Monday, October 24, 2022

Lovecraft in the UK: 90 years ago today

On Monday, 24 October 1932, an H.P. Lovecraft story, "The Music of Erich Zann," received wide circulation in England as no. 91 of a series "Great Short Stories" published in the newspaper The Evening Standard. Interestingly, it is illustrated by "Mendoza"--Philip Mendoza (1898-1973), who has a nice write-up here, and another here.

The illustration I reproduce next, and below it, the full pages of the story itself.  (I didn't compare the text to the original versions, in The National Amateur, March 1922 and Weird Tales, May 1925, to see whether it has been edited or not.) Clicking on the scans will make them larger.






3 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing!

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  2. Having compared the two versions, the only editing seems to be by way of altered punctuation (mainly commas instead of semi-colons) at times, insertion of paragraph breaks, and changes to "British English" spellings ("theatres" instead of "theaters", etc).

    There is one instance of a serious editorial blunder, though - it is in the seventh paragraph of the Evening Standard version, in which a sentence which in the original printing read:

    “The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man's acquaintance.”

    becomes the following:

    "“The longer I listened the more I was fascinated, until after acquaintance.”

    which makes no sense at all in the context of the story (the narrator's fascination with Zann's music certainly does not come to an end following his making Zann's "acquaintance" - quite the opposite, in fact) and must have thoroughly confused the poor benighted readers of the Standard.

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    Replies
    1. Every time a text is reset, things like this happen. I'm surprised you found only one egregious error. Thanks for reporting in.

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