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Originally Posted by clovis-man  I read this in a mass market paperback when I was in high school (1950s). I'm not sure the extended title was used even at that time. So how long have typos, omissions and misprints been going on in HPL publications? Wonderful creepy tale, BTW. |
Since the very beginning. The full title "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" was used only once before 1986, and that was in its first appearance in the amateur journal
The Wolverine. When it was published in
Weird Tales it was "The White Ape" (which kind of gives the whole thing away). And later, it was just "Arthur Jermyn".
Quite often, typos can be blamed on the people who transcribed HPL's hand-written manuscripts. HPl hated typing and was willing to go through fire and water to avoid it. Since his handwriting could be terribly difficult (there's an anecdote about the mother of one of his correspondents who at first glance mistook it for Arabic), and he frequently crossed out passages and wrote at right angles in the margins, with extra passages in bubbles and arrows crisscrossing the pages, it's no wonder that errors crept in.
Joshi has a very interesting article in the reprint of Schweitzer's
Discovering H. P. Lovecraft. The article is a revised version, incorporating a passage on the original manuscript of "The Shadow Out of Time" that was discovered as late as 1994, IIRC. Original manuscripts still keep popping up; the latest were the hand-written manuscript for "The Shunned House" that was sold at Sotheby's in New York about a year ago (it's on sale here
L. W. Currey, Inc. - "SHUNNED HOUSE, THE" [novelette]. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SIGNED (AMsS). 32 pages, handwritten on the rectos of 32 sheets of white and salmon-colored 8 1/2 x 11-inch paper with mimeographed, typed and handwritten business and person if you have $100.000 to spare) and the hand-written manuscript of "Under the Pyramids" (always published as "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" until the corrected Arkham House editions restored the title in the 1980s).