An English major toting a brand-new Bachelor of Arts degree, David E. Schultz stumbled into a numinous career in editing and book design by accepting gainful employment as a proofreader with an engineering firm. The way Schultz tells it, S. T. Joshi, wanted an estimate of page count for his edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature and, recognizing a good potential collaborator when he saw one, S. T. co-opted his talents and energy to aid him in his own efforts in Lovecraft Studies and Weird Fiction. Although he vigorously denies being a horror aficionado, Schultz has never been able to find his way back from the weird genre. Through years of scanning endless documents, converting them to Word, and then selecting type-faces for them, in the guise of freelance amateur book designer, Schultz became learned in the field, through a sort of literary osmosis, and has been able to make significant contributions to the burgeoning study of weird fiction.
In our interview, Schultz provides a tantalizing glimpse into early Lovecraftian scholarship (most notably the coediting with S. T. Joshi of thousands of Lovecraft’s surviving letters); the evolution of book publishing in the computer age; and his own exceptional contributions to Lovecraft scholarship (the highlights of which are his annotated Fungi of Yuggoth [Hippocampus Press, 2017] and his soon-to-be-released annotated edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book). The last I heard, he had written only 84 annotations for a future volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s prose poems and epigrams. Schultz is the guy who looks up all the cryptical words that most non-academic readers skim over, trying to divine their meanings from the context and seldom succeeding; his efforts are much appreciated by those of us who read every footnote and endnote.
From a Lovecraftian standpoint, though, the greatest contribution of David E. Schultz is his collaborative work with S. T. Joshi in preserving 25 volumes of the extant correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft, who is thought to have penned tens of thousands of letters. Not surprisingly, this project has spanned three decades. Lovecraft’s correspondence with friends, colleagues, and revision clients engulfed so much of his time that fans lament the fact that he was not always writing stories. To Lovecraft, though, epistolary conversations with far-flung friends were much more important. His letters provide valuable autobiographical information, commentary on his own writing, a window into his evolving philosophy, his beliefs about life and literature, and an inside look at his relationships with Frank Belknap Long, Sonia H. Greene, R. H. Barlow, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and other contemporary writers. With Joshi, Schultz has published a number of other letters projects; in 2024 what he thinks is the last volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s letters came out.
Currently, Schultz is completing work on an astounding 350-page annotated edition of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, the pocket notebook in which Lovecraft jotted down ideas for writing. Not a scholar by design or inclination, Schultz became one by default, thanks to a consistent immersion in Lovecraftian texts. And, as he will tell you below, most recently he has been drafted into service by the August Derleth Society to preserve that author’s texts. At the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Schultz recently scanned in one day about 600 pages of Derleth’s fiction, including both published and unpublished works, which are slated for publication by the August Derleth Society. He has created a spreadsheet of 850 poems from the magazines in the Historical Society’s archives. We were obliged to put this interview on hold for a time, as David needed to put in precious time at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library Special Collections Department: he is preparing a bibliography of periodicals containing Derleth’s poetry (much of it uncollected) for future volumes of Derleth’s collected works, and the Special Collections department is about to close for a year to upgrade its fire system. Here’s a sample of a typical work week for David E. Schultz:
Just this week I’ve designed 4 books from scratch (>800 pp) and had my fingers in probably a dozen others. A day in Green Bay coming up, probably another in Fond du Lac (actually 2), another in Madison.
He’s hot on the trail of missing Derleth works—possibly thousands of poems among them—and he’s sure to bag them and bring them home eventually.
Now, I have the great privilege of introducing David E. Schultz.
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I’ll begin at the beginning, David, by asking you which details of your life and education you would care to share with our readers.
I’ve lived my entire life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Education: Marquette University, B.A. Liberal Arts—in other words, the dreaded “English major.” I entered the workforce completely unprepared. I married my wife Gail in 1977. We had four children and now have 7 grandchildren. We’ve lived in our current house for 44 years. I retired in 2014, but have been immersed in book projects ever since. I still make time to go to organ or early music concerts in Milwaukee or other not too distant locations.
Please talk about your career in publishing.
After brief stint at a local book publisher, and an even briefer one in a factory for a summer, I got a job at—of all places—an engineering company. The company was part of a consortium for a huge wastewater treatment project, and they were responsible for getting a proofreader for the project office. When I was interviewed, the interviewer said, “I think we have a different job for you. Let me get back to you.” Of course, I expected no further communication, but he did in fact summon me again, and I went to interview at the project office. Got the job because the supervisor of the publications department thought my Latin and Greek background would be useful. (He later admitted, “You know, you had no experience . . .”) And so I became a “technical editor.” I spent 5 years with HNTB, 3 with Creative Marketing Corporation (again, hired on as proofreader, quickly bumped up to editor), and 27 with CH2M HILL—once a fellow member of aforementioned consortium. I’ve been retired nearly 10 years, but it seems I work harder than ever.
The engineering companies were rather like publishers. Print runs were very small—environmental impact statements, technical memorandums on various subjects, and so on, typically photocopied and comb-bound in-house. The subject fields were very broad: transportation, civil engineering, environmental engineering, geology, wastewater treatment, you name it. It was particularly fulfilling because the results of our work can be seen all around us. For example, an aging viaduct carrying traffic over the Menomonee Valley, just 2 blocks from my house, was demolished and redesigned by my company, and I worked on various documents associated with the project.
At first, all the “typesetting” in the office was done by our document processing crew. As computers entered the office, I found I could do much of the formatting and editing myself. By reverse-engineering the company’s well-designed templates, I learned the ins and outs of Word, and in time that knowledge led me to book designing—initially against my will.
By that I mean in 1999, S. T. Joshi asked me how big of a book his annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature might be. Well, it could be anything. I had no idea how to design a book that wasn’t 8½ × 11 inches in format, so I picked page dimensions based on a real book, tried to arrange margins to suit, and then picked typefaces. I was instructed to “keep the number of pages down,” presumably to minimize cost associated with the book. So I showed him how it had turned out—thinking only that the design gave an approximate page count. A skilled designer would then execute the actual and final design. His response was “We’re using this!!” And it promptly went to Hippocampus Press. Now, I thought in terms of appearance the thing was barely okay. What I presented Hippocampus with was hard copy—it had to be scanned and cropped somehow by the printer. Very primitive. In time, Hippocampus began to use print-on-demand publishing for most books because it meant the publisher didn’t have to keep inventory in his apartment. And gradually I learned the preferred means of submitting an electronic file for publishing. And I also learned more efficient ways of executing design. I recently made an electronic file of 461 single-spaced pages into two books set up for a conventional 6 × 9 in just a few hours. I hate to think how long that would have taken me, using basically the same tools, 25 years ago.
Being employed full time didn’t allow much time for my own book projects, but I did manage to publish a few booklets with Necronomicon Press and to coedit some books published by university presses. I’ve been publishing a brief rag in the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association irregularly since 1973. So I’ve been “publishing” for more than 50 years.
Were supernatural and science fiction always your chief interests in reading?
My early reading was eclectic. I’d read anything, if I was capable. I was urged, in eighth grade, to participate in a reading program for eighth graders. We got a box of books to read and discuss: Hiroshima, The Diary of a Young Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Seven Story Mountain, Profiles in Courage, and many others The box also contained 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Of that vast array of genres and styles, the last stirred me the most. I swayed toward science fiction after reading Ray Bradbury, thanks to a flyer received in grade school with books recommended for students. It may have been Fahrenheit 451 that first grabbed me. From there I learned of the Science Fiction Book Club and became immersed in the genre. Favorites became Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, R. A. Lafferty, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick. But I think these days my reading—what little there is—leans toward 19th and 20th century literature: Faulkner, Borges, Melville, Wodehouse, Dorothy Day. Mundane stuff, I suppose.
I think I first learned of Lovecraft when I saw a paperback of his stories at a department store. The Colour out of Space from Lancer, with its ridiculous cover depicting a skull amid flames. It may be—I can’t remember—that I first heard of him when I read Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire,” when in the future, all morbidness in life is gotten rid of. Cemeteries are destroyed, and the works of morbid writers are destroyed. He mentioned Poe, but the other authors he named . . . Lovecraft, Bierce, Derleth, Machen. Well, basically Bradbury was telling me “Go look for these authors’ works!” And so I did. Bierce puzzled me, because the book I found had stories about the civil war and a “devil’s dictionary.” But upon closer examination, there were some outré stories. Many years later, I prepared an annotated “unabridged” edition of The Devil’s Dictionary.
The title story of The Colour out of Space was like nothing I’d ever read before. The copyright page of the book stated that the stories were reprinted with permission of Arkham House, Sauk City, WI. The kindly librarian at my high school looked up the address for me and I promptly requested a catalog. And equally promptly ordered The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, At the Mountains of Madness, and Collected Poems. I can’t remember just how I learned of the various fanzines, such as Nyctalops and Etchings and Odysseys, but in ordering them I saw plenty of advertisements for still other ’zines. I think the most influential was H. P. L. by Meade and Penny Frierson, because it contained discussion of Lovecraft like nothing I’d seen before. Particularly arresting was Richard L. Tierney’s “The Derleth Mythos.” How dare he stand up to August Derleth? But he was right. I gradually came to read more non-Arkham House-sanctioned writing about Lovecraft. And I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Dirk Mosig, Ken Faig, Jr., and R. Alain Everts, who dug far deeper than most others writing about Lovecraft had done.
Speaking as one English major to another, how did you develop into an editor and a conservator of twentieth-century weird literature?
Probably I sought to emulate what I’d seen written about other writers. In college I read books about Faulkner and his work and was struck by the scholarship and deep understanding of his writing. The same goes for other writers. I guess, inspired by Tierney’s article, I thought “Why not Lovecraft?” I was not impressed by the writings of August Derleth, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp on Lovecraft. But I was bowled over by Willis Conover’s Lovecraft at Last. Not particularly great scholarship, but it vividly brought the man to life. I was particularly impressed by the chronological list of stories that Lovecraft supplied to Conover. I compared it to the “chronology” found in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. The latter was no chronology at all. If one looked at it closely, one could see that for any given year (sometimes incorrectly) the stories were all listed in alphabetical order. I doubt any author starts any year writing stories beginning with the letter “A” in the title and ending the year with stories starting with “Z.”
I had joined the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association in 1973, not really understanding what it was—which was an outfit much like the United and National amateur press associations to which Lovecraft himself belonged, but instead focused on him in some way. I began to get in touch with other fans. I went to many MinnCons with the Minneapolis/Duluth crowd, who alerted me to a fan who lived in Milwaukee, and I met R. Alain Everts of Madison, Wisconsin. In time he started a Necronomicon Amateur Press Association—supposedly for “scholarly” contributions. I’ll never know why I was invited to join, because I hadn’t written anything to date and was no scholar, then and now. My contributions to the EOD were very bad “poetry.” Since I needed to come up with something “scholarly” for the Necronomicon apa, the very first piece I wrote was an article about the order in which Lovecraft’s stories were written. At the time, only three volumes of his Selected Letters had been published. But I was able to do a pretty good job of getting the stories into the proper sequence, expanding Lovecraft’s own list to Conover, even if I could not pinpoint precise dates.
At the time, S. T. Joshi had independently approached Dirk W. Mosig on the same subject, and for the same reason I had. Dirk—also a member of the Necronomicon apa—steered S. T. toward me, and that was how our close relationship began.
I’d like you to talk about your edition of Fungi from Yuggoth. When I read the sonnets, I knew that they must be brimming with allusions and symbolism, but I did not have a key. And then I read your book, which greatly enriched the reading experience for me.
Having turned in a paper on the chronology of Lovecraft’s stories, I needed something else “scholarly” to do. So I started looking into Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth—his long poem. I don’t recall the details, but it seems to me I issued several little ’zines treating of the poem, eventually writing an “essay” on its composition, meaning, and so on. Some of those little pieces appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu. I provoked a bit of a controversy by stating—contrary to the long-held description of the poem—that there is no linear story in it. The first three sonnets tell a brief narrative, but all subsequent sonnets are completely independent of each other. Some commentators held that there was a cohesive story. I begged to differ and offered proof for my thesis using Lovecraft’s own words.
I was supposed to come up with a book for the Strange Company, but because it was taking me too long to assemble a proper text, it did not appear there. I poked around at the thing for the next 40 years. Over time, more and more information about the poem came to light, so I was always adding to the book. It finally appeared from Hippocampus Press in 2017. Necronomicon Press once issued a pamphlet of the poem printed on three legal-sized sheets, three poems per page. A 12-page booklet. My book is a ridiculous 288 pages. I am completely undisciplined when it comes to making a book. I fill it with everything under the sun.
Please discuss your edition (forthcoming) of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.
Commonplace Book has similar origins to Fungi from Yuggoth. Strange Company was going to publish an edition of Commonplace Book as edited by Ken Faig., Jr. At one of our gatherings in Madison (known as Madcons), Randy Everts handed out proofs of the book for people to proofread. I didn’t know what to make of the thing. Had never heard of Lovecraft’s commonplace book before. I didn’t proof the book at all, but studied it for my own edification. It was a bare-bones presentation of the text. What looked like errors were in fact accurate transcriptions of Lovecraft’s entries as he wrote them. Not long after, I received a copy of The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces. It contained the commonplace book, but the entries were organized differently and were very lightly annotated—mostly to point out which entries were used by August Derleth as Lovecraft’s “contributions” to various stories Derleth wrote that he called “posthumous collaborations.” I thought Heck, I can find all sorts of connections between the entries and Lovecraft’s work, and so I began writing on that for the Necronomicon apa.
With assistance from S. T. (who was attending Brown at the time), and input from colleagues, I began to fashion a book similar in intent to Fungi from Yuggoth. Necronomicon Press published it in 1987 as two fat booklets. I was astonished in 1990 to see a fellow standing on the Quad at Brown (for the Lovecraft Centennial) holding the two books side-by-side against his chest while a colleague took a photo of him proudly sporting my book. Over time, much more came to light about the origin of some of the entries, and then, with the Internet, books.google.com, and the Brown Digital Repository, I had access to an enormous library to sift through looking for material to add to my annotations. I had earlier dismissed Zinge as something Lovecraft whimsically made up, but I later learned that it is real—at least in the sense that it is mentioned in a poem by Thomas Moore—something Lovecraft had in his own library.
After more than 35 years after publication of my first edition of the book, I have now prepared (probably shouldn’t say finished) a new edition. It is not at this time ready for publication, because I have to integrate into text images of Lovecraft’s notebook—a complicated logistical problem. I’m guessing it will run to about 350 pages when done, because again, applying the kitchen sink method, it contains all sorts of related material not in Lovecraft’s original notebook. Once I circulated through the EOD my early annotation of the book. I also included Lovecraft’s text for reference. Being a stingy person, I didn’t want to pay for a lot of xeroxing, so I typed out his text in small type on two sides, in two columns, of a single sheet of 11 × 17 paper. In effect 4 pages. And so, it, too, has bloated into a gargantuan monstrosity.
What place do you accord H. P. Lovecraft and Weird Fiction in the greater rubric of literature?
Long ago, many kinds of magazines would publish an outré story along with more conventional tales. And publishers would publish a weird novel here and there. It seems to me (though I’m no follower of the book business) that now one needs to publish only in certain markets.
Derleth somewhat disparagingly said Lovecraft was a major writer in a minor field (a somewhat backhanded compliment, since he recognized himself as a minor writer, but in a major field. A better place to be, it would seem). I don’t really have an opinion in the matter. Lovecraft is, of course, now published by the Library of America, whose goal is to keep in print “canonical” American writers. And so he rubs shoulders now with Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edith Wharton, James Thurber, Walt Whitman (Lovecraft would be shocked), Gertrude Stein (ditto), Henry James, and many others. August Derleth does not. I guess that says something.
As with everything else, Sturgeon’s law applies to weird literature. “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” I don’t follow any modern weird writers—I’m just not interested. I haven’t read much other than the masters, and what I have I don’t really remember. I imagine M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen will remain the titans, and there surely are some other worthy of note, such as William Hope Hodgson and Walter de la Mare. Again, I haven’t read them. I couldn’t say who is truly a master in the field, but according to S. T. it probably would be Ramsey Campbell.
What can you tell us about your coediting of Lovecraft’s correspondence?
I can’t remember how it came about exactly, but either S. T. or I, c. 1990, came up with the idea for a Lovecraft festschrift. It wasn’t such a book technically, since its subject was long deceased, but the idea of a book commemorating him 100 years after his birth seemed like a good idea. S. T. had plenty of contacts from whom to solicit essays. At the time, I had typed Lovecraft’s letters to Henry Kuttner. They were at the Wisconsin Historical Society of all places. So we annotated them, but ultimately decided they really didn’t belong in the book, and instead we offered our text to Necronomicon Press, which issued them in a small booklet. That was the genesis of the letters project, although at the time we didn’t know it.
S. T. had worked up a prospectus for 13 volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, revision work, essays, and travelogues. I’m sure he said several times “No letters! Too much!” I learned that one could obtain a copy of the microfilm at the Historical Society of Lovecraft’s letters to August Derleth. I ordered it, but then what? S. T. had access to a microfilm printer, and so he printed the entire film—1000+ pages, in triplicate. I used the letters for my own research purposes, but following the Lovecraft Centennial Conference, I felt energized by the whole thing, so on the q.t., I began to transcribe the letters, saying nothing about it. The letters posed some issues. First of all, bad copies, or difficult to read handwriting. Then, most of the letters were not dated, because Lovecraft and Derleth wrote very frequently. Lovecraft’s letters may have said something on the order of “Thursday” and nothing more. So I had to try to determine the sequence of the letters. When I informed S. T. I had typed it all, he was thunderstruck.
Then the possibility of publishing Lovecraft’s letters took off. First we typed all the mss. we could find, preferring them to published (and edited) letters. S. T. typed letters to Donald Wandrei, R. H. Barlow, Duane W. Rimal, and Lovecraft’s aunts. I typed letters to Clark Ashton Smith, Wilfred Blanche Talman, Elizabeth Toldridge, F. Lee Baldwin, and J. Vernon Shea. Then, we were fortunate to be able to borrow a set of the Arkham House transcripts—those held by Derleth at his home. For example, there were a few letters by Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith at Brown University, but others were scattered all around. We merged the Arkham House transcripts among letters from manuscript, but still lacked many. In time, we obtained copies of the photocopies held by Roy A. Squires who had sold the letters, and other letter caches as they appeared: Hyman Bradofsky, Helm C. Spink, Arthur Harris, Frederic J. Pabody, Emil Petaja, and others.
We had issued a few small sets with Necronomicon Press, which always issued booklets in its customary squarish format, but the books we now could compile were far bigger than the press’s capacity. University presses were not interested. Once Hippocampus Press was founded in 1999, we had a sympathetic publisher who could issue big books. And so, in the twenty-first century, we began to publish books first typed in the 1990s.
Again, my models for such books were books compiled by others, such as The Letters of Jack London (Stanford University Press). The Lovecraft letters posed great problems for me, in that much of the material he discusses is not readily available. I was fortunate that the University of Wisconsin–Madison accepted the Fossil Library of amateur journalism, so that I could make short trips every so often to consult the many amateur journals in its collection.
These days, I tend to see Lovecraft more as a lifelong amateur journalist than a writer of spooky stories. His letters show that he thought of himself that way too.
Please share your experiences salvaging, restoring, republishing (or, initially publishing) the works of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (your current project). You’ve saved many of these from being lost to time.
Oh, I don’t know I’ve “saved” anything. The writers stand on their own merits, and their work has long been available. The business of Lovecraft being “saved from oblivion” by August Derleth seems ludicrous to me. If he hadn’t done the work, someone else would have. On the other hand, Sauk City’s pride and joy seems largely to be unknown—when he’s not riding Lovecraft’s coat-tails. His “regional” writings seem to have sold well enough in his time, but the man on the street is more likely by a thousandfold to recognize the name Lovecraft over Derleth—even in Wisconsin. The August Derleth Society is keen on getting his regional writing back into print, and so S. T. (its Veep) has been reissuing his novels, and also quite a bit of uncollected and unpublished material. Much of the latter is available at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and because Madison is a mere 79 miles due west of Milwaukee, I can make trips there to obtain material quite easily. (S. T. would have to travel 1900 miles to do the work himself.) The books are all print-on-demand, with virtually no advertising, so whether people are noticing them at all is questionable. So far ADS has issued 9 titles. There are at least another 13 on my list, but there could be more. ADS won’t do juvenile books, horror, detective, and the like.
I’ve been roped into designing books for the August Derleth Society—books by, of course, August Derleth. Not my favorite author. Because I’m not far from the repository of his papers, I can go there from time to time unearthing uncollected and unpublished writings for various projects. My “research” is somewhat superficial. Merely compiling stuff for others to organize. I had another project I’d long wanted to do, but because it takes me so long to get anything like that done, amid dozens of other books, I have been scooped by another writer. We’ll see.
I have to admit, though, that I really enjoyed and take great pride in The Song of the Sun, by Leah Bodine Drake. I think it is generally overlooked, as I hear very little response to the appearance of the book. Now, her papers at the University of Lexington are available to anyone for consultation. I learned that August Derleth wanted to issue another book of her poetry after her death, but could not himself travel there to consult her notebooks. When I arrived there I was shown a big scanner that was able to flatten out the tight scrapbooks and pull all the text. I scanned all 24 of them in a day, along with other papers of hers. Beyond that, I had to dig in periodicals for appearances of her work. I was fortunate to get assistance from others in tracking them down. No one had ever written a comprehensive bibliography of her work, and much of her poetry was unpublished, or published in obscure little magazines. By careful analysis of the little material available about her, I was able to write a biographical sketch about her. The book is yet another example of the “kitchen sink” method, because it has all her poems that I could find, letters, short stories, essays, reviews, notes—everything. And yet it is unknown, and the disproven myth about publication of her Hornbook for Witches still prevails in the world at large. But I enjoyed doing it.
Same with Eyes of the God [by R. H. Barlow] and Out of the Immortal Night [by Samuel Loveman]. Somehow I got ensnared in them when the books were largely compiled and edited by two others. But for the second editions, I had access to resources that were out of reach when the first editions were prepared. Those were fun to do.
What other projects are keeping you busy these days?
As designer for Hippocampus and Sarnath Press (S. T. Joshi’s micro-press), I do nearly all the book designs. That runs to perhaps forty books a year. The editing of Lovecraft’s letters ended in 2024, with his correspondence with Frank Belknap Long. Same with Clark Ashton Smith’s (far less voluminous) correspondence with his Miscellaneous Letters. S. T. is eager to take on still more letters projects, although letters in a market for weird writings seems like a stretch. Lovecraft and Smith correspondence may sell. But letters to R. H. Barlow? To H. P. Lovecraft? Well, maybe. The letters to Barlow are quite fascinating, very broad in scope, and they shed considerable light on the man, even if the words are not his. I look at most of our projects as building individual research libraries for others to use—and the books do get used from time to time. Midnight Rambles and Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein cite the Lovecraft letters a lot, and it’s gratifying to see that people can stitch together information from those books to make interesting and insightful narratives about Lovecraft.
Ambrose Bierce’s collected journalism—all assembled and designed a year ago—continues to emerge, one volume a month. Fifteen more books remain to be published. Believe it or not, I’ve compiled a fairly large book of the poetry of Winifred Virginia Jackson, amateur journalist and colleague (and lover?) of Lovecraft.
Do tell, what evidence do we have of a possible love affair between H. P. and Winifred Jackson?
I myself don’t have evidence re Jackson. George Wetzel and R. Alain Everts wrote a monograph on her in which that is mentioned. I believe the source of the anecdote is in Sonia Greene’s memoir, in which she says she “stole” Lovecraft away from Jackson. Now, Jackson and Lovecraft may not have been a thing—or even a potential thing. Maybe Sonia was just trying to head off Jackson at the pass.
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I wish to thank David E. Schultz for a most informative conversation. First, through his painstaking overview of the myriad technical and intellectual processes necessary to the physical production of books, he provides a privileged look at the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of publishing. Secondly, and of greater moment, though, are his personal contributions to a broader discourse regarding a philosophy of literature; for, his editorial exertions safeguard the vulnerable texts of worthy writers. Typically, authors hope their works will outlive them — and yet human memory is very short and very fickle; as an example, consider that fashions in literature must change rapidly in a consumer society in which books are a commodity and yesteryear’s writers are relegated to discard bins. Thirdly, while most authors, trusting foolishly in the protection of copyright, have absolutely no idea how much and how often their works will be adulterated once they have sent them into the world, published texts are, in fact, corrupted appallingly often. Finally, today, as so often in dark eras past (the student of history may find cases in every corner of the globe and in every aeon), there are nefarious individuals hard at work, intent upon erasing the ideas of those writers who lived before and who thought differently than they do. Simply by letting authors’ works stand unmolested, we help fight that societal evil.
Schultz’s honorable efforts have helped to preserve the integrity of texts, presenting them to the world as the authors meant the world to see them; and his herculean footnote-endeavors permit the ideas of these writers to be accessible to readers of later generations. David E. Schultz’s deeds in the conservation of manuscripts and letters provide the literary world with an arsenal of invaluable tools that may be used for the defense of literature as an art form, the defense of intellectual property, and the defense of free, individual expression in a modern climate in which both art and thought are threatened with extinction.
Katherine Kerestman is the author of Lethal(Psychotoxin Press, 2023), Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020), and Haunted House and Other Strange Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2024). She is the Editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat (WordCrafts Press, 2023), Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays (WordCrafts Press, 2024), and Witches and Witchcraft (Hippocampus Press, 2025). She is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks; and her name is etched among the inscrutable glyphs of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Dracula Society. Interested parties may stalk her at www.creepycatlair.com
Copyright 2025 Katherine Kerestman
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 