The most merciful thing in the world (2)

Seems Scribd weren't in a mood to argue HPL's tales still being under copyright in USA; the CP edition of "The Call of Cthulhu" has been restored.

We're older than you thought . . .

Or rather, some hack writer got a little sloppy in their bibliography. Every so often, generally when feeling in need of an ego-boost, I feed the name "Celephaïs Press" into Google. Today this turned up Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras: The Drug Cult that Civilised Europe, a note to whose final chapter cites Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus, apparently published "London: Celephaïs Press, 1865."

The notes to Basarab Nicolescu's From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Spirituality, and Culutre (SUNY, 2014) at least correctly identify the CP edition of Hinton's Scientific Romances (second series) as a 2008 reissue of a work first published 1896 by Swann Sonnenschien of London, though does not seem to be aware that it only exists as an online edition.

The most merciful thing in the world . . .

So, I log into one of my backup emails for the first time in 3 months or so (not the one I put on CP imprints, but an old Yahoo account reserved for signing up for things on websites) and discover that Scribd pulled the Mead Pistis Sophia and Lovecraft's "Festival" and "The Call of Cthulhu" in June-July after one of their bots flagged them as copyright violations.

Seems the Mead and "The Festival" already got restored but trying to view "The Call of Cthulhu" gets you redirected to a page about a commercial e-text of the same story from Harper Collins.

Owing to the USA's copyright laws being a convoluted mess, the status of Lovecraft's work where Scribd's servers are located is . . . complicated (where I am it's pretty clear-cut -- the whole lot's been public domain since the end of 2007). Anything first published before 1923 is public domain. After that date, it would depend on whether the copyrights were renewed before 28 years has expired from first publication, and it's far from clear that they were. Anyway I emailed Scribd's copyrights people back, waiting on a response.