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Read Every H.P. Lovecraft book for free!

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Scandanavian War Machine:
I got a couple different collections but they are all pretty terribly bound with really cheap materials

i wouldn't recommend them

Damnable Fiend:
I have a trade paperback called Tales of Lovecraft.  it's not a complete collection of his writing, but it includes everything that I'd consider essential, and it comes with a decent introduction.

MusicScribbles:

--- Quote from: Buttfranklin on 14 Dec 2010, 10:00 ---I picked up his entire one-volume complete works for 14 bucks.  His works, although alarmingly racist, are way better suited to reading curled up in the dark with just a night light than looking at a glowing computer screen, I think.

--- End quote ---

You might find it interesting then that Lovecraft was that kind of racist that had him absolutely terrified rather than feeling entitled. He was fearful of leaving his own home often because of this.

KharBevNor:
Yeah. Lovecraft never managed to get over his racist opinions basically because they were completely irrational, and, like a lot about his personality, had a lot to do with being withdrawn from school when he was 8 and then spending pretty much all his time for the next 10-15 years at home with his mum reading. On every other issue, Lovecraft had become, by the end of his life, rather progressive. Did you know he described himself as a socialist and a New Deal Democrat? It's all in the old boys letters, which are awesome. He wrote (it's been estimated) enough letters to fill a hundred volumes, and they've only just begun to be published. Here's a brilliant section Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi quotes in an excellent article about him, rebuking Frank Long for equating science and technology:

"Listen, young man. Forget all about your books & machine-made current associations. Kick the present dying parody on civilisation out the back door of consciousness. Shelve the popular second-hand dishings-up of Marxian economic determinism – a genuine force within certain limits, but without the widest ramifications ascribed to it by the fashionable New Republic & Nation  clique. For once in your life, live up to your non-contemporary ideal & do some thinking without the 1930-31 publishers' sausage-grist at your elbow! Get back to the Ionian coast, shovel away some 2500 years, & tell Grandpa who it is you find in a villa at Miletus studying the properties of loadstone & amber, predicting eclipses, explaining the moon's phases, & applying to physics & astronomy the principles of research he learned in Egypt. Thales – quite a boy in his day. Ever hear of him before? He wanted to know things. Odd taste, wasn't it? And to think, he never tried to manufacture rayon or form a joint-stock company or pipe oil from Mesopotamia or extract gold from sea-water! Funny old guy – wanted to know things, yet never thought of a collectivist state....leaving this last for the unctuous windbag Plato, upon whom the moustacheletted little Chestertons of a later aera were to dote. Bless me, but do you suppose he actually had the normal human instinct of curiosity  & simply wanted knowledge to satisfy that elemental urge? Perish such an un-modern & un-Marxian thought.....yet one has dim suspicions........ And then this bozo Pythagoras. What did he want to bother with that old "what is anything" question for? And Heraclitus & Anaxagoras & Anaximander & Democritus & Leucippus & Empedocles? Well – if you take the word of your precious old satyr-faced pragmatist Socrates, these ginks merely wanted to know things for the sake of knowing! According to this beloved super-Babbitt of yours, who brought down philosophy from the clouds to serve among men – serve useful ends in a civically acceptable fashion – the old naturalists & sophists were a sorry lot. Your dear Plato agreed. They were not social-minded or collectivistic. Tut, tut – they were actually selfish individualists who gratified the personal human instinct of cosmic curiosity for its own sake. Ugh! take them away! Moustacheletted young Platonists want nothing to do with such outlawed & unregimented pleasure-seekers. They simply couldn't have been real "scientists", since they didn't serve big business or have altruistic or bolshevistic motivations. Practically & Marxianly speaking, there simply weren't any such people. How could there be? "Science" is (they print it in books) the servant of the machine age. Since ancient Ionia had no machine age, how could there be "Science"? (SL 3.298-99)"


Seeing HP Lovecraft call Plato an 'unctuous windbag' is absolutely priceless. His letters pretty much go on in this fashion constantly btw. if he lived nowadays he'd be a legendary boarder/blogger.

MusicScribbles:
Khar, this is exactly why I have the Penguin collections of his books. S.T. Joshi's annotations are fantastic. Although, I'm totally on board any way of getting Lovecraft out there for free on the interwebs.

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