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.)
no subject
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.)