A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft (First Standard Edition)

LOVECRAFT, H. P. (ed. Jerad Walters; preface Stuart Gordon; intro. Harlan Ellison; afterword Thomas Ligotti; artists H.R. Giger, Michael Whelan, Lee Brown Coye, Virgil Finlay, Gahan Wilson, John Coulthart, Ian Miller, Bob Eggleton, Mike Mignola, J.K. Potter, John Jude Palencar, and others). A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Lakewood, Colorado: Centipede Press, 2008.

Large Folio (30.5 × 39 cm). Full black cloth. Cover decorated with tentacle pattern in blind; gilt titling to cover and spine. Pictorial dustjacket. Black cloth slipcase. Two silk ribbon markers (black and yellow). 400 pp. Colour and black and white illustrations throughout; numerous multi-page fold-outs, including Michael Whelan's Lovecraft Diptych, here approximately four feet wide. Profusely illustrated with over forty artists' work spanning eight decades of Lovecraftian art. Over 20,000 words of original essays. Standard slipcase edition. Published October 2008.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, published almost exclusively in pulp magazines, never achieved commercial success during his lifetime, and died at forty-six in poverty. His reputation has been assembled entirely posthumously. He is now regarded as the most influential writer of weird fiction of the twentieth century — the architect of a mythology of cosmic horror whose central proposition is that the universe is incomprehensibly vast, utterly indifferent to humanity, and inhabited by entities so far beyond human comprehension that any encounter with them produces madness rather than knowledge. The Cthulhu Mythos — the loose constellation of ancient beings, forbidden books, and doomed New England communities that recurs across his fiction — has exerted an influence on horror literature, film, visual art, and popular culture that no one in 1937 could have imagined.

The Lovecraft Retrospective draws on the full range of artistic responses to Lovecraft's work over the previous eight decades — from the original pulp illustrations of Weird Tales through the paperback cover art of the 1960s and 1970s, fanzines, film production design, sculpture, and private commissions — presenting the accumulated visual imagination that Lovecraft's fiction has generated across a century of continuous creative response. The artists assembled here represent the full spectrum of that tradition: Virgil Finlay and Lee Brown Coye from the golden age of pulp illustration; H.R. Giger, whose biomechanical imagery connects the cosmic horror tradition to the mainstream of late twentieth-century visual culture; Ian Miller, John Coulthart, and J.K. Potter, whose intensely detailed graphic work has defined contemporary Lovecraftian illustration; Michael Whelan, Bob Eggleton, and John Jude Palencar from the world of science fiction and fantasy painting; Mike Mignola, whose Hellboy universe owes a clear debt to Lovecraft's mythology; and Gahan Wilson, whose cartoonish yet deeply unsettling approach to the material is entirely its own. For most of the art, Walters worked from either originals or first-generation transparencies, so most of the work is displayed with a brilliance that has never been seen in reproduction before.

The framing essays are provided by three figures of exceptional authority. Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) — the most award-winning author of speculative fiction in the history of the field — contributed the introduction. Stuart Gordon (1947–2020), the director of Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), who did more than any other filmmaker to bring Lovecraft's work to the screen, wrote the preface. Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953), the American horror author widely regarded as the most significant writer in the Lovecraftian tradition since Lovecraft himself, provided the afterword.

Centipede Press was founded by Jerad Walters in Lakewood, Colorado, initially as Cocytus Press in 2001 and renamed in 2004. It has established itself as the foremost specialty publisher of fine limited editions in the horror, science fiction, and weird fiction genres, with a particular emphasis on the Lovecraft tradition.

Fine. A beautifully preserved copy, free from imperfections. Slipcase shows some shelf markings.

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Catalogue Number: HH000627