29 Sunday Oct 2023
Posted in New discoveries
Deep Cuts examines what can be known about the lost Lovecraft correspondent Alice M. Hamlet, and finds a good photographic portrait. She was a Boston concert pianist and a keen amateur journalist.
I see the New England Piano Teachers’ Assoc. still holds an annual Alice Hamlet Competition, presumably named after her and in her memory. They may be interested in knowing about the pictures of her?
29 Sunday Oct 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The latest Illustrators #42 magazine (October 2023) leads with a Richard Corben feature.
The Halloween comics are also flying freely through the mists here in the UK, from the new This Comic Is Haunted British horror comic, to a set of Halloween themed Commando releases.
28 Saturday Oct 2023
Posted in New books
Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells (October 2023) from Yale University Press. Reviews describe the new book as a “copiously illustrated” “coffee-table book”, covering everything “from ancient papyri to pulp paperbacks”.
Very possibly this is a cut-down repackaging of the same author’s Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2010)? Just a guess. His earlier book was a chunky 380 pages from Oxford University Press, and is on Archive.org. It also looks like you can easily pick it up in paperback for £10 (about $15). This earlier book sounds very similar to the new one, and had a few pages outlining Lovecraft and the Necronomicon.
28 Saturday Oct 2023
New on Archive.org, an academic book on Alan Moore: Out from the Underground (2018), one of the Palgrave series which discussed comics and graphic novels.
Has little to say about Lovecraft, but does show that the Lovecraft influence was strongly present as early as 1969…
Having met the young Dave Womack at the second British comics convention in 1969, he [Moore] sent him some illustrations and an article on Lovecraft, the latter of which featured in the first issue of his dual comics fanzine/adzine Utopia/Valhalla in February 1970.
And adds one more item to the list of early Lovecraft as character appearances…
Moore’s “Breakdown” in Embryo 4 [circa 1971?] had similar Orwellian themes (‘Cold terminal eyes in the control chamber fingerbutton proseflash’) and ends with a conversation between Orwell, Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury.
Embryo #4 is a zine that doesn’t appear to be on Archive.org.
27 Friday Oct 2023
Posted in Picture postals
This week on ‘picture postals’, news-stands of the 1930s and 40s, via the best images to be found at the Library of Congress. Here cropped, contrast-adjusted and reduced to a manageable-but-still-big size from the huge .TIF files.
It’s interesting to see how they were purveyed. Upside down, in one picture.
And quite mixed in another picture from 1939, where Sky Devils can end up right next to Complete Love, and Weird Tales is jammed between Home Friend and Consumers Digest…
Perhaps the war made them more organised, so that they could be more easily given the once-over for seditious material during wartime?
26 Thursday Oct 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A clever stylised Kitbashed Cthulhu, via Propnomicon…
This is a bag of sea creatures from Target [a big U.S. discount store], a dollar-store bag of Halloween skeleton warriors, and a Vampire bat from the “Todd McFarlane’s monsters” playset from the 90’s
25 Wednesday Oct 2023
Posted in Scholarly works
In the latest Journal of Popular Culture, one of those single-author corpus text-mining / digital humanities papers, “The ‘Cthulhu network’: The process by which the popular myth was made”. This only examines Lovecraft’s works. The many cross-references and allusions found in works by members of the Lovecraft Circle, and also ideas and names shared by letters, are also mentioned. But that aspect of the growth of the Mythos is suggested as needing “further research”.
Freely available, under full Creative Commons Attribution.
24 Tuesday Oct 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
My Tolkien Gleanings ‘zine #7 is now available at Archive.org. A handy PDF digest of Tolkien and related news for August – October 2023, with live clickable Web links.
24 Tuesday Oct 2023
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts
I love that nearly all indie generative AI models know what Lovecraft looked like (‘indie’ because those of Adobe etc are quite obviously censored). And, increasingly, can also generate cats. Cats being a tricky creature, due to their natural camouflage and near-infinite contorting combinations of outline-shape.
Here’s an example from a new AI which makes retro pixel-style images…
HPL returns from the mailbox with his daily haul of letters, ‘zines, books and kittens.
23 Monday Oct 2023
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The exhibition Tales of Terra: A Lee Brown Coye Retrospective. Running until 2nd March 2024 in Hamilton, New York, at the Picker Art Gallery / Dana Arts Center.
Lee Brown Coye (1907–1981), recognized mostly for his unsettling illustrations in horror anthologies and pulp magazines. His creations for popular pulps such as Weird Tales and stories by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Manly Wade Wellman earned him a place in American illustration history. Featuring examples from Picker Art Gallery’s vast collection of artwork by Coye, along with loans from other regional museums and private collections, Tales of Terra brings into focus the less gruesome side of Coye’s artistic output and puts these works in dialogue with his published illustrations. This retrospective exhibition includes artworks that span Coye’s lifetime, examining his regionalist roots, his fascination with architecture, and his relationship to the places he lived, all of which found a place in his unique takes on the grotesque.
I found two quotes from Those Who Were There…
“In the middle and late forties, Weird Tales had one superior artist, Lee Brown Coye. Coye’s best work featured degenerate and warped humans, who fitted well with the weird inhabitants of Dunwich and Arkham. His illustrations for “The Whippoorwills in the Hills” by Derleth and “The Will of Claude Ashur” by Thompson were masterpieces.” (Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, 1973).
“Karl Edward Wagner’s masterful tale “Sticks” (Whispers, March 1974) was an homage to the artist Lee Brown Coye, who illustrated several Lovecraft editions from Arkham House in the 1960s. Making use of the stick-lattice figures that Coye made his signature, “Sticks” speaks of these figures as glyphs designed to summon the Great Old Ones.” (Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, Joshi).
Coye’s depiction of Lovecraft writing…
The venue for this (probably one-time) retrospective looks rather remote, and potentially wintery from now on. A glance at the map suggest you’d go from New York City up the Hudson Valley to Albany, then strike west for about 100 miles.
21 Saturday Oct 2023
Posted in Odd scratchings
Currently on eBay, Robert H. Barlow’s Leaves II (1938) ‘zine.
This also has what’s said to be an unpublished Barlow story…
the unpublished 1933 work Gem of Evil
The same seller also has a Wandrei poem, and an Ashton Smith drawing and poem.
20 Friday Oct 2023
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
New on Archive.org, a good scan of Paul W. Cook’s The Recluse. This 1927 issue has Lovecraft’s ground-breaking “Supernatural Literature”…
Imagine a copy of this plomping down on the doormat in 1927, and opening it to find Lovecraft had laid it all out for you.
From the Lovecraft circle, the issue also has a dream-tale by Donald Wandrei and a poem by Clark Ashton Smith. Plus a cover drawn by Vrest Orton. Even a somewhat supernatural poem by Arthur Goodenough, among others.