I’m going to have to quibble with Ellen E. Jones. Since a demand was apparent, and Lovecraft had made his casualness about intellectual property clear—Cthulhu was a game others were welcome to play—there are a lot of ostensive Necronomicons out there, purporting to be genuine occult texts. (And never mind that Lovecraft was a staunch rational materialist who always stressed that he’d made this stuff up.)
One, I’m told, consisted of repetitions of twenty pages or so of pure gibberish (Owlswick Press, 1973); the version I’m most familiar with was first published in 1975 on the centennial of Aleister Crowley’s birthday, being a fusion of Crowley’s occult practices and Sumerian mythology sprinkled with Lovecraftian references.
(I’ve heard shuddersome urban legends of an edition of the latter bound in human skin; I can vouch for the existence circa 1980 of a big fancy leather-bound coffee-table version that used to be among the “stuff” at the north branch of Waterbeds and Stuff, a head shop in the Short North High Street drag of Columbus, Ohio.)
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Date: 2023-09-25 02:41 am (UTC)One, I’m told, consisted of repetitions of twenty pages or so of pure gibberish (Owlswick Press, 1973); the version I’m most familiar with was first published in 1975 on the centennial of Aleister Crowley’s birthday, being a fusion of Crowley’s occult practices and Sumerian mythology sprinkled with Lovecraftian references.
(I’ve heard shuddersome urban legends of an edition of the latter bound in human skin; I can vouch for the existence circa 1980 of a big fancy leather-bound coffee-table version that used to be among the “stuff” at the north branch of Waterbeds and Stuff, a head shop in the Short North High Street drag of Columbus, Ohio.)