Here’s a quick round-up for December on Tentaclii, for what it’s worth now. In December my ‘Picture Postals’ posts took a look at Robie Alzada Place (1827–1896) and her home place to the west of Providence, this also having been the home place of Lovecraft’s mother; I followed Lovecraft’s travel trail far up into the White Mountains; and I mused on the Ladd Observatory and its relation to time and time-keeping in Providence.

I wrote a long summary here of the year’s more general Lovecraft-related activity by others, in “Lovecraft in 2021: a summary survey”.

Not much in new books in December, but I was pleased to spot S.T. Joshi’s Phantasmagoria: The Weird Fiction, Poetry, and Criticism of Sir Walter Scott and its fine cover. Also the Lovecraft astronomy book El Astronomicon Y Otros Textes En Defense De La Ciencia down in Spain. The French had shipping dates for the various volumes in the sumptuous Editions Mnemos set of Lovecraft’s work in a new translation.

Not much research by me in December, other than for the ‘Picture Postals’, though I am slowly reading through a new book of letters. I did look at who Chapman Miske was, what he published on Lovecraft, and where to find it. I took another look at Lovecraft’s knowledge of Harlem, after finding some new data.

I spotted that H.P. Lovecraft’s first publication (Scientific American, 25th August 1906) was for sale on eBay. Also on eBay I found a good watercolour of the “Longitude” lane in Charleston, which Lovecraft described and admired on his travels. Over on Abe, a set of “At the Mountains of Madness” in Astounding Stories appeared for sale. More significantly, at the end of the month Abe also landed a big bundle of Lovecraft’s earliest appearances in print.

Popping up on Archive.org for free in December was a comprehensive plot-annotated checklist of ‘Bibliomysteries’ (mystery novels across various genres which centre on rare books, book collectors, old bookshops and suchlike); and I was also pleased to see Clifford D. Simak: a primary and secondary bibliography.

Among the audio, the timely story “The Return of the Undead” by Arthur Leeds saw a welcome free release on YouTube. It’s also just gone into the public domain. A new Voluminous podcast looked at ‘H.P. Lovecraft, Detective’, doggedly solving a dastardly crime at the Haverhill Post Office. A books podcast interviewed the author of the intriguing new novel Providence Blue: A Fantasy Quest.

I was pleased to see that the Robert E. Howard Days in Texas announced their 2023 dates. I was also pleased to find a new lost story by Lovecraft’s friend Everett McNeil, “A Descendant of the Vikings” (1906/07).

In software I noted the new writing software CQuill Writer 1.x, an interesting style-prompting assistant which could be filled (in its full paid version) with the works of Lovecraft. I also see that Scrivener 3.x for Windows was released, at long last, something I had missed earlier in 2021. The latter seems hideously complex, but is said to be the best software for writers on Windows. In 3D software I noted free 3D writing accessories for the free DAZ Studio 3D figure rendering software, which could be used with the 3D Lovecraft figure.

Elsewhere I produced a bumper 108-page ‘Moebius tribute’ issue of Digital Art Live, and also interviewed Simon Ravenhill (Striker, in The Sun newspaper) for VisNews. I comprehensively updated my free “The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire” annotated bibliography, now available online in version 1.7. I released my short book Tolkien and the Lizard: J.R.R. Tolkien in Cornwall, 1914, this being a PDF extract from a much larger book on a far larger and more intellectual topic relating to the young Tolkien. Cornwall has sold only two copies, but did at least help pay for the meagre Christmas food shopping.

All this while having Omicron. From which I’m now recovered — and I presumably now have the latest and greatest antibodies.

Coming soon on Tentaclii… Lovecraft’s almanacks, Tom Baker’s best, and taking the Trans-Europe Express to vampire-country. Not necessarily in that order.

Tentaclii saw the blog move to a new web address in October. Quite why the old blog was suspended I still haven’t been told. It wasn’t for anything you haven’t seen posted here already. Too many bare-chested barbarians? Linking to the wrong podcasters? Showing how to hack WordPress a little with the Classic Editor script? One too many Amazon links for books? Who knows. Anyway, all the posts and about a quarter of the pictures have been saved. The more important historical pictures should still be present here, as I keep local copies of those for future books. If anyone has a complete capture of the Tentaclii blog (with Win HTTrack or similar), then I would welcome a Dropbox .ZIP with just the 400Mb or so of pictures. All my other free WordPress blogs now have full and current local backups including pictures and PDFs.

Many thanks to my Patreon patrons for sticking with me, it’s much appreciated. I lost one $6 patron a few days ago, but thankfully a leading Lovecraft scholar has kindly increased his patronage to the same amount… and thus made up the loss. Hopefully people will start filtering back, especially once Tentaclii is indexed on Google Search, and then the Patreon won’t drop further. I know times are hard for all, what with inflation spiralling upward and with mortgages soon to follow. But if just three or four people could increase their patronage by a $1 or two it would be a great encouragement. Even now I still have hopes of reaching $100 a month. Until then the heating is staying off for as long as possible this winter, at Tentaclii Towers, to try to save cash and cover the electricity inflation and impending mortgage rise. Layers of clothes, a scarf/hat and a draft-excluder can together work wonders in keeping the heater switched off, I find!

The Voluminous podcast returned this month with “The Wind That Is in the Grass”, the Barlow-Lovecraft correspondence. This welcome news spurred my hunt for the exact spot in De Land, Florida, where Lovecraft would have alighted from the long-distance bus to meet Barlow. I was also pleased to track down at last the illustrated 10-cent British history books that Lovecraft admired and used as visual reference. They turned out to be his partial set of Our Empire’s Story, told in Pictures. I’m told he also later managed to complete the set. It would be good to see these as crisp scans on Archive.org at some point.

This month my Friday ‘Picture Postals’ visited the observatory in Nantucket where Lovecraft saw Saturn, gazed up at the imposing 1935-41 new entrance to the Brooklyn Public Library, slipped into the shoreline country at the back of Lovecraft’s favourite local destination of Newport, and took another look at De Land.

A run of Scientific American 1845-2016 began to appear on Archive.org from microfilm, providing ample insight into the science of Lovecraft’s day. I hear there is also a book in the offing dedicated to Lovecraft’s astronomy, telescopes and other scientific devices, and presumably also his observatory and planetarium visits and eclipse observations. Also popping up on Archive.org was the 1943 “Fungi From Yuggoth” stencil-duplicated edition, which was an evocative sight.

In scholarly journals I was pleased to see the first Miskatonic Missives funded so quickly and handsomely. I also brought news of a special journal issue on ‘Fungi in Contemporary Art and Research’, and noted the fine-looking new Heinlein Journal. My own copy of the new Lovecraft Annual 2021 also arrived at last, heavily delayed by the paper shortages. Thanks to my patrons who made that vital purchase possible. There will likely be a review here at some point.

In books I discovered that the Lovecraft ‘autobiography’ Lord of a Visible World can now be had from Amazon as a £5 ebook. It was duly publicised in the back of the Halloween issue of Digital Art Live magazine. Gary Gianni’s The Call of Cthulhu shipped, and a sumptuous edition of A Voyage to Arcturus was announced. I was pleased to find that the Lovecraftian Ramsay Campbell had an apparently enjoyable sword & sorcery collection Far Away & Never. Another find was the very little publicised but very well-regarded series of Lovecraftian mystery books by Jeffrey E. Barlough, though when I shall find the time and money for them I don’t know.

In podcasts S.T. Joshi did a long podcast with the worthy Save Ancient Studies Association, now on YouTube. For Halloween The National Review magazine’s widely listened-to Great Books podcast was on ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by H.P. Lovecraft.

In the arts I was pleased to find a superb 3D H.P. Lovecraft by Khoi Nguyen, having been thinking along those lines myself (I’m also an expert on the Poser and DAZ Studio 3D figure software). In comics I discovered another Kadath adaptation, tucked away at the back of Fantasy Classics #15 (2008), and rather nicely done too. Various other shorter comics adaptations were noted. Though only slightly Lovecraftian (shoreline setting, flying polyps, surreal and dream-like) I was pleased to see that Claveloux and Zha’s classic comic Dead Season (aka “Off Season”, in Heavy Metal) is finally to get a good English edition next spring. I also produced a pre-Halloween ‘Gothic’ issue of Digital Art Live this month, as editor, which paid a suitable amount of attention to Lovecraft.

Well… what a month, what with the temporary loss of Tentaclii and several other unwelcome surprises. Please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, or increasing your amount there a bit. You can also just send a one-off PayPal donation via the link on my About Tentaclii page. You can also buy my books, which are not just on Lovecraft, but also offer things such as a deep investigation into the identity of H.G Wells’ famous Time Traveller (H.G. Wells in the Potteries), or the Gawain-poet (Strange Country). Both figures are local to me in Stoke-on-Trent. There’s also my comprehensive survey of the ‘hidden stories’ in The Lord of the Rings (The Cracks of Doom: Untold Tales in Middle-earth) as an Amazon ebook. You could also review these books somewhere, perhaps. So far as I know none has yet had a review, though I did try.

Thanks for reading, and please help spread the word about the new Tentaclii location.