Spirit of Revision, The - Lovecraft's Letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop

In 2014 a collection of letters from H.P. Lovecraft to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop was discovered in an old trunk in a basement. Mrs. Bishop was an aspiring young writer who became of a client of Lovecraft, making use of his service of revising and improving other author's stories to help them get published. In this collection of never before seen letters, we see how Lovecraft ran his business and how he mentored an aspiring writer. Lovecraft and Mrs. Bishop went on to collaborate on the stories "The Curse of Yig", "The Mound" and "Medusa's Coil".

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has carefully scanned and transcribed the original manuscripts which date from 1927 to 1936. The thirty-six new letters to Mrs. Bishop are presented in sequence with eighteen previously known letters to create the most thorough picture of the correspondence between Lovecraft and Bishop possible. The collection is extensively annotated by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman and includes pictures of reference documents which Lovecraft recommended to his clients, newspaper clippings about topics he describes, facsimiles of some letters, a cartoon by Lovecraft and much more. The Spirit of Revision features an introduction by pre-eminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, and offers a fascinating glimpse of Lovecraft as teacher, correspondent and collaborator.