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I Am Providence: The H.P. Lovecraft Thread
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270 posts in this topic

This one has "The Music Of Erich Zann" .... from the honorable Dave Smith. Ol' Stan Lee made use of versions of that storyline a couple of times. GOD BLESS...

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)(thumbsu

URPZa6S.jpg

Edited by jimjum12
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January 1942 Weird Tales, with a reprint of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".  This issue is more famous for the Canadian version, which came out in May 1942 with largely the same contents... but a new cover actually featuring the Lovecraft story, one of only four pulps with the Lovecraft story as the cover.

Weird_Tales_1942_01.jpg

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23 minutes ago, OtherEric said:

January 1942 Weird Tales, with a reprint of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".  This issue is more famous for the Canadian version, which came out in May 1942 with largely the same contents... but a new cover actually featuring the Lovecraft story, one of only four pulps with the Lovecraft story as the cover.

Weird_Tales_1942_01.jpg

Mileage varies with Lovecraft, depending on who you ask, but Shadow is one of my very, very favorites. Seeing the title on the cover elevates the appeal to me. I didn't read Lovecraft until my 20's and then, thirty years later I rediscovered Lovecraft at the Public Library and it was like I had never read the stories .... The same thing happened with REH except I began him in my very early teens. Same with ERB, which explains a lot about why Pulps attracted me in the first place. I grew up loving this sort of literature ... but can't say that a little Alistar McClain wasn't also eagerly devoured.  GOD BLESS...

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)(thumbsu

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6 hours ago, jimjum12 said:

Mileage varies with Lovecraft, depending on who you ask, but Shadow is one of my very, very favorites. Seeing the title on the cover elevates the appeal to me. I didn't read Lovecraft until my 20's and then, thirty years later I rediscovered Lovecraft at the Public Library and it was like I had never read the stories .... The same thing happened with REH except I began him in my very early teens. Same with ERB, which explains a lot about why Pulps attracted me in the first place. I grew up loving this sort of literature ... but can't say that a little Alistar McClain wasn't also eagerly devoured.  GOD BLESS...

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)(thumbsu

I read Lovecraft of the bus to my high school in my teens. Then sort of forgot about it as well and in the last few years have read a number of anthologies. Shadow over Innsmouth was my favorite of those tales! I'd love to see the Canadian variant cover for that!!

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With the March 1942 Weird Tales, they start reprinting "Herbert West: Reanimator".  I don't quite want to call how they do it serialization...  It takes them almost two years to get through the six parts of the story.  They were really just throwing it in when they had room, as near as I can tell.

I'm not sure if this counts as the first professional publication of the story, because I'm still very fuzzy on what exactly "Home Brew" was.  I've seen it called an amateur publication, but I've also heard Lovecraft wrote the story to demand for the editor.  But the payment was supposedly only $5 a chapter, which seems low even for short chapters in 1922.   The few covers I've seen look far more professional than most amateur publications of the era.   I suspect it was what we would now call a semi-prozine. 

Anybody here have a copy they could share?

Weird_Tales_1942_03.jpg

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On 5/28/2021 at 12:30 PM, OtherEric said:

With the March 1942 Weird Tales, they start reprinting "Herbert West: Reanimator".  I don't quite want to call how they do it serialization...  It takes them almost two years to get through the six parts of the story.  They were really just throwing it in when they had room, as near as I can tell.

I'm not sure if this counts as the first professional publication of the story, because I'm still very fuzzy on what exactly "Home Brew" was.  I've seen it called an amateur publication, but I've also heard Lovecraft wrote the story to demand for the editor.  But the payment was supposedly only $5 a chapter, which seems low even for short chapters in 1922.   The few covers I've seen look far more professional than most amateur publications of the era.   I suspect it was what we would now call a semi-prozine. 

Anybody here have a copy they could share?

 

$5.00 in 1922 is about $80 in today's dollars. 

Home Brew was not an amateur publication, otherwise they would not have paid anything. It was a short-lived, regionally-distributed magazine. 

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8 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Thank you; "regionally distributed" makes a lot more sense than anything else I've ever heard about the title.

Today's book: Weird Tales from November 1942, with part four of "Herbert West: Reanimator"; I don't have part three yet.

This book is something of a passing of the torch.  As Weird Tales runs out of Lovecraft to publish, this issue introduces their great discovery of the 1940's:  This has the first story by Ray Bradbury in the series, only his second professional publication and the first credited just to him.  (Apparently Henry Kuttner provided some uncredited assistance on the story.)

Weird_Tales_1942_11.jpg

Interesting to view Lovecraft as passing the torch to Bradbury! I also see Fritz Leiber here; did they publish his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales in Weird Tales? Thanks for posting all these great pulps; fun stuff.

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4 hours ago, 50YrsCollctngCmcs said:

Interesting to view Lovecraft as passing the torch to Bradbury! I also see Fritz Leiber here; did they publish his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales in Weird Tales? Thanks for posting all these great pulps; fun stuff.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser first appeared in the August 1939 issue of UNKNOWN, I don't believe they ever had any Weird Tales appearances.

Unknown_1939_08.jpg

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September 1943 Weird Tales, with part 5 of Herbert West: Reanimator finally showing up nearly a year after part 4.  Reanimator holds a weird place in Lovecraft's body of work:  It's generally regarded as one of his least successful stories by Lovecraft fans, but because of the movies it's one of his best known ones by people who haven't read that much by him.

Weird_Tales_1943_09.jpg

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12 hours ago, OtherEric said:

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser first appeared in the August 1939 issue of UNKNOWN, I don't believe they ever had any Weird Tales appearances.

Unknown_1939_08.jpg

Interesting; I was not familiar with that title. Also fun to note L. Ron Hubbard had a story before he converted his sci-fi tales to a religion! Years ago there was a great article in the LA Times (or it may have been the Pasadena Weekly) about his pre-religious days here in the Pasadena area where he was hanging around a bunch of the rocket scientists at CalTech and what became JPL. A fascinating story.

I had a collection of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in paperback form on my bookshelf for decades and never read it until these Covid days. I really enjoyed it and picked up the Sword and Sorcery collection in trade paperback afterwards. Thanks for posting!

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1 hour ago, OtherEric said:

September 1943 Weird Tales, with part 5 of Herbert West: Reanimator finally showing up nearly a year after part 4.  Reanimator holds a weird place in Lovecraft's body of work:  It's generally regarded as one of his least successful stories by Lovecraft fans, but because of the movies it's one of his best known ones by people who haven't read that much by him.

Weird_Tales_1943_09.jpg

The reanimator was one of the tales in the Penquin collection of Lovecraft I picked up; I actually enjoyed that story quite a bit despite its debt to Frankenstein.

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