A Query:

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Pity, though, because I can't afford to buy books very often, and our library sucks, and I have this one staring me in the face. Never mind. I like to approach things 'properly'.

Sephiroth -- have you checked to see if your library has an interlibrary loan service? If they do, you can order books from a much, much broader area (depending on the service, and your abilities to pay, quite possibly from around the world -- though that's not going to be necessary in this case.....)

[Sephiroth]

I haven't, I wasn't aware that such a thing existed. I'd have to re-register now, my last membership lapsed because I got tired of going down there and coming away empty-handed, or at least without the title I went for.

But it is worth finding out about. Cheers for the heads-up.

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by Ningauble

As has been discussed in some other thread, the Omnibus volumes are based on old magazine appearances that were flawed to begin with, and over the years more and more misprints have crept in and become fossilized.

A couple of examples, taken from all the Omnibuses:

* In "The Other Gods", "the seven cryptical books of earth" should be
"the seven cryptical books of Hsan".

* In "the Call of Cthulhu", the subtitle, "Found among the Papers of
the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston", is missing.

* In "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" all "Zoogs" should be "zoogs"
and "Inquanok" should be "Inganok". In one place "beings" have become
"priests" (or maybe it was the other way around -- I forget).

* In "The Quest of Iranon", "and thou wouldst" should be "an thou
wouldst" (Shakespearean "an" meaning "if"). Correct in the Penguin
edition but nowhere else.
* The correct title of "Arthur Jermyn" is "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".
* The correct title of "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" is "Under the Pyramids".
* The fragment "The Thing in the Moonlight" is a fake.
* Of the "Early Tales", only "The Alchemist" and "The Beast in the Cave" are actually early. All the others were written after "The Tomb" and "Dagon".
* The introduction to Dagon by August Derleth, with the "bibliography" concocted by Derleth, s-u-c-k-s. (At least I think it appeared in Dagon.)
* "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is an older version -- HPL revised it slightly later, and these changes are not in the Omnibus Dagon.
* The text of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" as it appears in the Omnibus At the Mountains of Madness is severely flawed. Not only is the text off in many places, but there's also a bad misprint that replaces the first line of one chapter with the first line of another chapter. This misprint has been around since at least the 1970s and the publisher has not bothered to correct it (I found it in 1992 and I can't believe I'm the first.).


And what really annoys me is that Gollancz had every chance in the world to publish a good Lovecraft collection with their upcoming Necronomicon, but what do they do? They will use the old texts and not HPL's originals because they already owned the rights to the old texts, and because August Derleth was such a brilliant editor (see Joshi's "Textual Problems in Lovecraft" for a different view; Joshi's opinion is that Messrs. Wandrei & Derleth had an uncanny knack for picking the very worst textual versions almost evey single time). I suppose I'll get it anyway, but only to have the flawed versions available.

Is my penguin collection from 1999 The Call of Cthulhu and Other Wierd Stories with many mistakes as the omnibus? Or is it fine?

can i read it without worrying about it being full of mistakes or stories not written by HPL but edited and realesed way after him?

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Connavar of Rigante

Is my penguin collection from 1999 The Call of Cthulhu and Other Wierd Stories with many mistakes as the omnibus? Or is it fine?

can i read it without worrying about it being full of mistakes or stories not written by HPL but edited and realesed way after him?

I'm not Ningauble, but I can give you a fairly useful answer on this one. No, the number of mistakes is vastly reduced... quite minor, in fact, amounting to the nearly inevitable sort of things that creep in during the production of any book. And none of the stories are by anyone else... S. T. Joshi, certainly one of, if not the foremost Lovecraftian textual scholar, edited the book and wrote the introduction and notes. So you've got one of the best low-price Lovecraftian volumes there is. (The others would be the two remaining volumes in the Penguin set. His revision tales -- also worth reading, in some cases just below his best original work itself -- is unfortunately only available currently in the Arkham House hardbound volume, if you want a good edition.)

[Connavar]

Ah good to know.

Now i can read HP with my mind at ease.

[Ningauble]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

I'm not Ningauble, but I can give you a fairly useful answer on this one. No, the number of mistakes is vastly reduced... quite minor, in fact, amounting to the nearly inevitable sort of things that creep in during the production of any book.

I concur with j. d.: the mistakes are for the greater part quite minor. I've compared The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories against the Arkham House editions, and here is a sample of differences I came up with (please note my use of the word differences here; I don't know whether these are real typos or not because S. T. hasn't looked on them yet. However, I suspect that the AH text -- on the right -- is correct in most cases.):

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE
*172.25: first begin to get thick.] first begin to get very thick.
*178.8: the anatomy and habit of squirrels] the anatomy and habits of squirrels
*178.13: leaps of the rabbit] leaps of that rabbit
*178.32: store in Clark’s Corners.] store at Clark’s Corners.
*178.36: they had held] they held
*181.8: a timid woodmill salesman] a timid windmill salesman
*182.7: locked up in the attic.] locked in the attic.
*182.14: in the stalls] in their stalls
*184.7: It must only be] It must be only
*184.24-25: to cling around the Gardners] to cling round the Gardners
*185.28: Thad had gone,] Thad was gone,
**188.25: He whispered,] [would make more sense with a lower-case "h" here
*188.31: out of everthing] out of everything
*189.28: Thaddeus already being known,] Thaddeus being already known,
*191.33: in the aërolite] in that aërolite
*195.8: poor Hero] poor tethered Hero
*195.30-31: with the gnarled, fiendish] with their gnarled, fiendish
*196.19-20: crackling, not an] crackling, and not an

I should point out that 188.25 is based on my own gut feeling: NO appearance of the story has a lower-case "h" here, not even the manuscript from what I've heard (on the other hand, the manuscript was most likely typed by someone other than Lovecraft). However, the text makes more sense with a lower-case "he" here.

His revision tales -- also worth reading, in some cases just below his best original work itself -- is unfortunately only available currently in the Arkham House hardbound volume, if you want a good edition.)

Au contraire, my dear j. d. The recently released trade paperback from Del Rey is -- judging from the interior layout -- photographed from the Arkham House edition, which would make it the only Del Rey edition of Lovecraft that I can recommend with a clean conscience.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Ningauble

Au contraire, my dear j. d. The recently released trade paperback from Del Rey is -- judging from the interior layout -- photographed from the Arkham House edition, which would make it the only Del Rey edition of Lovecraft that I can recommend with a clean conscience.

Ah! I'd been a bit out of the loop lately, and wasn't even aware of this one. Thank you for the information! In such a case... by all means, check out these stories when you have a chance, Connavar (or anyone else interested in diving into serious HPL reading). Though some of the revision tales are clumsy, some are mediocre, and some (like "Ashes") are simply bad, there are a number well worth checking out, such as "The Mound", "Out of the Eons", "The Horror in the Burying-Ground" (for sheer grue, this one certainly fits the bill), and especially "The Night Ocean", as well as others. Here's the list from the revised edition (the Del Rey apparently, as Ningauble noted, follows the Arkham texts):

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Ningauble]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Ah! I'd been a bit out of the loop lately, and wasn't even aware of this one. Thank you for the information! In such a case... by all means, check out these stories when you have a chance, Connavar (or anyone else interested in diving into serious HPL reading). Though some of the revision tales are clumsy, some are mediocre, and some (like "Ashes") are simply bad, there are a number well worth checking out, such as "The Mound", "Out of the Eons", "The Horror in the Burying-Ground" (for sheer grue, this one certainly fits the bill), and especially "The Night Ocean", as well as others. Here's the list from the revised edition (the Del Rey apparently, as Ningauble noted, follows the Arkham texts):

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'll second your recommendations. "The Mound" is IMO one of the best tales in the book -- in fact, I'd say it's about as good as "The Thing on the Doorstep" or "At the Mountains of Madness" (but then again, HPL apparently wrote it all by himself with no help from the official author, apart from the bare bones of a plot idea), but with a little bit more action.
"The Night Ocean" is a great story, but recent research has shown that only about 10% of the text was written by Lovecraft (a microfilm of the original manuscript was located in c. 2000), so credit must go to R. H. Barlow for its qualities.

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Ningauble

* The correct title of "Arthur Jermyn" is "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".

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.

[Ningauble]

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).

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Ningauble

"The Night Ocean" is a great story, but recent research has shown that only about 10% of the text was written by Lovecraft (a microfilm of the original manuscript was located in c. 2000), so credit must go to R. H. Barlow for its qualities.

See? I said I'd been out of the loop.... I knew that scholarship kept pushing back the amount of HPL's contribution to "The Night Ocean", though I'd not heard about the MS. being found... that's very good news. Finally settles the question left open by the ambiguous phrasing in Lovecraft's letters.... And yes, it is a very good story. Barlow's talent seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds at that period.

Now if I only had $100,000 for that script of "The Shunned House"....

[Ningauble]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

See? I said I'd been out of the loop....

On the other hand, it hasn't been widely announced. I know of only two places: An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia and Eyes of the God. But an old mailing of the EOD even had a facsimile of the typescript.

I knew that scholarship kept pushing back the amount of HPL's contribution to "The Night Ocean", though I'd not heard about the MS. being found... that's very good news. Finally settles the question left open by the ambiguous phrasing in Lovecraft's letters....

Yup. Now there are known Mss. for all of the Barlow/Lovecraft stories.

Now if I only had $100,000 for that script of "The Shunned House"....

Yes, if only... If I ever win a humongous amount of money, one of my first priorities will be donating a sizable chunk of it to the John Hay Library for this purpose.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Ningauble

On the other hand, it hasn't been widely announced. I know of only two places: An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia and Eyes of the God. But an old mailing of the EOD even had a facsimile of the typescript.

Not being a member of the EOD (I really need to check into these things shortly after the first of the year... things this year have just been so chaotic all 'round....), I wasn't aware of that... I'd love to see it, though...

Yup. Now there are known Mss. for all of the Barlow/Lovecraft stories.

Always glad to see such things show up. The more we learn about these relationships between Lovecraft and other writers, the more fascinating they become....

Yes, if only... If I ever win a humongous amount of money, one of my first priorities will be donating a sizable chunk of it to the John Hay Library for this purpose.

Ditto! They've provided many an invaluable service to study of the man....