Books, Books Everywhere...

[PaleRider218]

Salutations All!

So I've been listening to the HPL Literary Podcast for about about a month now, and am more than happy to say it has reignited my love for all things Lovecraft, and I managed to drag a handful of friends kicking and screaming into the madness with me. So after picking up a few various volumes of Lovecraft at my local Barnes and Nobel, I started combing Amazon looking for Joshi's books of letters and various annotated collections, as well as Kenneth Hite's "Tour De Lovecraft" and was astounded at how much various sellers are asking for these books.

It's nigh upon ridiculous.

At this point I'm just wondering if others have come across the same things, searching out these books.

[catamount]

Lovecraft's works are public domain at this point, therefore, you can find all his tales online at various websites, as well many of his contemporaries, such as Howard, Machen, Chambers, etc. If you prefer an actual book, you can find some good deals on ebay at times as well. 

[Cacodaemoniacal]

I've seen that with other used books on Amazon--especially out of print books. It seems so random. The prices will start out at say $3.99 and some guy at the bottom will have the exact same book for like $50. I always wonder how that works out for them. Maybe, if they are patient enough all the others get sold, then $ka-ching!$

[helios1014]

Does anyone know why most of Lovecrafts Selected Letters are out of print?

[Genus Unknown]

I'd guess sales and copyright issues.  Copyright is kind of murky as applied to letters, but generally the recipient has the rights to them.  These may have to be purchased or otherwise finagled by the publisher, who then has to print and distribute them (with an attractive cover and introduction by S.T. Joshi), which costs a fair bit of money.  The audience for Lovecraft is a kind of niche market already, and the audience for his letters is a niche within a niche.  It just might not be financially worth it for the publisher.

[helios1014]

After doing so poking, I found this at http://www.hplovecraft.com/internet/ahcfaq/written.asp:

Q: Why are volumes I and II of Lovecraft’s letters so hard to find?

A: Volumes I and II of Arkham House’s Selected Letters are long out of print. As of this writing (November 2000), Arkham House has announced that volume IV was also in short supply. Here’s the publication history of these five volumes:

Book                 1st Edition  2nd Edition  Total
Selected Letters I   2,504 (1965) 3,000 (1974) 5,504
Selected Letters II  2,482 (1968) 3,000 (1974) 5,482
Selected Letters III 2,500 (1971) 2,500 (1997) 5,000
Selected Letters IV  5,000 (1976)     ––      5,000
Selected Letters V   5,000 (1976)     ––      5,000


As you can see, Arkham House reprinted volumes I and II in 1974 and probably intended to simply delay reprinting volume III until after volumes IV and V came out. At that point, the page proofs for volume III were lost, and that volume was not reprinted until popular demand brought it back in 1997. Arkham House has yet to announce plans to reprint any of the Selected Letters volumes.

[whpugmire]

The situation with Lovecraft's Letters is weird.  As soon as the two volume sets of HPL's correspondence with Derleth and REH went out of print, they were listed at Amazon selling for $1,000 per set!  S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz are editing all of Lovecraft's available letters in a series of some 25 volumes through Hippocampus Press. 

Arkham House has announced that they are working on an electric edition of their Lovecraft titles that will comprise something like eleven or thirteen volumes.  One assumes that this will include all five volumes of the Selected Letters.

[old book]

Yeah, Arkham's Selected Letters were always scarce, and poor sellers nonetheless. inb4 dog in the manger etc.

A lot of Klarkash/HPL and REH/HPL correspondence was dumped to internet a few years ago, it might be possible to find it still, or do wayback or cache requests.

On overpriced literary books about Lovecraft, I have no advice except to say, they probably aren't worth the postage, much less the cover price. On HPL's own work, the previous reply was correct, all of the tales can now be found for free on internet, and a good deal of essays and poems. A few longer pieces, such as To Quebec and Arkham's Misc Writings can also be found if you scrounge around and look for torrents, etc.

Another group of materials worth considering is audio. BBC has done the Young Man of Providence and Weird Tales: The Life of HPL. HPL readings/audiobooks are nothing new and there have been some good ones.

What I'm missing and can't get is all the stuff inbetwixt then and now, during those long decades when Derleth acted as HPL's postmortem slavemaster and tried to claim he owned the spirit and image of everything, and yet a few people did do some independent stuff. Lin Carter, Fritz Leiber. I'd really like to be able to find the other two tales in the Robert Black TRILOGY by Bloch himself (Shambler from the Stars, Steeple) on the internet instead of trying to save up pennies to order an out-of-print anthology that contains the limited stuff I require. Require. Not the right word. The stuff about which I'm curious.

And no, I don't really care much about copyrights and digital editions, sorry.