Does it not seem likely that it is neither H P Lovecraft's signature, nor a forgery?

Seems most likely a forgery, since the handwriting is near identical to H. P. Lovecraft's. Of course, there have been other Lovecrafts around, back in the 1920's when the book was originally purchased, and now, such as in the Spectral Reams publication mentioned in the other thread, invented or not.

Still, the auction could turn out an outrageous bargain! After all, anything with "Lovecraft" on it today is a goldmine.

It contains the right letters of the last name, in the right order, and in script. Otherwise, I don't see how you can say the writing is "near identical". All you can say is that someone accustomed to writing legible connected script wrote the name "Lovecraft" on the book, for some unknown reason. That person might even have been HPL for all I know, but is probably not. Perhaps someone wrote the name, hoping that people making unwarranted speculations on the internet would jack up the price of the book, without any actual need to lie. Or perhaps the name is there for other reasons. If someone had been trying to forge HPL's signature, I think they would probably have written "H.P." in front of it, and would have made sure the "e" was written in quasi-capital style.

Compare for yourself: [www.google.se]

After having looked at it for a while, it seems to me that someone without proficiency or much commitment still tried to imitate the signature style.

No matter how much you look at it, you can get very little info from such a tiny writing sample. It may even have been written by Lovecraft, for all I know. Someone with legible handwriting wrote "Lovecraft" in standard-style connected script. When I write the word "Lovecraft" in script, it looks about the same. They may or may not have been trying to make it look like Lovecraft's sig; but that is hardly the only explanation for the similarity. That style of script is pretty standard, and by no means unusual.

Picked up the following comment from an Amazon review, for what it's worth. According to this, it seems as if Joshi took Lovecraft's old manuscripts, and added bits he found in them to the 'corrected' Arkham House editions, without really taking into consideration whether Lovecraft wanted these bits in his final versions:

"The reference to 5,000 words excised from "At the Mountains of Madness" is also misleading, even if technically true. The difference between the Joshi version of "Mountains", and the older Arkham House texts which followed HPL's final instructions, is only about 230 extra words, which Joshi "restored" from earlier drafts. It may be true, as you say, that about 5,000 words were excised from the original magazine appearance, but this is irrelevant to most people, because that version is not on sale anywhere. If 5,000 words were excised in the magazine, Lovecraft evidently restored 4,770 of them on his hand-corrected copies, resulting in the Arkham House texts, and texts derived from the Arkham House texts, which everyone read before Joshi's versions came alone. The other 230 words that Lovecraft did not restore were, presumably, the words he did not want."

Sorry to rekindle an old debate, especially one so heated, but it seems to me that we have a somewhat messy situation regarding Lovecraft's texts at the moment. On the one hand we have the old Arkham texts that are still available, although predominately in paperback. These texts introduced textual errors in the form of typos that have snowballed over time. On the other hand we have Joshi's texts which according to Platypus and from what Joshi himself admits are in reality hybrid texts, merging different drafts into what Joshi considers to be a definitive version - or his preferred versions at least. These texts are increasingly taking over as the established texts in the ever increasing number of Lovecraft editions that are available.

EDIT: Out of interest, what approach did Scott Connors and Ronald S. Hilger take with their corrected texts of CAS? Did they take a best version of two or more drafts or did they pick the draft they thought best represented CAS' wishes? Or some middling approach?

Any discussion over pulp versions seem to be a red herring here, because it was not those versions that Derleth published.

Apart from the sterling work that Platypus has posted here showing the changes to ATMOM is there anywhere else on the internet that has published theses changes? I for one cannot afford the Variorum editions that Joshi intends to publish shortly, so I'd be interested to read the work of any other Lovecraftian scholars.

Anyway, thank you all for a fascinating discussion.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 29 Sep 14 | 07:38AM by faunus.