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

[ellen_datlow]

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

Comments

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

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.

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

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...