[This post originally appeared one month ago on Joe Pulver's blog This Yellow Madness. This is the book I've been working on for most of this year.  Since writing this post, there's been more news about this project.  Check out the website for the anthology for more details].

Today’s guest post is by my pal, editor, Nate Pedersen. Nate’s working on a special project Lovecraftians will be very interested in. Here’s Nate to give you a first look at the blasphemies and revelations he’s about to unleash . . . I think you’ll be as excited by this as I am.

“In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the days of man’s youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was.”

–H P Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark”

What if, on the eve of disbanding, the Church of Starry Wisdom organized a rare book auction of the various tomes in their collection? What if the accompanying auction catalogue was privately published and privately circulated, disappearing for over a century until its recent rediscovery in the archives of Miskatonic University?  What if we could read the 1877 original today?

My new (and first) anthology for PS Publishing is just that: a “facsimile” publication of the 19th century auction catalogue, entitled “The Starry Wisdom Library: being a catalogue of the unsurpassed occult library held by the recently disbanded Church of Starry Wisdom, offered for sale at private auction Midsummer’s Eve, 1877 by Messrs Pent & Serenade of Arkham, Mass.” The anthology will be presented and designed exactly like a 19th century book auction catalogue, with entries describing the major books in the Church’s collection, accompanied by essays from “noted scholars” on the history of each dread tome. The “noted scholars” will be contemporary horror and speculative fiction authors.  Their contributions will be similar in length and content to Lovecraft’s own “History of the Necronomicon”, a slightly edited version of which will also appear in the catalogue.

The Starry Wisdom Library anthology was inspired by my personal love of rare book catalogues garnered from years spent working in the rare book trade in North Carolina and Scotland. I am now a freelance journalist and editor and write frequently for the magazine Fine Books & Collections. This anthology was the direct result of a blog post I wrote for Fine Books last October entitled “The Grimoires of Lovecraft”.

Nate Pedersen formerly worked for rare book dealers in North Carolina and Scotland.  He now lives in Oregon where he works as a librarian in addition to freelancing as a journalist and editor.  He is a Contributing Writer for the magazine Fine Books & Collections.