S. T. Joshi’s Blog
February 15, 2025 — Progress on Various Fronts
Before I turn to the news of my activities, I can’t help reproducing an exquisite card that the renowned artist (and devoted cat lover) Jason C. Eckhardt sent me on the occasion of Mimi’s demise. It is, of course, a transcription of Lovecraft’s poem “Little Sam Perkins,” commemorating the passing of a little kitten that lived only a few months:
On to news. I have prepared another edition of an obscure but interesting writer in Weird Tales (and other pulps), Eli Colter—who proves to have been a woman, May Eliza Frost (1890–1984). Aside from several stories that reveal her fervent religiosity, she wrote a controversial story, “The Last Horror” (January 1927), in which a highly educated black man, Richard Ballymair, working in tandem with an unscrupulous white doctor, Dr. Straub, engrafts the skin of a wide array of white men onto himself, because he feels he cannot attain the fame and fortune he deserves because “I am a negro. No matter what respect I might command from white men because of my intelligence and abilities, no matter to what heights I might rise, the wall of race reared between.” But this story is in no way racist, as an antagonist of Ballymair, citing the tenor Roland Hayes, the actor Charles Gilpin, and the writer Countee Cullen, points out that “on every hand [the negro] is rising to better things.” My volume is entitled The Last Horror and Others (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DW45NQ8P).
Stark House Press has issued another volume of the stories of Robert Hichens, The Return of the Soul and Other Curious Tales (https://starkhousepress.com/hichens.php), which contains some extraordinary weird tales, including the title story and the inexpressibly poignant novella “The Cry of the Child.” I wrote an introduction to the book. There may be one more volume of Hichens’s work coming out from Stark House.
In Spain, the publisher Aurora Dorada has issued the first of a multi-volume set of Lovecraft’s tales, arranged thematically. This one is called Relatos Macabros (https://www.auroradoradaediciones.com/product/relatos-macabros-narrativa-completa-i-edicion-bilingue-revisada-de-s-t-joshi). This is a distinctive bilingual edition (using my corrected texts), for which I have written a new introduction and new introductions to the two sections of the book. A must purchase for the Lovecraft devotee!
An exquisite little booklet, Eternal Brood the Shadows, has just emerged from Helios House Press. This booklet contains five acrostic poems on the name Edgar Allan Poe written by Lovecraft, Adolphe de Castro, R. H. Barlow, Maurice W. Moe, and Henry Kuttner, along with a splendid essay on the poems by David E. Schultz, along with other matter. For more information, see the publisher’s web page: https://www.helios.house/books/ebts.
And for those who have some spare cash to spend, check out this realtor’s listing of the Shunned House (135 Benefit Street) in Providence: https://www.remax.com/ri/providence/home-details/135-benefit-st-providence-ri-02903/1582274375872096127/M00000554/1376603. This is the first time, so far as I am aware, that this house has been put on the market. Calling all millionaires: go pick it up!
January 28, 2025 — The Stories of Dashiell Hammett
I am tremendously proud to announce the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Collected Stories, Volume 1: 1922–1924 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DTZ2S6S3), one of the most important books I have published through my Sarnath Press imprint. This is the first edition of Hammett’s short stories based on consultation of original texts and a rigorous analysis of Hammett’s preferences in regard to spelling, punctuation, other such details.
My work on this project dates to the 1990s, when Penguin wished me to prepare such an edition, in the expectation that Hammett’s work would gradually go into the public domain beginning in 1998. I did considerable research on this project, taking at least one trip to the Library of Congress to look up original magazine appearances of Hammett’s tales. But then the US copyright law was extended from 75 to 95 years after publication, so the project was cancelled. Now, as of January 1 of this year, Hammett’s work down through the end of 1929 is in the public domain; and it was during this period (1922–29) that the bulk of his short fiction was written, as he thereafter focused on novels.
The importance of this edition rests upon the fact that Hammett himself never supervised the book publication of his short fiction. In the 1940s, Ellery Queen arranged with Hammett to publish numerous digest-sized volumes of his short stories, but Ellery Queen (the collaborative team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) boldly rewrote and abridged many of the stories, also changing titles. These adulterated texts continued to be reprinted in such volumes as The Big Knockover (1966) and The Continental Op (1974).
When the Library of America was compiling its volume of Hammett’s Crime Stories and Other Writings (2001), the editors consulted me about the textual status of the stories. I notifed them that I had found definitive evidence of Ellery Queen’s tampering with the texts, after I had consulted the Ellery Queen Archives at Columbia University. The Library of America edition does go back to the original magazine appearances, but its volume contains only about a third of Hammett’s complete short fiction.
I shall be issuing two more volumes of Hammett’s stories in the coming months. Then I shall have to wait until more of his tales go into the public domain.
Sarnath Press continues its publication of the works of Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. Volume 29 of Bierce’s Collected Essays and Journalism has just been published. I was pleased to see that my friend and colleague Michael Washburn wrote an incisive review of volume 28, which covers the years 1896–97 (https://bookandfilmglobe.com/nonfiction/ambrose-bierce-muckraker/). It was in early 1896 that William Randolph Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Examiner, sent Bierce to Washington, D.C., to lobby against a funding bill that would have granted one of the most notorious of the railroad barons, Collis P. Huntington, a virtually unlimited period of time to repay government loans. Bierce wrote more than 60 articles attacking Huntington and the funding bill, and it was largely through his influence that the bill failed to pass.
My edition of Mencken’s Magazine and Newspaper Work, 1929 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4M2XF7) constitutes the forty-ninth volume of his Collected Essays and Journalism. It is a lively volume, as all the others are.
My colleague Vincent Martini has forwarded a distinctive Lovecraft associational item. A French book dealer is offering for sale an issue of the amateur journal L’Alouette (edited by Charles A. A. Parker) in which a brief ad for Lovecraft’s revisory services appears (https://sentierdezaman.fr/2025/01/12/lalouette-novembre-1933/). This item has not been previously known, although a much more expansive ad appeared in L’Alouette for September 1924. This was when Lovecraft announced the formation of the “Crafton Service Bureau” (presumably a collaboration between himself and James F. Morton) offering a variety of services well beyond literary revision. It is unlikely that Lovecraft received much business from either ad.
Another Lovecraft associational item will appear in the Summer 2025 issue of Spectral Realms. You may recall that Lovecraft wrote a poem entitled “To the Late John H. Fowler, Esq.” (Scot, March 1916). Fowler was a little-known amateur journalist, and in one of his “Department of Public Criticism” columns Lovecraft singles out Fowler’s poem “The Haunted Forest” as a wok that is “almost Poe-like in its grimly fantastic quality.” A colleague, Josh Callahan, has now found the poem! It appeared in the journal Outward Bound for January 1915. Whether it matches Lovecraft’s description of it, readers will have to determine for themselves.
January 12, 2025 — Remembering Mimi
Our cat Mimi lived for almost exactly seventeen years and three months—a venerable age for a cat. She graced my various households for all but the first two months of her life. (I agree with Lovecraft that one does not “own” a cat; one “entertains” a cat. The cat, as Lovecraft wrote in “Cats and Dogs,” “adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he [or she] wishes to be there.”
I remember bringing her home, in late November 2007, from the horse farm in upstate New York where she was born. The poor thing was quivering with fear as I held her close to my chest, enclosed her in the folds of my leather jacket as my first wife drove us home. But she quickly found a place in our house. Our other female cat, three-legged Phoebe, took her under her wing, actually washing her from time to time; she was a sort of surrogate mother to her. Big Henry recognised that Mimi was something of a spitfire and gave her a wide berth, even though he was two or three times her size.
Mimi made the long trek across the country (along with five other cats) to Seattle in the fall of 2008. We first settled in my mother-in-law’s house, then in our own house in the Pinehurst neighbourhood. Sadly, her sister Lily died at the age of one and a half when she was hit by a car. The amiable Taffy also bit the dust in that house. But upon the dissolution of my marriage, I quickly found in Mary a far superior companion and fellow cat-devotee. By early 2012 we had decided to fuse our households, and Mimi, Phoebe, and Henry moved into Mary’s house. Her own cat Paolo was a bit overwhelmed by the sudden infusion of so much felinicity, but he bravely adjusted. One by one, though, these cats went the way of all flesh.
I have so many memories of Mimi … How she would glare in outrage at some real or fancied insult to her dignity … How she would recognise, by the mere turning on of my second computer (which is connected to my scanner), that it was time to play with me as I scanned page after page … How she would go ballistic when we tried to put flea medicine on her … How she would know, by my putting on my sneakers at 5 P.M. for my customary walk around the neighbourhood, that this was another occasion for a play session. Her peremptory meows (“Come on, Daddycat! Hurry up and finish tying your shoelaces!”) were endlessly amusing. … How she almost had to have her tail amputated when she got into a fight with a vicious feral cat stalking the neighbourhood. The tail was saved when the vet treated it with medicated honey, even though this required her to remain in a cage at the clinic for all of twelve days. (We providentially caught that feral cat and released him in Discovery Park, far from here.) … How she would claim various pieces of furniture as her resting and sleeping area (toward the end she appropriated our brown ottoman in the living room, which had formerly been Henry’s perch). … How she would walk all over Mary and myself in our bed, basically asserting ownership of her “parents.”
In other words, Mimi had more personality than most human beings I have met.
It is strange to be in a catless household. I have not lived without at least one cat in the house since the fall of 2001. But we will secure more cats presently. We are eyeing a pair of ragdoll kittens, whom we shall keep indoors to lessen the likelihood of injury or fatality. But that won’t happen for a few months.
Meanwhile, work continues. I have now issued, via Sarnath Press, a volume entitled Atheism and Agnosticism: Selected Readings (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DS2XTQL9). This is a combined edition of my previous anthologies, Atheism: A Reader (2000) and The Agnostic Reader (2007), with some items omitted. It should make a good pendant to my history of atheism. On that note, I would be grateful if anyone who has obtained volume 1 of The Downfall of God were to write a review of it, either for Amazon or for Goodreads or any other such venue. There is one review on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Downfall-God-History-Atheism-Prehistory/dp/1634312589), written by my colleague Travis S. Metheny; let’s hope for more! The Goodreads page for the book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219255557-the-downfall-of-god) has 2 “ratings,” but no actual reviews.
I am involved in much other work and will make note of it in due course of time. Ambrose Bierce … H. L. Mencken … Weird Tales writers … August Derleth … and a major undertaking in the crime/mystery field that I shall announce at the appropriate moment.