Tolkien Gleanings issue 2 (Jan-Feb 2023) is now freely available. A handy PDF magazine for Tolkien scholars, collecting the recent ‘Tolkien Gleanings’ news items and adding articles, vintage pictures and a review. Contributions, especially scholarly book reviews, are welcome for future issues.

Can also be had via Gumroad.

I stumbled on a rare book listing, which made me aware of a book of possible interest. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (2001) was claimed to have something on Lovecraft…

Authors addressed in this collection of academic papers extend beyond the British canon despite the subtitle, among them H.P. Lovecraft, Umberto Eco.

I then found the TOCs for the book, which revealed more. The book is a general survey written by a single author, and obviously written from the American academic left as it was at the end of the 90s (expect Foucault, et al). Several of the fiction authors are slotted into themed chapters, and I imagine there must be quite a few plot-spoilers. The author knows enough to consider that Lovecraft can effectively qualify as British, which is encouraging.

There’s since been an explosion in ‘critical archival studies’ in academia, focused on institutional gate-keeping, erasure and memory, the making of art-chives by artists, technological impacts on presenting the past, etc. But I can’t say I’ve ever heard of this early book on the topic.

The first half of the book looks interesting as a set of informative surveys useful for anyone writing on the theme of archives and libraries in the weird. Specifically tales featuring archival access and deep research as a key feature of the plot. Here are the main items in that part of the contents-list…

Romances of the archive, identifying characteristics : A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes.

Wellsprings : Edmund Spenser, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, Josephine Tey, Umberto Eco.

History or heritage? : Penelope Lively, Barry Unsworth, Peter Ackroyd.

Time magic and the counterfactual imagination : Kingsley Amis, Lindsay Clarke, Lawrence Norfolk, Nigel Williams.

The book is not on Archive.org, as yet.

The Reading Room, Boston Public Library. The room opened in 1895, and was likely visited by Lovecraft when he encountered the city some 25 years later.

This week Pulp.net catches up with Crypt of Cthulhu, and along the way brings news that…

it looks like Price has restarted the old Eldritch Tales fanzine that used to be published by Necronomicon Press, this one billed as #8 (properly Vol. 2, No. 8) in September 2022.

I have a personal buy guide for Crypt issues, to September 2018 when the PDFs became available. But there were a couple more issues after that.

An unusual new academic paper in Heliyon, “Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings” (2023). The open-access paper looks at his fiction from 1905–1935, using software to find “emotion-inducing words” and then clustering these. Finds…

there exists an intimate connection between the emotions of fear and sadness in Lovecraft’s writings

… and that the darker tones deepen over time.

This was, most likely, strongly personal but not purely so. The entire cultural trajectory of the 1929-1935 period appears to have been bending that way. I say “appears” because I recall my old history teacher showing very clearly that this was not actually borne out in most people’s lives, at least for the employed in most of 1930s England. Until the war came, for many the 1930s was mostly a time of ‘getting on’ and moving up. New homes on Betjeman-esque suburban commuter estates, new motor-cars, new labour-saving devices, better health, better self-improvement opportunities, a surprising boom in incomes and pensions, much better shop-clothes for women and girls, and there were also the fine new art-deco cinemas and ice-cream. The weather was iffy due to some strong extremes, but people got through it. In my teacher’s view it was the intellectuals who were the miserable ones, infected by a virulent “we’re doomed!” pessimism and a dislike of the many opportunities for the upstart masses in this new modern world. The key book on the topic is the excellent and darkly amusing The Intellectuals and the Masses.

Also spotted in academia, a McFarland book due in June 2023. Horror and Philosophy: Essays on Their Intersection in Film, Television and Literature. Among other things this is said to have a chapter on Lovecraft, presumably centering around philosophical parallels in the perceived…

relationships between Jorge Luis Borges and H.P. Lovecraft

Now freely available, Ken Faig Jr’s “Three Generations of The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright”, expanded with a biographical introduction and new pictures.