The Temple of Dagon

I'm currently posting reviews of the stories from Mr. Pacione's anthology which are available online. I am of the opinion that any time an anthology has some of their stories online, they should be read first as a sample of what to expect before purchasing.

http://www.journalscape.com/cussedness

It's hard to guage as Lovecraft's influences were fairly broad. If you include all, that would be one large tome. If you only include the pulp contemporaries (and those preceeding by only a bit) you are going up against many other collections that do that as well. Most readers would already have Machen, Blackwood, Howard, etc. They wouldn't need to get a collection with one story from each when each author's whole collection can be had in mmp. There are books by Joshi that fringe on this topic, and a book of Wierd Tales authors. One of the problems with anthologizing the rarer ones is they are rare for a reason. You might find a pulp writer form that area that hasn't gotten much press, and put those works together. What kind of lineup were you thinking? That might help people decide.

I think an important issue that no one has mentioned is this..

Although I have all of Lovecraft's work in digital form (which are not being kept on the site anymore due to an agreement with Arkham House - a very friendly company btw) I still always buy any new Lovecraft book I find when I wonder around bookstores, and online of course too.

There is just something more fun about having an actual book. Sure you can print off stories.. but it is not quite the same. There is magic in books I personally would much rather have an actual printed version of something than just a cheap print-out. Now maybe if I had my own professional printing press, things would be different.

Some people are content with reading stories online, or printing them. But many others prefer true books.. If no one cared much for true books, people would not still be printing Poe, or thousands of other authors whos works can be found online.

Know what I mean?

My view exactly - I can hardly stand to read anything of any length off a computer screen. And it just isn't the same printing it off on a printer.

Some of the authors I'm looking at including stories from are Chambers, Bierce, and Machen. There is a particular "twist" I'm thinking about putting to the collection but I don't want to give too much away at this point.

Here is another question: if you could see the story list, cover art, etc. would you pre-order a book like this 2-3 months in advance? If we could get say 30-40 preorders it would be incentive to go through with the project.

Thanks to everyone for the help,
Jacob
http://www.undeadanthology.com

Aleister wrote:I think an important issue that no one has mentioned is this . . . There is just something more fun about having an actual book.

There's no denying that books are the way to go, but I've found that access to decent short stories online has its merits. Sometimes after I've been working late on the PC, I like to wind down before calling it a night, and it's nice to be able to pull up a random odd tale here or there to give me something to mull over before going to bed.

Of course!

I do not mean to trivialize the importance of it If I did it would seem silly for me to have these works online

Ultimately it comes down to the personality of the reader I guess. Some people won't take online (fiction stories) work seriously. But if that same work is in a book, a thing you can hold and touch and that on what money has been spent, then that extra value and credibility is added to it.

Aleister wrote:Although I have all of Lovecraft's work in digital form (which are not being kept on the site anymore due to an agreement with Arkham House - a very friendly company btw)

What kind of agreement is that? There are a bunch of people out there saying that AH does not actually hold any legal rights to the works of HPL.

Could be hearsay, but from what I've read, Chaosium stopped paying AH for the rights to publish their Call of Cthulhu game (after they discovered the truth behind the copyright claim), and none of the HPL movie productions had to pay for the rights to use the stories. Then there are the other web sites that have ignored the copyright claim and continue to post Lovecraft's works without ever experiencing legal reprisal.

It's an interesting situation. Sounds to me like AH may be all bark with no teeth to bite with.

Well that is how I had originally been speaking to April. She asked me nicely to remove them... I wanted to stay on good terms with them obviously. Copyright law is complex, and everywhere on the internet where you read that it is all public domain, well there is really nothing to back it up.

Sure I might could put them up and nothing would happen, but then I probably would not get emails responded to from April and considering I am such a fan of Lovecraft, why would I want to cause the company that helped keep his work alive in the early years to not respect the site. It would not be very professional.

I would indeed be interested to see some hard proof one way or another. I am sure there must be some way to get the information from the copyright offices, but I do not really feel like paying a copyright lawyer what it would take to research it all, although the findings would be interesting to post.

Anyone want to fund that ?

I've looked into this a bit, and as you stated, everything seems to point towards all of HPL's work being in the public domain, sans some of the 'selected letters', whose rights are held by one of HPL's nephew's descendents (or something to that effect....sorry, but his name escapes me at the moment).

As a film maker, I was concerned about the rights, but my mind was put at ease after reading Joshi's "HPL: A Life", which contains a thorough argument of why he believes the work is now public domain. It also includes examples of AH threatening legal action against certain individuals (again the names escape me), and also their lack of follow through with their legal action. I'll be seeing him at the HPLFF this weekend, so I'll ask him more about it.

I have also talked with many lovecraftian film makers, and have yet to find any that have asked (or felt they needed) AH's approval. Dagon bless AH for publishing his work, otherwise we probably wouldn't even have this forum, but I think AH just really wishes that they had solid copyrights as his work becomes more popular, and offering implied copyright is all they can do at this point.

I looked into it some more.

Apparently, after Lovecraft died, copyrights to his tales passed on to his aunt. When she died four years later, the copyrights were transferred to her daughters.

The daughters then signed an agreement with August Derleth, wherupon they maintained the copyrights, but allowed AH to publish the stories. August Derleth would later claim the copyrights were his, but the document says otherwise.

Shortly after After WWII, Derleth purchased "all rights" of those tales printed in Weird Tales. The problem there is that HPL began reserving 2nd-print rights for himself in 1926 or before. Therefore, Weird Tales didn't actually own the rights (to HPL stories) that it printed from that time on.

Also, of the 13 HPL tales printed by Weird Tales prior to 1926, seven had been previously published in amateur journals, which, by law, put them in public domain.

So it's conceivable that Arkham House could possess the copyrights to a half-dozen HPL stories. Unfortunately for them, there are no records (at the Library of Congress, anyway), of those copyrights having ever been renewed, which once again, places those tales into PD.

Interesting information. Did you find all of this information in one source? Maybe I did not search around enough last time I tried to look up info on this

If the pieces are in public domain, I say go for it. I would suggest expanding the normal intro into a critical text, explaining how the pieces influenced Lovecraft. The book will help open doors for your budding micor-press. I took a look at your site and was pleasantly surprised at the professionalism and quality of what you are trying to do. You can use books of reprints like this to work out the kinks in your production and distrobution. They also have a better chance of being reviewed than a non-name 1st novel, or antho of nobodies. When you do release a book from an up-and-comer, or an antho, this will give your house more legitimacy than the other fly-by-night publishers; especially if you can get mention of it in the more academic horror circles. Don't skimp on the cover art. Make it look very nice. There are many painting in public domain that would fit nicely. Something like Fuseli's "The Nightmare", Boklin's work, Durer's, a Goya litho, etc.

Aleister wrote:Interesting information. Did you find all of this information in one source? Maybe I did not search around enough last time I tried to look up info on this

It was all laid out on one page. Looked like the author got most of his info through research conducted by Joshi.

Speaking of copyrights, anyone know how it works for someone like one of us that posts their stories here?

Since we're posting them online, does that automatically make them public domain?

Would that mean that anyone who wanted to could just take them and publish them in a book without paying us anything for them?

(Of course, at this point I really wouldn't mind seeing one of my stories published even if I didn't get paid for it).