Kelly Freas interview
13 Saturday Apr 2019
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Lovecraft’s copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho
13 Saturday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
Currently on AbeBooks, a volume claimed to be Lovecraft’s library copy of the early gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, under the listing title “THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. A Romance. With an Introduction by D. Murray Rose. H.P. LOVECRAFT’S COPY.”
The inscription from Kirk looks authentic enough, but before you part with your $5,000 you’ll have to make up your own mind about Lovecraft’s name and bookplate. I’m not certain from the description if the bookplate can be determined by marks to have once been attached to the book in question. There seems to be a faded square, but does it match the bookplate?
The seller notes…
It is unclear at which date Kirk gave Lovecraft this copy of UDOLPHO, but in a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith on Dec 12, 1925 (on George W. Kirk’s letterhead) Lovecraft writes: “W. Paul Cook’s request for an article on weird literature from me – a request which he won’t withdraw despite my emphatic disclaimers of all possible qualification – has imposed upon me the very pleasant task of reading up some of the matter I had long ago scheduled for perusal. I waded through the whole of “Udolpho” last week, & am now on the hunt for Maturin’s “Melmoth”.” Lovecraft also made a list of his weird fiction collection in a letter he sent to CAS on August 27, 1932; Radcliffe’s “Udolpho” is on that list.
The edition of Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library that I have access to is uncertain of the edition. If this is indeed the edition Lovecraft owned, then, we can now be relatively certain he read the introduction by Rose.
Weird Tales from 1925
13 Saturday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
New on Archive.org this week, scans of 1925 Weird Tales editions not previously present there…
“The Statement of Randolph Carter” by H.P. Lovecraft.
“The Music of Erich Zann” by H.P. Lovecraft.
“The Unnamable” by H.P. Lovecraft.
“Spear and Fang” by Robert E. Howard.
“The Temple” by H.P. Lovecraft. With a fairly good header illustration.
Stellarium – new release
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in 3D, Scholarly works, Unnamable
A new version of the 3D heavens Stellarium software is now available, including a “paleolithic sky culture and landscape”, two new ancient Babylonian ones, and medieval and modern Chinese sky zodiacs. It’s the leading free / open source software for such things, that’s also easy for clueless newbs like myself to use.
You can also zoom back in time with Stellarium, making it rather useful for historians trying to date and geographically locate a text that has astronomical / sunrise-sunset time statements in it. My latest use of it in that way was for my Sir Gawain book. It doesn’t yet include comet positions.
Friday picture postals from Lovecraft: the View from Prospect Terrace (ultrawide edition)
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, Picture postals
Here’s an ultrawide double-sized fold-out postcard of the View from Prospect Terrace, Providence. This was, of course, a favourite Lovecraft place. Especially when the city and sky burned with a fine sunset. Presumably also in that quiet time when most of the Terrace’s talkative daytime sitters had gone home for their tea, and the evening lovebirds had not yet arrived…
to me the quality of total, perfect beauty [is] a mass of mystical city towers and roofs and spires outlined against a sunset and glimpsed from a fairly distant balaustraded terrace. (Selected Letters III)
This postcard, wide though it is, was obviously cropped from an even wider plate as can be seen here…
The old Providence view from Prospect Terrace…
Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, Ohio State University Press, 2013. Now out of embargo, and in public open access as an OCR-d PDF. Amazon wants $47 for the paper edition, but it’s free here. The Introduction and Afterword might be useful for offering some pointers and frameworks for those writing on the historical context of Lovecraft’s upbringing, in terms of New England’s fears of disease and immigration and how these fears might have mirrored those of Great Britain.
New book: Eighty Years of Arkham House
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Derleth expert and champion John D. Haefele reviews Joshi’s new expanded and updated book Eighty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography (March 2019).
If David Bowie had become a paperback writer
12 Friday Apr 2019
Posted in Unnamable
John Michell’s Enchanted Landscape
11 Thursday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
A talk on “John Michell’s Enchanted Landscape”, 29th May 2019 in London.
It’s good to see there’s still interest in him. Many in the British Isles will remember him as one of the key writers of the 1970s and early 1980s on the alleged ‘prehistoric geometry’ of the English landscape, on general astro-archaeology, and as an assiduous ley-line hunter. An authentic ‘fringe traditionalist’, of the sort that England increasingly had no patience with from about 1985 onwards, as the authentic place-rooted ‘eccentric’ type who had previously thrived was slowly but firmly purged from modern life.
He was the inheritor of an earlier 1920 tradition around ley-lines and Alfred Watkins, which I suspect the Anglophile Lovecraft partly knew about and drew on for some small elements of stories such as “The Lurking Fear”. See my annotated “Lurking Fear” for details, page 38 and footnote.
Letter to Eddy, November 1924
11 Thursday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Transcription: H.P. Lovecraft’s Letter to Author C.M. Eddy Jr on Nov. 20th, 1924…
“As of today, Buzz Bookstore has acquired a handwritten letter from “the father of modern horror”, HP Lovecraft, to his friend and collaborator CM Eddy Jr. In looking through my collection of Arkham House “Selected Letters of Lovecraft” books, I was unable to locate a existing transcription of this particular piece.”
Perhaps unpublished, but the transcription has nothing that’s not already known, as far as I can tell. Except perhaps his opinion on two Weird Tales “art headers”…
“meanwhile pray accept my apology for delay of your tale. Hope it gets a good art heading. I’ve seen the Brosnatch drawings for my “Festival” & “Randolph Carter”, & although they’re good, they don’t fit the narratives any too well.”
Blockquote me, baby!
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
A handy tip for wrangling an old book in Microsoft Word, to port it over into an Amazon ebook for the Kindle with re-flowable text. After many years when it was impossible-to-difficult to get clean HTML from Word, there’s now a relatively easy solution for MS Word -> clean HTML, including linked footnotes. But it has one stumbling block… it un-indents your quotation paragraphs. The link above takes you to the fix.
Sollasina cthulhu
10 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Odd scratchings
Cthulhu sea cucumber that stalked the oceans 430 million years ago…
“Researchers at Yale, Oxford, the University of Leicester, Imperial College London, and University College London have identified a 430 million-year-old fossil as a new species related to living sea cucumbers. They named the creature Sollasina cthulhu, after H.P. Lovecraft’s tentacled monster, Cthulhu.”
