FROM THE ORIGINAL LORE ARCHIVES
The beginning of Robert M. Price’s MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS series. This recovered 2011 LORE feature introduced a simple but valuable idea: bring hard-to-find Lovecraftian criticism and genre writing back before readers who may never have encountered the original magazines, convention publications, or specialist venues.
Author: Robert M. Price • Original publication: July 8, 2011 • Series: MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS
MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS vol. 01 is more than the first installment of a recurring LORE feature. Read today, it also functions as a statement of purpose for a kind of literary archaeology that has become even more important with the disappearance of magazines, convention papers and early websites.
Robert M. Price used the series to return older material to circulation. Some pieces came from Crypt of Cthulhu; others had appeared in specialist venues that even committed readers of H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos might easily have missed. Volume 01 began with three short pieces originally associated with the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival’s newspaper-format convention program, The Daily Lurker.
WHY THIS PAGE MATTERS
The surviving page preserves Price’s own explanation of what Moldy Manuscripts was meant to do. That makes it the natural starting point for restoring the later volumes and the individual essays that LORE originally linked beneath them.
Robert M. Price Introduces MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS
ORIGINAL 2011 TEXT
Welcome to a brand new feature, probably as close as we’re ever going to come to reviving my old mag Crypt of Cthulhu. In this barnacle clinging to the electronic hull of LORE, I want to round up various articles I’m willing to bet few of today’s Cthulhu Mythos buffs have seen before. Some will be articles from 80s and 90s issues of Crypt which I’m sure will be new to the huge new generation of Lovecraft fans. Others appeared more recently but in specialized venues that probably escaped most readers’ notice. This time I want to offer a handful of my own brief pieces written for The Daily Lurker, the newspaper-format convention program of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
That short introduction tells us almost everything we need to understand the series. Price was not presenting the material as newly written scholarship. He was deliberately recovering work that had become difficult to encounter and placing it in front of a newer Lovecraft audience.
The Three Features Collected in Volume 01
The original LORE page linked directly to three separate features. Their sequence is preserved in the old Joomla structure as Features #60, #61 and #62.
FEATURE #60
H.P. Lovecraft in the Screaming Room
One of Price’s short pieces written for The Daily Lurker and recovered by LORE as part of the first volume.
FEATURE #61
Review of “The Mist” by Stephen King
A film-related piece connecting Price’s Lovecraftian interests with Stephen King’s modern horror tradition.
FEATURE #62
The Picture of Dorian Grey
The third surviving child feature in the original Volume 01 cluster.
From Crypt of Cthulhu to the Early Web
Price’s reference to Crypt of Cthulhu gives the feature a deeper historical context. Specialist magazines and fanzines were essential to Lovecraft studies long before searchable digital archives made obscure criticism easier to locate. Material could circulate intensely among dedicated readers and still remain practically invisible to a later generation.
Moldy Manuscripts was an attempt to bridge that gap. The joke in the title suggested dusty pages and forgotten files, but the editorial purpose was preservation: retrieve worthwhile material from older publications and give it a new life online.
AN ARCHIVE INSIDE AN ARCHIVE
There is an unusual circularity to recovering this page today. In 2011, LORE was preserving material that had already become difficult to find. The LORE page itself later disappeared from the live web and now has to be recovered in turn.
The Daily Lurker and Lovecraft on Film
Volume 01 also shows that LORE’s interests were never confined to Lovecraft’s prose alone. Price specifically selected pieces written for The Daily Lurker, the convention program of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival. The three linked articles therefore sit at the meeting point of literary Lovecraft studies, horror cinema and fan culture.
That combination would continue throughout Moldy Manuscripts. Later installments moved from Poe and Roger Corman to subjects including Conan, Hostel and Godzilla. The series treated weird and horror culture as a connected field rather than a collection of isolated niches.
The Beginning of a LORE Series
The archive now confirms at least three installments of Robert M. Price’s series. Volume 01 established the format; Volume 02 turned strongly toward Edgar Allan Poe and his influence on Lovecraft; Volume 03 opened another group of older reviews and essays.
THE RECOVERED SERIES
Vol. 01 — The Daily Lurker / Lovecraft Film Festival pieces
Vol. 02 — Poe, Lovecraft, Donald R. Burleson and Roger Corman
Vol. 03 — Hostel, Conan and Godzilla
Restoring the parent pages and their individual child features gives the modern LORE archive something more valuable than isolated recovered articles: it recreates the editorial relationships between them.
Original LORE Feature Sequence
#58 — Robert M. Price’s MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS vol. 01
#60 — H.P. Lovecraft in the Screaming Room
#61 — Review of “The Mist” by Stephen King
#62 — The Picture of Dorian Grey
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LORE Archive Record
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION RECORD
Original title:
Robert M. Price’s MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS vol. 01
Author:
Robert M. Price
Originally published:
July 8, 2011
Historical URL:
/index.php/features/58-robert-m-prices-moldy-manuscripts
Recovery status: Restored from the surviving historical LORE Online archive. Robert M. Price’s original introduction has been preserved, while modern editorial context and navigation have been added around it.
Part of the LORE Online Recovery Project — restoring criticism, interviews, reviews and weird-fiction history from earlier incarnations of LORE.