News

Wishing all of you the best possible 2017 and beyond.

The HPLHS is going to be operating with a skeleton crew for the first week or so of the new year, and while skeletons do have their uses, they are not known for speedy packaging and/or shipment. We will endeavor to make them go as quickly as possible, but you may experience a slight delivery delay on any orders placed in the earliest weeks of January. We hope you can forgive us and we look forward to the return of the fully-fleshed shoggoths in a short time.

It's the time of year in the USA when the holiday sales season starts. From our Thanksgiving holiday through the new year, it's a time of gift giving and, as a result, a time for shopping. We're of two minds on this phenomenon. First, if it really is a time of year to count one's blessings and show the people you love that you love them, then we encourage people to truly do that. It's not about the giving of gifts - it's about the demonstration of love and respect, kindness and generosity of spirit. A true gift is not a thing - it's an action that makes its recipient feel. It can be the smallest of actions which changes the trajectory of someone's day. It can be a bowl of homemade soup or ten dollars for the homeless person on the corner. It can be a heartfelt and unexpected hug. Ultimately the gift is the part of yourself which you're willing to give to bring joy to another.

And yet, we live in America, in a culture where actual wrapped presents are... well, it's just how Christmas is done. And on top of that, the HPLHS is a small business, and we stay in business by selling some of those gifts that will be given. A third of our business (we hope) for the entire year will happen in the last week of November and the first two weeks of December. And as a tiny business in a ridiculously niche market, we are so incredibly grateful to our customers that they bring us their business and share the weird stuff we make with others. All of which is to say, you don't have to buy gifts, but if you are going to buy a gift, we're very appreciative if you get one from us.

Lovecraft painted mankind as an irrelevant speck whirling through the vast infinity of an uncaring universe. And, in a glorious irony, he also loved Christmas. His contradictions are among his most charming personality traits. But regardless of what wintry holiday you may celebrate, or whether you merely cower before the Great Old Ones, we hope you and yours meet the end of 2016 with a generosity of spirit, unfettered kindness, and genuine love for one and other. - SB

After talking about it for years, thinking about it for years and working on it for years, we're very pleased to have unveiled a whole new website for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Our old site, which began in the early days of the Internet sixteen years ago, was built on the fly. Like the famed Winchester Mystery House, we added onto it over the years, creating new wings, attics, basements, doors to nowhere and the like. The net itself and how people use it has changed a lot over those years. The HPLHS has changed a lot too.

Back in 2000, we were still principally a group of Live Action Role Playing gamers who had created our own unique system of Lovecraftian gaming called Cthulhu Lives. But as the years have moved on, our focus has moved away from gaming to and the Society's principal endeavor is the creation of Lovecraftian entertainments. Around 2001 we produced a mockumentary film, A Shoggoth on the Roof, and that started us down a path which has led to where we are today: producing motion pictures, audio projects, books, CDs and much, much more.

So, our new site is our effort to better represent who we are these days and where we're heading in the future. It's also an effort to better serve you with a site that's friendly to tablets, phones and other mi-go technologies used to access the web. We're still converting a lot of our old content from the old site into the format of the new site, so if you don't see something you like from the old site, please check back in with us.

Ultimately, our web presence is about interfacing with you, people who enjoy the works of H.P. Lovecraft. We hope you like the changes. If you have any comments or suggestions for us, by all means, let us know.

We are in the process of completely overhauling the entire HPLHS website. If you click on the Society logo in the menu bar above, it will take you to the new website, which is still a work in progress.

Beloved Friends and Valued Customers,

If you haven’t heard, U.S. postal rates are going up on January 17 by as much as 21.6%. International rates will be more affected than domestic rates, but since we do all of our shipping with the U.S. Postal service, this rate hike will impact most of our customers. If you’re considering making an HPLHS order and want to save a few bucks on shipping, now is the time to strike. Please know we don’t set our shipping rates — the U.S. government does. We wish we could send you great Lovecraftian products for even less.