Your first Lovecraft book

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

Knivesout no more
Joined
Nov 11, 2003
Messages
4,043
Location
Bangalore, India
What was the first Lovecraft volume you owned?

I read various Lovecraft stories in different volumes taken from my father's rather large collection of 60s and 70s horror anthologies, but the first volume exclusively consisting of Lovecraft's work that I owned was purchased while I was in college, from a second-hand bookstore:
 

Attachments

  • thetomb.jpg
    thetomb.jpg
    50.3 KB · Views: 304
Now, that's an interesting cover, and one I've not seen before.

Well, let's see... my first encounter with HPL was "The Colour Out of Space", in Peter Haining's The Ghouls... though I was too young at the time to fully grasp it, I think. At any rate, I didn't recall the writer's name until a bit later, when I also read the Beagle/Boxer 2-volume paperbound edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos from our public library and encountered "The Call of Cthulhu"... and was hooked. Thereafter, I sought out every bit of Lovecraft our library had, and went scouring used bookstores for volumes of his work (most of which was out of print at that point, or failed to be distributed in our area).

The first actual Lovecraft book I owned was a copy of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, quickly followed by The Doom That Came to Sarnath, part of the same series... and then the Ballantine 6-volume set of Lovecraftian (and Derlethian) tales, picking up the Beagle editions whenever I came across them (which was seldom... in fact, it wasn't until nearly 20 years later I got my hands on the Beagle edition of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, though by that time I had the -- corrupt -- Arkham editions; but, for sentiment's sake....)
 
The first Lovecraft that I remember reading was "The Shunned House" in ... some anthology or the other. After that, I think it was "At the Mountains of Madness."
 
The first Lovecraft book I ever beheld was a jacketless edition of Beyond the Wall of Sleep that my pal had just purchased. This was in 1968 or 1969. In 1972 I was sent to Northern Ireland to work as a Mormon missionary, and it was there that I bought second-hand Panther pb editions of HPL's tales. Was there a Panther Horror edition called The Lurking Fear and Others that had a cover illustration of that tale, lots of holes in the ground and one daemonic thing popping its mug out of one of them? That was probably my first-owned book of Lovecraft's weird fiction. Then I returned to ye States and discovered Arkham House and bought the three hardcover editions and the first three volumes of Selected Letters -- and lost my soul.......
 
The first Lovecraft book I owned was H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus Volume 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. I found it in a rental book store in Brunei. This was the only volume they had. I've since gotten the other volumes.
 

Attachments

  • Dagon.jpg
    Dagon.jpg
    12.4 KB · Views: 259
Apart from stories in assorted author collections, my first was The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, procured from a second hand store with the cover missing, but otherwise tolerable condition. Joshi's annotations though sometimes excessive did a lot to enhance my appreciation of At The Mountains of Madness and The Rats in The Walls.
 
The first Lovecraft book I ever beheld was a jacketless edition of Beyond the Wall of Sleep that my pal had just purchased. This was in 1968 or 1969. In 1972 I was sent to Northern Ireland to work as a Mormon missionary, and it was there that I bought second-hand Panther pb editions of HPL's tales. Was there a Panther Horror edition called The Lurking Fear and Others that had a cover illustration of that tale, lots of holes in the ground and one daemonic thing popping its mug out of one of them? That was probably my first-owned book of Lovecraft's weird fiction. Then I returned to ye States and discovered Arkham House and bought the three hardcover editions and the first three volumes of Selected Letters -- and lost my soul.......

Indeed there was, Wilum: the Beagle Boxer edition of The Lurking Fear has this as its cover, though there was more than one critter:

Cthulhu Mythos: Beagle Boxer Covers
 
I honestly can't remember which one that was . I only know for sure it was not "The Call of Cthulhu" as I had read quite a bit of his work and read about him by that point and knew about the story as something I "should read" .
 
Alright so now we know what the first book was. How about the rest. Do you have multiple copies because they are different editions? Or do you just have one tome with most everything? Are you after only a 'definitive' volume?

For myself, I have several copies of his works. Some because I love the old covers. There's some amazing cover art. Some because the books are beautiful in themselves such as the Gollanz edition. Some are travel copies and lending copies. And I have multiple copies so they can be found in several parts of my home.
 
My first lovecraft volume was only a few years ago now and was one of the Penguin collections: "The Call of Cthulhu: And Other Weird Stories".

51BCS1iIBzL._SX106_.jpg
 
My first love craft book is 'Necronomicon; the best wierd tales fo HP Lovecraft'
I received it for Christmas and am still reading it, last night I finished the Dunwich Horror, very horrible but brilliant :)

41JymMknhDL._SL500_AA300
 
Only owned and read the one volume, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.
dagon.jpg


Only one story really impressed me, Herbert West-Reanimator which if you havent read, is superb!
 
Well, to answer Nesa, I have Penguin Classics black-spine editions of the Penguin Lovecraft. I've got the Gollancz collection, Necronomicon. I also have Del Rey's The Horror In The Musuem, another collection of Lovecraft tales with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates and the first volume of The Annotated Lovecraft, which has interesting pictures. I don't suppose I'll collect any more new editions, but I'm always interested in finding copies of the older paperbacks for their interesting cover art.
 
Only the copy of The Tomb I mentioned. I also have 70s pbacks of a couple of Derleth's pastiches, one of which, The Shuttered Room is credited to Lovecraft and Derleth on the cover. The other is The Trail Of Cthulhu, the best thing about it is the cover art!
 
Ummm yes I know those. I found most of mine at Eastercons and Morpheus got himself a set at the last one. In fact they were at a table run by a charity and the books were going for very little indeed. Yes the cover art is the best thing. I'll have a look out, which is always fun.
 
Let's see... I have the revised Arkham House editions edited by S. T. Joshi (early printings, before the changeover to the dreadful new cover art) as well as the Derleth-edited original edition of the Arkham House The Dunwich Horror and Others; Miscellaneous Writings; an Arkham Collector containing the only extant part of a letter HPL wrote to his future wife, Sonia; the five-volume Selected Letters; the three-volume Penguin modern classics set with cover art by, respectively, John Martin (1789-1854), Gustave Doré (1832-1883), and Henry Fuseli (1741-1825); I have both the Beagle/Boxer 11-volume set (titled The Arkham Collection of H. P. Lovecraft) as well as the later Ballantine reprint of 6 of those volumes (they left out The Lurker at the Threshold, The Trail of Cthulhu, The Mask of Cthulhu, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward); the Gollancz Necronomicon volume; the Barnes & Noble Tales; a Scholastic Book Services edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror, ed. by Margaret Ronan; the two volumes of the Annotated H. P. Lovecraft; a rather hefty number of publications by Necronomicon Press; all the Hippocampus Press volumes; The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft (both hardbound and softcover); Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems (Ballantine); A Winter Wish and Other Poems (ed. by Tom Collins); the Books at Brown volume with HPL's letters to John Dunne; Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters; the two Night Shade Books volumes of letters; a photocopy I made some years ago (for research purposes) of The Dark Brotherhood; and some scattered volumes here and there that I am almost certainly forgetting....

Oh, yes... and the exquisite Lovecraft at Last, by HPL and Willis Conover:

http://www.hplovecraft.com/study/bios/atlastcsp.asp
 

Similar threads


Back
Top