Sign in with Facebook
Emily Wynne's Reviews > Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales
by
by
It seriously took a publisher how much of a century to title a collection of Lovecraft's stories "Necronomicon"? Like seventy years? Did it really just not occur to anyone? Shouldn't the first collected volume of his stories have been called that? I blame August Derleth.
Speaking of whom, I don't believe this edition features the re-edited versions of the texts available in the Library of America edition of Lovecraft. Necronomicon includes the older editions as published by Derleth's Arkham House, featuring Derleth's... let's call them "bold typographical choices", including italicizing the second half of the final sentence in many stories to heighten tension and irritate me.
Oh also! There's a rather nice map of Arkham, Massachusetts printed on the front and back endpapers. Admittedly it's very similar to the map accompanying the Arkham entry in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, but never mind that. Endpaper maps! Whooooo. At least it's rather better than Necronomicon's other illustrations, which are for some reason the same three pictures of a shifty-lookin' guy, a pile of old books and papers, and a megalith, repeated fairly randomly at the first and last pages of many stories. Why not? Also it's bound really poorly, basically a paperbound book with hard boards, but this is true of virtually all hardcover editions published these days, which is lamentable but hardly unique to this book.
I sound like I'm being pretty hard on Necronomicon, but I was totally pleased with it. I like having a single-volume hardcover edition of most of Lovecraft's stories with the single most appropriate title possible. Not all stories are included--notable omissions include "Nyarlathotep" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"--but it includes most important works, such as "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", and so on. That's really all I ask of a Necronomicon.
Also the italics are kinda like eldritch alien text, yeah? Sure.
*Edit* - Ok, looking back, there are more than just those three repeating illustrations.
There are also pictures of some houses.
Speaking of whom, I don't believe this edition features the re-edited versions of the texts available in the Library of America edition of Lovecraft. Necronomicon includes the older editions as published by Derleth's Arkham House, featuring Derleth's... let's call them "bold typographical choices", including italicizing the second half of the final sentence in many stories to heighten tension and irritate me.
Oh also! There's a rather nice map of Arkham, Massachusetts printed on the front and back endpapers. Admittedly it's very similar to the map accompanying the Arkham entry in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, but never mind that. Endpaper maps! Whooooo. At least it's rather better than Necronomicon's other illustrations, which are for some reason the same three pictures of a shifty-lookin' guy, a pile of old books and papers, and a megalith, repeated fairly randomly at the first and last pages of many stories. Why not? Also it's bound really poorly, basically a paperbound book with hard boards, but this is true of virtually all hardcover editions published these days, which is lamentable but hardly unique to this book.
I sound like I'm being pretty hard on Necronomicon, but I was totally pleased with it. I like having a single-volume hardcover edition of most of Lovecraft's stories with the single most appropriate title possible. Not all stories are included--notable omissions include "Nyarlathotep" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"--but it includes most important works, such as "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", and so on. That's really all I ask of a Necronomicon.
Also the italics are kinda like eldritch alien text, yeah? Sure.
*Edit* - Ok, looking back, there are more than just those three repeating illustrations.
There are also pictures of some houses.
Sign into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of your friends have read
Necronomicon.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
July 26, 2008
– Shelved
