The love of ruins letters on Lovecraft - Shershow, Scott Cutler 1953-; Michaelsen, Scott 1959- (State University of New York Press, 2017)
"H. P. Lovecraft's daily life revolved around correspondence. He is estimated to have written 100,000 letters in his relatively short lifetime, and 20,000 of these letters survive. . . . The following is a sequence of thirty-four letters about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, each one written from Scott to Scott, who have been writing letters to each other for more than thirty years. . . . It should be noted that the texts that follow both are and are not "real" letters. On the one hand, all of them originated as actual missives composed by one of us and sent to the other over the course of almost exactly one year; and some of them retain traces of the specific occasions in which they were thus written and sent. On the other hand, all of these letters have also been revised, rethought, reordered, by both of us, working at times on the other's work, to the point that these texts are necessarily unmoored from their literal points of origin. Many of the letters have footnotes ... some written by that letter's author and some by the other Scott. Thus this book is explicitly about questions of dialogue and voice: how many voices are there in a dialogue between some Scotts? The answer, no doubt, is that there are always less than and more than two. . . . This first in this series of letters was written on 1 August 2014, the 180th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, and the 178th anniversary of Charles Darwin's arrival in Bahia, Brazil, fresh from his voyage on the HMS Beagle. The final letter was written on July 15, 2015, the same date as the dedication of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in 484 BCE. Lovecraft had a special fondness for the story of these cultic twins, whose temple remains today in ruins." ... Preface. - Includes bibliographical references and index