#pseudobiblion

[andreabonazzi]

Dei Culti Oscuri, by Giovanni Gabello. In octavo, Genova, 1791. My Lovecraftian grimoire made in 1991 with Amiga and dot matrix printer. Free PDF download from my blog https://in-tenebris-scriptus.blogspot.com/2014/08/dei-culti-oscuri-1791.html (and, if you like, a small PayPal donation if you enjoyed it).

[cinematic-literature]

Color Out of Space (2019) by Richard Stanley

Book title: Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft

[weirdletter]

The Nightside Codex, edited by Justin A. Burnett, Silent Motorist Media, 2020. Cover art by Matthew Revert, info: silentmotorist.media.

There’s something fascinating about a book that was never written. It resists, for one, all the imperfections that inherently arise in language, all those insufficiently rendered thoughts and images that famously leave writers exasperated with their own work. Exasperated enough to inspire some, like Kafka, to advocate the wholesale burning of their oeuvre. Sometimes it’s worse. Imagine how many books out there never made it to print thanks to the gap between direct experience and these tiny scratches of ink we’re expected to render it by. A damned shame. One of the benefits of avoiding this insufficiency is that an unwritten book achieves exactly what it’s supposed to. Robert W. Chambers’ two-act play, “The King in Yellow,” drives its reader to madness. There’s no question of its power to do so. What horror writer wouldn’t want a taste of that? Luckily, the actual text is never allowed to interfere with Chambers’ unwritten masterpiece. That’s what makes it so fascinating—the burden of creation is thrown back into our own imaginations, letting us fill in the gaps with our own hidden madness. Barring the invention of some kind of live neuron mapping tech in the world of entertainment (you laugh, but just wait), nothing comes closer to a truly individualized media experience. No wonder writers as diverse and inventive as H.P. Lovecraft, Stanislaw Lem, and Jorge Luis Borges, to name a few better-known examples, are drawn to the unwritten manuscript. But that’s not entirely what this book is about. You’ll find more here than just the (un)written word in the classic sense—there’s musical scores, ancient glyphs, an autograph, and even an eBook. Worse, each extracts a terrible price from its reader. With the exception of Richard Thomas’ “In His House,” these stories aren’t additions to the lore of unwritten staples of horror and weird fiction. They are wholly fabricated media artifacts of each writer’s imagination, horrific in their nonexistence, dark heirs to the great and unreal Sutter Cane. We hope your imagination is a secure place since it’s there where the conjurations are soon to begin. We bid you luck on your descent into The Nightside Codex.

Contents: Editor’s Introduction – Justin A. Burnett The Book of Black Dreams – K.A. Opperman In His House – Richard Thomas I Cannot Remember – Brian Evenson Les Belles Infideles – Nadia Bulkin Pulpit Fiction – Jessica McHugh The Past is a Foreign Count – Alistair Rey Schattenlenker’s Hidden Treasure – Michael Fassbender Monster of the Mind – Scott J. Couturier The Red King – Selene de Packh The Redneck Library – S.E. Casey Tongue Tied – Devora Gray As I Sit to Write This Story – Philip Fracassi My Eyes are Closed to Your Light – Luciano Marano For Bobby – Christine Morgan Ouroboros – Sarah Walker Rhys Hughes – Between the Circles Vanity – Austin James The Hero of Flight 247 – Stephen Graham Jones

[weirdletter]

Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, by Thibaut de Castries, edited by Raymond Stantz, with an introduction by Egon Spengler, April Foolday Publishing, 2020. Cover design by Peter Venkman, info: academia.com.

“The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours.”— So wrote the eccentric Thibaut de Castries in the first, and until now only edition of his controversial essay Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, privately published in 1890. “At any particular time of history there have always been one or two cities of the monstrous sort—viz., Babel or Babylon, Ur-Lhassa, Nineveh, Syracuse, Rome, Samarkand, Tenochtitlan, Peking—but we live in the Megapolitan (or Necropolitan) Age, when such disastrous blights are manifold and threaten to conjoin and enshroud the world with funebral yet multipotent city-stuff. We need a Black Pythagoras to spy out the evil lay of our monstrous cities and their foul shrieking songs, even as the White Pythagoras spied out the lay of the heavenly spheres and their crystalline symphonies, two and a half millennia ago. [...] Since we modern city-men already dwell in tombs, inured after a fashion to mortality, the possibility arises of the indefinite prolongation of this life-in-death. Yet, although quite practicable, it would be a most morbid and dejected existence, without vitality or even thought, but only paramentation, our chief companions paramental entities of azoic origin more vicious than spiders or weasels. [...] The electro-mephitic city-stuff whereof I speak has potencies for achieving vast effects at distant times and localities, even in the far future and on other orbs, but of the manipulations required for the production and control of such I do not intend to discourse in these pages.” April Foolday Publishing brings back in print de Castries pioneering study on Neo-Pythagorean metageometry, in a brad new edition of Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities edited and annotated by Dr. Raymond Stantz, with an extensive introduction by Dr. Egon Spengler, in loving memory of the late Professor Fritz Leiber.

[mykingdommusic]

PSEUDOBIBLION unveil the cover of their debut "Index I"

A compendium of old-school Death Metal and early '90s Doom Metal, inspired by XIX and XX century gothic and horror literature. This is what "Index I", PSEUDOBIBLION's debut album, aims to be. Today we reveal the album cover and full tracklist: 1. The Upper Berth 2. The Oval Portrait 3. Memory 4. Green Tea 5. The Judge's House 6. Markheim 7. Oh, Whistle, And I Will Come To You, My Lad

The album will be released on July 3rd via Club Inferno Ent., distributed by My Kingdom Music, and it is available for pre-order on CD at the following link https://t.ly/hD9Ps

Featuring members of NIHILI LOCUS, DVM SPIRO and MANHUNT, PSEUDOBIBLION's "Index I" wants to honor the inspiration that gothic and horror novels gave to the project's protagonists, and the spirit of '90s music, paying homage to bands like Grotesque, Nihilist, early Dark Tranquillity, early Death, Sodom and Autopsy, while leaving room for the melodic elements necessary to evoke the ghosts of the past. Each track becomes an intense and decadent listening experience, celebrating and evoking the precursors of Gothic and underground tradition.

The title "Index I" draws inspiration from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of prohibited books created by the Catholic Church in the 16th century to eliminate books and authors deemed heretical and dangerous. This catalog of once-forbidden visions is now translated into music by the band.

Welcome to the darkness!

[mykingdommusic]

"Index I" will be PSEUDOBIBLION's debut album

The passion for '90s Death and Doom Metal and the inspiration from Gothic and horror novels  are the roots of PSEUDOBIBLION, a project born in 2015 from the minds of Roberto Ripollino (vocals and guitar) and Massimo Currò (bass and vocals)—formerly of NIHILI LOCUS—who were soon joined by Massimo Ligotino (guitars), Lorenzo Somma (drums) and Roberto Biorcio (keyboards).

Their debut album, "Index I", will be released on July 3rd on Club Inferno, a sub-label of My Kingdom Music, on CD and digital. It aims to honor the spirit of the music and genres of those years in a more contemporary mood and in a decadent way. The title "Index I" is inspired by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of prohibited books created by the Catholic Church in the 16th century with the aim of eliminating books and authors deemed heretical and dangerous. This catalog of once-forbidden visions has been transposed into music by the band.

The band told us about the essence of their project: "PSEUDOBIBLION is a homage to our origins as listeners and young musicians of extreme metal, with our love for bands like Grotesque, Nihilist, early Dark Tranquillity, early Death, Sodom, Autopsy, but also as readers of horror and gothic novels written between the 19th and 20th centuries, which greatly influenced us during those years. For this reason, we wanted to use original and intact excerpts from these works, aiming to preserve and convey the authentic spirit of each opera. The whole thing thus becomes a listening experience aimed at celebrating and evoking the precursors of gothic, dense with atmosphere and deeply rooted in underground tradition".

Welcome to the darkness!

[weirdletter]

"Dei Culti Oscuri. di Giovanni Gabello. In octavo, Genova, 1791" pseudobiblium by Andrea Bonazzi, 1991. Info and free PDF version: in-tenebris-scriptus.blogspot.com. "I made my pseudobiblium Dei Culti Oscuri (literally, Concerning the Dark Cults) in 1991, as a practical support for my Lovecraftian role-playing games. A pseudo-XVII century pastiche in 250 pages (8x6 in.), it collects the most varied Cthulhu Mythos data from games and books, with few personal touches, written in a fake archaic Italian language. This book was composed with an Amiga 500 home computer, printed in only four copies with an old 9-pin dot matrix printer, and roughly bound in leather (nobody was skinned alive for the binding of these tomes, I assure you)."

[tindalosmalakia]

Abdul Alhazred and Hildred Castaigne.

Veeeeeeeeeery rough sketch, drawn at 01:10 AM.