[Ningauble]

I got the Gollancz Necronomicon today.

Just as I suspected, it's got corrupted texts -- but not as bad as the Omnibus series, since some (but only some!) of the corrections from the Arkham House editions have been used. For example, in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" there are "bholes" instead of "dholes" (which is correct), but also "Zoogs" instead of "zoogs" and "Throk" instead of "Thok" (which are not). "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" mentions, as expected, a book by "Artephous" instead of "Artephius", "Hacher's Hall" instead of "Hacker's Hall" and "the scow Fortaleza instead of "the snow Fortaleza"; at least, it hasn't got the same first line in two chapters which has plagued the text of "Ward" in most incarnations I've seen. And of course, "The Shadow Out of Time" has a couple of sentences missing, as have all versions except The Shadow Out of Time: The Corrected Text, Tales and The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories.

In other words, textually speaking this book is little better than the Omnibus volumes or the Del Rey volumes.

But it's a damn'd fine-looking book, with plenty of illustrations.

Here's the table of contents:

Night-Gaunts
Dagon
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Cats of Ulthar
The Nameless City
Herbert West -- Reanimator
The Music of Erich Zann
The Lurking Fear
The Hound
The Rats in the Walls
Under the Pyramids
The Unnamable
In the Vault
The Outsider
The Horror at Red hook
The Colour Out of Space
Pickman's Model
The Call of Cthulhu
Cool Air
The Shunned House
The Silver Key
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Dreams in the Witch-House [sic]
From Beyond
Through the Gates of the Silver Key (with E. Hoffmann Price)
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
To a Dreamer
Afterword: A Gentleman of Providence by Stephen Jones

for a grand total of 883 pages.

Do I recommend it? Yes. But only if you've already got the Penguins and want a big beefy fake-leather volume with nice illustrations. If you haven't got the Penguins, get them instead. They've got all the texts contained in this book except the two poems "Night-Gaunts" and "To a Dreamer", and Jones' afterword (which is pretty good except for some pretty big blunders, such as the claim that "The Survivor" "was the story closest to completion at the time of the author's death" and describing Lovecraft Studies as a "fan publication").

I'm quite sure that there'll be a collection using the corrected texts eventually.