at No. 44, during the 1960s.

Anyway, here are the basic details of this other shop’s claimed connection with Lovecraft, as remembered by ‘Jimserac’. He was commenting on a post on the blog “Notes From A Burning House: Remembrances of Bookstores Past” in July 2008…

In the 60’s you could walk into Dick’s Book Shop on Richmond Street and buy a copy of Davie’s Geometry, or any number of other antiquarian books, for maybe a dollar, two at the most and be treated to Dick’s first hand description of his personal acquaintance with H.P. Lovecraft.

The veracity of the owner’s remembered claim seems questionable, though. Since Dick’s appears to have been first established after Lovecraft’s death. The shop is not found by either the “Dick” or “Dick’s” name, or the Westminster St. address, in the 1920, 1934 or 1936 Directories for Providence.

Dick’s is not to be confused with the Dana bookstore. This other store appears to have been a rather more upmarket used bookstore, and judging from the brief Dana memoir of Lovecraft he almost never went in there and didn’t converse when he did.

Call: Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century

04 Wednesday Sep 2019

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Call for papers for an edited volume: “Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century”.

Because interest in Lovecraft continues to grow, our intention is to explore some of the reasons why he has become so influential — and so indispensable — since the early 1990s. … his expanding popularity and the significance of his legacy as we entered the digital age. Consequently, we are interested in research that focuses on the significance of Lovecraft’s work from the 1990s to the present day.

An interesting topic but the list of suggested approaches is limited, and they appear to indicate that “the significance” to be considered is that of the influence exerted on university academics. This list further suggests that the editors only really want papers which use a narrow range of fashionable C.V.-ready PhD supervisor-pleasing approaches. Also, the end result seems likely to be yet another $120 ‘for academic libraries only’ dust-gatherer.

However, the call does mention “Lovecraft’s poetry” as a possible focus, surprisingly. Given the rarity of places in which to offer a close analysis of the man’s poetry in the context of its reception by modern readers, the call thus seems worth mentioning here.

The call, with a deadline for proposals of 30th November 2019.

Getting started with Ardath Mayhar

04 Wednesday Sep 2019

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Where does one start when faced with the vast output of the East Texas writer Ardath Mayhar? Even the intro to her main Megapack Kindle ebook doesn’t provide a quick overview survey and guide. According to the Women SF Writers of the 1970s pages at Tor, she doesn’t even exist. But after a bit of searching and jiggling of Wikipedia I think I now have it roughly worked out…

Audiobook: Crazy Quilt: The Best Short Stories of Ardath Mayhar. I can’t get the table-of-contents for this in any format. Also in paper, but no ebook.

Rural weird/dark: Strange Doin’s in the Pine Hills: Stories of Fantasy and Mystery in East Texas, and A World of Weirdities: Tales to Shiver. The first is in Kindle ebook and is dark rather than weird, and the latter is in collectable paper with 29 stories, “many of them never before published”.

Other starter fiction:

i) As a starting point for her fantasy, How the Gods Wove in Kyrannon (1979) seems to be the best. It was her first such book, a set of tightly linked brief and delicately-Dunsanian stories followed by culminating sections. Its world-setting appears to have later been spun off as a three-volume series under the name Lords of the Triple Moon with these being aimed at a slightly younger audience than the first book? All are in Kindle ebook.

ii) The Ardath Mayhar MegaPack in two $2 Kindle books of stories. The first seeming to have the best and lighter stories in it, the second some darker material. I’m uncertain if these two collections form ‘the complete short fiction’ or are just a partial selection from her vast output. They seem to present the stories in no particular order, and include a number of westerns.

iii) Messengers in White sounds like the most interesting and successful of her science-fiction novels to start with. It’s available in Kindle ebook.

iv) Her ‘what happens when we make intelligent monkeys?’ novels sound perhaps-fun, but is probably not the science-fiction work to start with. These are found as Monkey Station: The Macaque Cycle, Book One and Trail of the Seahawks: The Macaque Cycle, Book Two, and both are in Kindle ebook. There was talk of a videogame, but I’ve found no evidence of a book three? Difficult to tell much more about it without proper reviews. It’s very difficult to find reviews for her work that are not flippant and cynical, and one gets the feeling that — like Clifford Simak — her robust rural Texan conservatism and blending of fantasy/sci-fi didn’t sit well with the sci-fi establishment of the 1980s and 1990s. (“Conservatism” doesn’t here = evangelical or religious, and a Starlog interview reveals that she was hounded locally by deluded Christians during the bizarre moral-panics over ‘Satanism’ in the 90s. Even today I encountered one prissy Christian on Amazon reviews, squeaking over discovering that Mayhar’s regionalist East Texas novels had dared to offer a tepid view of her local Church-goers).

Regionalist: So yes, there’s also a whole bundle of East Texas local rural novels and stories. Mostly ‘young adult’ tales with feisty heroines, though there’s also what is apparently her survivalist adult-novel masterpiece The World Ends in Hickory Hollow. I had my fill of that kind of post-apocalyptic novel in the 1980s, and I’m not sure I want more even now, but it’s well regarded.

Westerns: There are a great many robust pre-PC wild-western novels which might appeal to R.E. Howard fans. I’ve no idea were one might start with these.

Advice: Through a Stone Wall: Lessons from Thirty Years of Writing. Paper only. Seems to be well-regarded.

Autobiography: Strange View from a Skewed Orbit: An Oddball Memoir. Paper only. Said to be excellent.

Most of her books appear to be quite short by modern standards, many well under 200 pages. One associates the late 1980s and 90s with over-padded door-stopper books, especially in fantasy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

So, that’s my somewhat hazy outline based on some online research scrabbling among scattered and sparse materials. Any advice or correction is welcome.

Kittee Tuesday: Claveloux’s Cats

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in our fascinating felines.

This week, a panel of Lovecraft’s trans-lunar leaping Ulthar cat-army from “The Language of Cats” by Nicole Claveloux. The two-page strip appeared in Heavy Metal magazine’s Lovecraft special-issue in October 1979. I see the Heavy Metal online shop still appears to be shipping paper copies of that issue, though I’d guess they might perhaps be reprints rather than 1979 originals.

“The Language of Cats” is not in the fine new The Green Hand and Other Stories collection of Claveloux’s scarcer work. Hopefully the “Cats” strip can eventually be properly re-published in crisp scans, alongside the long masterpiece “Off Season” by Zha and Claveloux (which also appeared in English in Heavy Metal). And ideally without the colourisation which bedevils reprints of older b&w line-art comics these days.

New artbook: Les Montagne Hallucinees

02 Monday Sep 2019

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François Baranger’s Les Montagne Hallucinees, Tome 1 is now listed on Amazon, for an October 2019 release in French from the publisher Bragelonne. The artist is also showing previews at Facebook, which have English text — so I guess an English edition may also happen too…

The format for his At The Mountains of Madness appears to be the same as his 2017 Call of Cthulhu book. Not quite an artnovel — but 14″ tall and with abundant double-page spreads of superb visuals done in his sweeping cinematic style. I assume the approved Joshi texts or the equivalent French translations are being used.

The second and concluding volume of his Mountains is set to appear before Halloween 2020. The first is being delivered on time, so we can reasonably assume the second will be too.

Lovecraft cinema’d: 1932-33

01 Sunday Sep 2019

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What movies might Lovecraft have seen in 1932-33? He wrote to Morton in 1933 that, over Christmas/New Year, “I was cinema’d nearly every night” by his friends in New York City.

Most likely are:

* The Sign of the Cross, a lavish epic by Cecil B. DeMille. An Ancient Roman setting under Nero, complete with vast architecture and huge crowds, and thus a natural fit for Lovecraft-the-Roman. 30th November release and almost certainly still playing a month later.

* The Mummy with Boris Karloff. Ancient Egyptian mummy-horror. He was rarely scintillated by these 1930s monster movies, but he may have appreciated some of the set design. 22nd December release.

* Island of Lost Souls with Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi. Apparently now a bit of a cult movie. A gruesome adaptation of H.G. Wells’s early horror The Island of Dr. Moreau. This appears to have been heavily marketed as a ‘sex movie’, or what passed for such a thing in the movie-houses of December 1932. This marketing tone only got worse, as the movie passed down into the flea-pits…

Movies at this time were all ‘pre-Code’ and thus running in their full uncensored forms. The often scrappy and cut versions that appeared on TV in the 1970s and 80s were usually not accurate reflections of what had been screened at the 1930s movie palaces.

He appears to have stayed on in New York into January, but probably not for long enough to see lesser movies such as The Vampire Bat (12th January) or The Monkey’s Paw (13th January) in New York. He could not afford to see movies in Providence at this time, even if he had though the movie worth bothering with, so would have missed these.

Notable movies from earlier in 1932 were: The Old Dark House, a Boris Karloff horror by James Whale; and the modestly successful zombie movie White Zombie with Bela Lugosi. Either of these might still have been playing somewhere in New York at the end of 1932, if only in the lesser cinemas as a double-bill.

He evidently was not going to the cinema in Providence at this time, as he noted of his 1932/33 New York viewings that they were… “the first sight of such performances since last June [1932] when he had enjoyed a similar series of New York cinema treats from his friends. He would not have been so well served with horror movies in summer 1932. But Murders in the Rue Morgue (a Poe adaptation), and Tod Browning’s infamous Freaks, might have still be running somewhere in New York. They had been released in February 1932 and by the summer would make a natural double-bill for the lower end of the market.

James Whale’s Frankenstein was likely still running. This had its New York opening 4th December 1931 and was a sensational hit, said by movie history buffs to have kick-started the 1930s horror movie boom. It must surely have been playing somewhere in New York City, even six months later. The same may have been true of the high-quality Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released 31st December 1931. These would have formed another natural double-bill of movies, this time for the classier end of the market.

Lovecraft would not have seen some flea-pit hold-over of the February 1931 Dracula, though. He eventually saw the first reels of that 1931 Dracula on a visit to Miami, but was so bored by it that he walked out on the movie and went for a night walk on the sea-front instead. When with friends he would often snooze through a dire movie rather than walk out, as being in the dark tended to induce a sleep response in him. Thus, even if he mentions that he attended a movie screening, unless he discusses the movie we can’t always be sure that he saw it rather than snoozed.

His summer 1933 letters to Barlow show a renewed zeal for the cinema, so evidently the 1932/33 New York viewings had stirred something in him.

Tolkien and Howard

01 Sunday Sep 2019

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The new Tolkien’s Library is a doorstopper, and thus the free 10% sample for the Kindle has all the introductions and the first 90 items (though curiously, the table-of-contents is missing, so one has no clue what’s in the appendices). One reads in Tom Shippey’s introduction that…

Tolkien mentions not only some of the early British classics of “scientific romance” … H.G. Wells; not only familiar British writers of fantasy, such as Dunsany and Eddison; but also several [1960s-70s] writers of commercial twentieth-century science fiction or fantasy, such as John Christopher, Frank Herbert, Sterling Lanier, Lyon Sprague de Camp. He did not like all of them, but one he mentions with mild approval is Robert E. Howard, creator of the “Conan” cycle. This is something of a surprise, given that Conan is the pre-eminent example of hairy-chested macho barbarian heroism, so very un-hobbitical. Perhaps Tolkien appreciated Howard’s efforts to create a sense of age, of lost civilisations?

From my other encounters with Shippey I get the sense he is definitely not a Howard fan for some reason. And is thus probably unaware that Howard was also Tolkien’s equal — and arguably his actual superior — in setting up, setting out and then describing complex battles in epic fantasy worlds. Nor is he probably aware of the close comparisons that can be made in terms of a few central plot devices found in the longer Conan works. However, having not seen the rest of Tolkien’s Library, I’m unsure about what item Shippey is resting this remark on. Is there a new finding, or is this the same old de Camp memory? As I wrote here in March 2019, that Tolkien read Howard…

all boils down to what L. Sprague de Camp remembered in 1983 a snatch of conversation had with Tolkien in a garage in 1967, so it’s pretty slim as evidence goes.

August at Tentaclii

31 Saturday Aug 2019

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Well, that’s August gone. Tentaclii Towers sailed serenely on through the shimmering August blue and the increasingly chill nights of late summer, avoiding power-cuts or flash-flooding. My daily blogging continued, although my Patreon remains stubbornly stuck at $59 a month.

This month the password-protected posts for my Patreon patrons were:

* “A Century Less a Dream, new for $4”. (Effectively the ‘best of Lovecraft Studies’ as a nice hardback. I got one, but one was also left available at $4 for someone else to bag).

* “Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Finding Bolton”. (My new discovery on the mysterious Bolton, a place featured in several Lovecraft stories).

* “Moving Lovecraft’s House” (an eyewitness account of the event and a photo).

* “Knowing Derleth” (Derleth on the gay scene within early science-fiction fandom, and more).

Just $1 a month or more (ideally more) gives you access to protected posts at Tentaclii.

In the arts, another ‘Lovecraft as a character’ appearance was discovered in the graphic novel Atomic Robo and The Shadow from Beyond Time, and this discovery led to issue #42 of Digital Art Live magazine having a superb and long lead interview with the Atomic Robo guys. Tentaclii also featured: a brief first look at the new Colour Out of Space movie, with my musings on why it might have been time-shifted; an unearthing of a lost French Lovecraftian sculptor Henri Etienne-Martin with good pictures; an update on the Blaschka’s ocean invertebrate glass-models, including news of restorations and a new book; the Lovecraft Birthday ‘InnFest’ festival in the Second Life virtual world (now with 90 minute ‘best of’ video; and a couple of other Lovecraftian arts items.

New books were noted, such as: Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully; Lovecraft’s ‘autobiography in letters’ Lord of a Visible World (as a second revised edition). In fiction, new affordable and properly edited ebooks of The Averoigne Archives (Clark Ashton Smith) and the best of Wilum Pugmire; plus Arthur Machen: Collected Fiction. I noted that the French can expect a “Fully Upholstered Luxury Lovecraft” set in early 2020. I was also pleased to find the Lovecraft Lexicon encyclopedia in affordable ebook, and I read through it cover-to-cover during August.

August was a light month for new journals, but the new Lovecraft Annual #13 and Pulpster #28 were both major releases and also packed with independent scholars who Know Their Stuff. I also noted two calls for non-fiction material from future editions of the Arkham Gazette fanzine.

Useful freebies were linked to here, as usual. These included: concise synopses of Lovecraft’s revision works, totalling 13,000 words; Krazy Kat 1916-22 free online (incidentally, I also found that Lovecraft made a probable passing reference to Krazy’s mouse “Ignatz”, so maybe he did come to know this famously surreal kittee strip after all); The Fantasy Fan’s 1933-34 issues were found and linked on Gutenberg; I found 15 pages of Breccia adapting “The Whisperer in Darkness”; and a French website called Cthulhu & Co. was found, this being a fine online catalogue of Lovecraftian zines and journals. Of course August and Lovecraft’s birthday brought my own freebies: Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” with 8,000 words of scholarly annotations; and my new revised high-res map of “Lovecraft’s Providence”.

In my biographical posts, ‘Lovecraft on a bicycle’ offered my detailed timeline of Lovecraft’s bicycling, done in order to rebut a recent tendentious (and now, proven false) claim about Lovecraft. Several of my regular “Picture Postals” posts at Tentaclii were biographical, with one of these including the full run of Frank Belknap Long’s ‘comic strip by postcards’ featuring Lovecraft as a character; “HPL in an aquarium”; and an unusual night-view photograph of College St. very near to Lovecraft’s final home.

I feel I had a breakthrough in the post “On that elbow”, by tallying story-interpretation against historical context. I similarly looked into the real Sydney Bulletin, of “Call of Cthulhu” fame — I’ve long suspected that Lovecraft had several unknown Australian correspondents, and though this post wasn’t on his correspondents it served to further confirm my hunch.

My big discovery this month came in the post “Eddy bookstore on Weybosset St”. I found a seemingly previously-unknown 1948 memoir of Lovecraft, by one who knew him well. This led me to the equally un-noticed uncle Eddy, Providence’s used bookseller. Just a few streets over from the Public Library, Lovecraft had access to a large (20,000 volumes?) used bookstore, whose friendly proprietor would open up especially for him and who was also the uncle of his best friend in the city. Who knew?

Due to the tribble-like expansion of volumes of Lovecraft’s letters, I wrote a quick post suggesting the need for a public ‘mega-index’ of these and I suggested how this might be speedily created. I also noted that Rhode Island newspapers before 1923 should be online soon, after news of a $250,000 funding grant for scanning and digitisation. One wonders if the Library might offer some sort of ‘hunt the Lovecraft’ prize, once that database is online and public. Talking of Providence, I thought I might get a blog post by rounding up all the reports from NeconomiCon Providence 2019. But after extensive searching I can only find one… and curiously that doesn’t even mention Lovecraft.

Scholarly links this month included a free detailed paper on the history of the lost Arabian desert city of Irem/Iram, plus a number of new additions (inc. one thesis) to my Open Lovecraft page. I also noted that the call for “Tolkien’s Legendarium and the Arts” included explicit openness to Lovecraft; and that there’s a call for general horror scholarship from the UK’s Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference 2020.

For my own puny shelf I bagged the book A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H.P. Lovecraft, new in hardback for a mere $4, via a fire-sale book direct from Amazon USA. It was just $11 even with shipping to the UK, which was irresistible. It was fine on arrival, the only slight mar being a bar-code sticker firmly affixed to the back cover. I’ve also been able to bag a copy of the Lovecraft Annual for 2015 at a low price, and this should be arriving here shortly.

That was August. Please help me to continue the Tentaclii blog by pledging $1 a month or more via Patreon. It would be nice to get to $100 a month by the late Autumn/Fall, a year after re-starting Tentaclii. If you made new contacts at summer conventions and conferences then please let them know about the blog and my need for patrons.

Fully Upholstered Luxury Lovecraft

31 Saturday Aug 2019

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Les editions Mnemos: Luxury Lovecraft.

7 handsome volumes of the stories and poetry, illustrated. Essays by S.T. Joshi, Patrice Louinet and others, the Commonplace Book, selections from the letters. All in French, though.

Apparently “Delivery is scheduled for the first quarter of 2020”, according to editions Mnemos. The project raised £362,516 ($442,142) on the French equivalent of the Kickstarter site.

New books: Breccia

31 Saturday Aug 2019

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Two new books on Breccia are due soon:

Breccia : Conversations avec Juan Sasturain is transcribed previously-unpublished tape interviews in French translation, plus a detailed chronology and newly published art. 460 pages in French. Amazon says October, the publisher says November 2019.

Alberto Breccia, le Maitre Argentin Insoumis. A book by the curator of recent exhibitions in France on Breccia, who is currently preparing a forthcoming… “major retrospective on Breccia, to be held in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture”. 128 pages, in French but it seems to be well illustrated, and is apparently limited to 800 copies. Both the publisher and Amazon say October 2019.

If you want a taster of his Lovecraft comics art, see Revista El Pendulo No. 1 (1979) which has recently arrived on Archive.org due to an Argentine historical journals digitisation project. This issue has a 15-page Breccia comics adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”. In Spanish, but still worth seeing for the masterly art alone…

The comic is followed by a Lovecraft article by Mosig, again in Spanish. This was graced by a Moebius panel depicting Lovecraft. The article was a Spanish translation of Mosig’s essay “Poet of the Unconscious”, which had first appeared in The Platte Valley Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 1978.

The next issue Revista El Pendulo No. 2 (1979) had a short interview with Breccia in Spanish.

Revista El Pendulo seems to have been a brief attempt at publishing an Argentine equivalent of Toutain’s 1984 and its various licensees and imitators, and as such Pendulo’s issues are not ‘safe for work’ today.

The Mosig essay led me to discover that his Mosig at Last (1997) book of collected Lovecraft essays is still available at $7.95 from Necronomicon Press, which means that Lovecraftians and academics can bypass the Cthulhu-sized prices asked for it on Amazon and eBay.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the lane-end at night

30 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Historical context, New discoveries, Night in Providence, Picture postals

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As we slip over into the seasons of mists… a vintage picture of the Van Wickle Gates on a misty night, Providence. My thanks to Brown University for digitising this, and I’ve used Photoshop to subtly rectify some of the damage and fuzzyness of the picture (but you can still see a section of peel-up on right). I can add to their record the name of the photographer: Prof. Walter H. Snell, and that it was made in the early 1930s.

The John Hay Library frontage is seen behind, with main entrance-steps seen on the far right of the picture. This orientation confirms that we’re looking down College Street.

From this vantage point in the shadows a lucky observer in 1933-37 might have glimpsed H.P. Lovecraft about to set off on a long night-walk in his city. A tall gaunt figure would have stepped out from the end of the short lane which came up from his house. After pausing a moment to scout the quiet street and garden-walls for any suitably conversational cats, he would have turned to walk briskly away down the hill — while being framed for an instant in the gate-entrance seen on the far left of this picture. Or, if one was lucky, he would have headed toward the gate and the camera, so as to walk through the grounds of Brown University. I assume that the grounds were not sealed-off at night, in those days.

Map:

Below we see the lane-end (far left, lower corner) in daytime, viewed from the other side of the gates…

Incidentally I now realise that I was mistaken in an earlier ‘postcard’ post here, one made late last year. I had though that a bit of a house glimpsed past the John Hay Library might have been that of Lovecraft. It wasn’t so, and that post has now been deleted. I now realise that any picture which shows the frontage alone can’t show the relevant house(s). Only side views, like those above, are of possible interest and even then will likely only indicate the line of the lane that came up from his house at the back of the Library.

New week on ‘Picture postals’: continuing the theme, with a detailed look at Lovecraft’s unique scientific understanding of the origin of clouds and mists.