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In early December (2010), I used a file from the Australian Project Gutenberg to create an EPUB of most of Lovecraft's works. It wasn't a comprehensive file and while it's been popular (just having hit 1,000 downloads this morning, in under 3 months), it isn't what I want for my own use or what the librarian-in-training in me thinks should be out there.

So, after several months of working on the project when I could—snatching minutes and hours between work, grad school, and making Cthulhus—I am very proud to announce that I have finished an eBook of The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, I expanded my original project and made versions both for the Nook (EPUB) and for the Kindle (MOBI).

Download Options

August 1, 2011: I've also created a PDF copy for people who can't use any of the formats above. It's quite large at 8MB and doesn't display nearly as well on e-Readers as the others. But it works for computers, probably iPad-type devices, and just hanging onto.

I started this project because I couldn't find a free or inexpensive (or expensive) EPUB eBook of Lovecraft's complete works for my Nook. Many compilations or standalone stories exist, but as you can see from the table of contents list below, there are a lot of these stories and having them in individual files would be a bit of an organizational nightmare.

About the eBook

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft contains the original stories which Lovecraft wrote as an adult. It begins in 1917 with “The Tomb” and ends in 1935 with his last original work “The Haunter of the Dark.” The book is ordered chronologically by the date the story was written. Because Lovecraft was a terrible businessman and left no heirs to his intellectual property, all of his works are already in the public domain. I did not include collaborations or revisions because some of those works may still be under the co-author's copyright. There also left out two completely non-Weird very early stories.

eBook Creation Process

After putting together one very large HTML file containing the complete works with a linked table of contents, I formatted it as EPUB for Nook using Sigil and converted it to MOBI for Kindle using Calibre. When I created the original EPUB of most of Lovecraft's works, based on a file from the Australian Project Gutenberg, I had used Calibre to convert it from HTML. But while Calibre converts well from EPUB to MOBI, it doesn't work nearly so well going from HTML to EPUB. HTML tags were dropping in places, making the layout look sloppy. Sigil's interface allows one to create and edit the book, which made it something far better than I was getting through my many Calibre conversion attempts.

3/4/11 — I've updated the eBook with a cover created by Santiago Casares, an artist and Lovecraftian fan.

Putting the eBook on Your eReader

The eBook downloads contain slightly different files for the two differing formats. I've put together a [page with my own and other people's tips and walk-throughs][13] to help you add the book to your eReader. People with Sony Readers are particularly advised to use the page as it appears they'll need to do an EPUB -> EPUB conversion on Calibre or it won't display correctly.

If you use the straight, unzipped, versions, you can just used your usual methods.

Licensing and Acknowledgments

(updated 6/20/2011) All the works contained in this book are in the public domain. However thanks to some reverse-piracy, I have formally licensed the eBook under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) (a formalization of the request I initially made in this post, merely putting it into legal terms). The book may be redistributed, torn apart, revised, etc, but please do not sell it. Uploading on your own site for download is fine. If you choose to share or redistribute the book, please give credit to Squid Studio. Basically, you can do anything with it but sell it. Not too hard…except for one person.

Updated again: I've put an illustrated version on Amazon, which can currently only be purchased abroad.

I would like to express my gratitude to three websites without which I could not have made the book: HPLovecraft.com, DagonBytes.com, and Project Gutenberg (especially the Australian Project Gutenberg). I'd also like to thank The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast for getting me interested in Lovecraft and Terry from GameCouch for proofreading the Kindle version.

Table of Contents

The eBook's table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.