[Lovecraft]A Moment of Appalling Geekery

[Ancient History]

Some of you will know that H. P. Lovecraft was a tremendous letter-writer - he had somewhere around 100 correspondents at his height, and wrote everything from postcards to 70-page monsters, on a very regular basis from his teenage years up until he died. A fraction of that correspondence - which is still quite a bit - has been published over the years, most notably in the five-volume Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft by Arkham House, which includes abridged (often highly abridged) excerpts from 930 of Lovecraft's letters.

But of course, that's just the meaty tip of the iceberg. Letters from Lovecraft, both abridged and unabridged, have been published in fanzines and scholarly journals, letters have been transcribed and published in collections, and the letters of Lovecraft's peers, contemporaries, and correspondents like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Vincent Starrett have all been published as well, by publishers like Necronomicon Press, Hippocampus Press, and the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.

So there's a lot out there, and it's difficult to keep track of it all. Worse, most of these publications have rather limited printings and can be expensive to hunt down, and with abridging and confusion of dates on some of the letters it can be really difficult for someone looking for a specific letter to find it. Which is part of the reason I made http://wikithulhu.com - a scholarly resource so that people can trace back who-cited-what and where-can-I-find-that. A big chunk - the biggest part, at least at the moment - is concerned with the letters of H. P. Lovecraft. And I just hit a milestone in my appalling geekery, and thought I'd share.

Basically, reference pages to all 930 letters in the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft are up on the wiki. They're identified by correspondent, date, and a unique identifier number. Each page shows the volume(s) that the letters (or parts of letters) are published in, has an abstract on the contents of the letter, and navbars so you can follow a chain of correspondence or the contents of a particular book. So far the other books of letters up and integrated are few - Dreams & Fancies and The H. P. Lovecraft Dream Book (which have a lot of crossover) and Some Notes on H. P. Lovecraft - but I'll add more in the weeks and months to come. Plus, there's a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet with the pertinent statistics for the letters which is helpful as an absolute index.

So, early days yet, lots more to do, but I felt good about getting the SL up, and wanted to share it with y'all. Feel free to poke around, and feel free to ping me if there's a broken link or anything.

http://www.wikithulhu.com/book:selected ... -lovecraft

[Laertes]

You are a colossal geek and I thoroughly approve.