musingsbymattheous asked: I need a good, as-complete-as-possible, collection of H.P. Lovecraft. I've been reading the Del Ray collections, but none of this is complete...help?

I have issues with the Del Ray collection. It is broken up into strange groups of stories that somewhat distort the flow of the Lovecraft mythos. They’re also not affiliated with S.T. Joshi like the Penguin Classics are. The Del Ray version do, however have interesting introductions by various noted authors and are probably the most easy to acquire. The only way to obtain every single Lovecraft story without buying a plethora of rare paperbacks is by buying a one volume collection. The Necronomicon published by Gollancz is a decent collection. For most bookstores this is as far as you’ll get in regards to some of his rarer stories, however it is only around 880 pages and while it does have an interesting afterword, the book is missing several collaborations he did with other authors. In my opinion the very best single volume collection is actually printed by Barnes & Noble. The tome is over 1000 pages and has the stories in order of when they were written. It has every single story as well as things like discarded drafts and different versions of stories that Lovecraft shortened or lengthened. The book is called Lovecraft: The Fiction and is truly a deal for around 12 human dollars from barnesandnoble.com. Thank you for your question and I wish you luck in delving into vast libraries of rare knowledge.

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