ellen_datlow | A Book of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book

A Book of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book was created for a French exposition commemorating the 70th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death and edited by Patrick J. Gyger. The introduction talks about Lovecraft as a “science fiction writer” and describes how this Commonplace Book, kept from 1919 and 1934, recorded ideas that the author planned to use in developing his later fiction.
Twenty, one-page pieces of text and one hundred pieces of art were commissioned. The book contains most of those commissioned (the text is in both French and English). The first half of the book consists of pieces by Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, James Morrow, Norman Spinrad, Ian Watson, Terry Bisson, Paul Di Filippo, Christopher Priest, and several French writers. The second half is filled with eighty-nine pieces of Lovecraftian inspired art by John Couthart, H. R. Giger, and other artists whose names are unfamiliar to me. All in all, a wonderful artifact
Thank you so much, Jeff, for acquiring this copy for me. It's yummy.

I misspoke, it is available for sale-someone I know bought one:

Maison d'Ailleurs

This is what the person told me:
Yes. I had to email a query about ordering, but I got a quick response. I
think it came to about US$50, including airmail shipping, and I was able to pay via paypal.
You can contact them at: maison@ailleurs.ch

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It's funny, I've never considered Lovecraft to be a SF writer - he is always what I think of when people ask me about horror. Lovecraft and Poe are the cornerstones of my launch into horror, particularly since I found them when I was a kid and impressionable and they were SCARY and written weird 'old style' and they both could crawl into my head with ideas like trapping someone inside a wall or the monster who doesn't know they are a monster - those are straight out of the inside of my head.

The book does sound yummy though :)

Some of his work was definitely sf--at least one of the novels, as I recall.
And when I read him as a mid-teen I could clearly see in his work the classic definitional difference between sf=sense of wonder at the unknown and horror=fear of the unknown.

I always liked how he was able to twist the perspective from one to the other - I do think I should re-read him though - it has been too many years and I believe I've forgotten a lot...

Digging around on the internet suggests that this is probably the catalog from the Exhibition of Unspeakable Things, an exhibit that ran in Switzerland at the Maison d'Ailleurs (House of Elsewhere), last year. It's apparently scheduled for Milan in 2008- I'm hoping I can track down a copy of the catalog for myself!
Some other info on the book is here (http://houseofelsewhere.net/uk/index.php?pageNum_news_rqu=4&totalRows_news_rqu=45), and I'm hoping an email to the PR office is going to produce a copy of this for my own shelves, if only by way of me getting a friend in Lucerne to visit and pick it up for me.

Thanks for calling my attention to this! I've waved the YBF&H anthologies around at friends a great deal, over the years, because the editors of it always seem to point me at stuff I wanted to read that I never knew existed- this is the first time I've had a chance to thank you for it.

colubra,
I'm probably a little confused --I hope Jeff will correct me--was it for this Swiss exhibit or the Utopiales (french) thingie you and a bunch of other sf/f writers have attended in the past???

In any case, if you see my correction in the original post, I believe it still can be purchased...I'm checking with the person who told me to see where/how he bought it--if it was directly from the site or some other way.

And you're very welcome!

The former: I'm not (as yet) a writer. ;)

And thanks again, this time for the pointer to where to get it!

Ellen: Glad you liked it. I think you can still actually buy copies of the book. I'll check into it and report back.

Thanks. I'm checking with the person who bought one, too. Whoever gets back first !

Hi Ellen,

Related to this is The Commonplace Book Project (http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/games/lovecraft/). It's similar to the Book of Unspeakable Things, but it features (free) interactive fiction based on Lovecraft's Commonplace Book.

Hi all,

I published the book, so I am very glad Ellen mentionned it. It is indeed an exhibition catalog. The exhibit itself has almost 500 works, and the volume is like a companion piece. The show has been created by Maison d'Ailleurs and might tour (maybe to Nantes; both are often related, as I used to run the Nantes festival and am still involved there). The interactive fiction is also part of the whole exhibition around the Commonplace book.
As for HPL being an SF writer, this is of course a deliberate point I try to make in the intro. A lot of HPL works and ideas come for interest in science (relativity, astronomy, etc.) and one of the most interesting things I see in his writings is how he shows that us humans are nothing when put into a wider perspective, and a rational one too (which is even scarier than having a dead great uncle coming back from the dead for me). It could be a long debate, but I don't think that in his case horror (as a form) and SF (as a type of narration) exclude themselves... But then obviously there are stories of his that would contradict that...
Best, Patrick

Welcome Patrick,
Thanks for coming by and clarifying about the book.
I'd love to be able to see the exhibit--maybe it'll come to NY some day.

Thanks Ellen... The show is available from today (we're taking it down in a bit more than an hour) so if anyone is interested... cheers, Patrick

A Book of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book

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