H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book and Other Notes: An Annotated Edition [LIMITED HARDCOVER]

$60.00  $55.00

  • Limited Hardcover: 500 copies only!  Prepublication discount in effect! Save $5

  • Edited by David E. Schultz
  • Cover art: "Untitled" by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, copyright © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
  • 370 pages
  • ISBN TBD: Limited Hardcover

 

 

AVAILABLE AT NECRONOMICON-PROVIDENCE 2026!!

 

 

Lovecraft began keeping a commonplace book only a few years after he began his serious writing of weird fiction in 1917. It is far from accurate to state that the 222 entries in the commonplace book are anything close to plot-germs, but they nonetheless embody many key conceptions and fragments of imagery that Lovecraft incorporated into some of his best-known tales.

 

“The Outsider,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and many other stories were derived from entries in the commonplace book, and Lovecraft even used some entries as the basis of poems, especially his Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet-cycle. In a few instances he allowed other writers, notably Henry S. Whitehead and Frank Belknap Long, to use some entries, although he confessed that the resulting stories were far from what he would have written.

 

This exhaustively annotated edition, based upon decades of study of both the text and sources of the commonplace book, illuminates the origins of many entries—from events in Lovecraft’s life, books or stories he read, and other sources—while also indicating their use in his fiction, even in cases where the use of the entries is by no means obvious. Other lists and notes relating to the commonplace book, including such works as “Weird Story Plots” and “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” are also presented, thoroughly annotated.

 

In addition, this volume includes FULL-COLOR facsimile reproductions of the handwritten manuscript of the commonplace book, so that readers can gain a first-hand look at Lovecraft’s imagination at work over the two decades of his creative life.

 

David E. Schultz is the author of numerous articles on Lovecraft as well as a pioneering annotated edition of Fungi from Yuggoth (2017). With S. T. Joshi, he has prepared annotated editions of the totality of Lovecraft’s letters, in twenty-four volumes.