Several...

If I was to say “I want to see several parts of an atlas” you would understand what my requirements were: there are bits of an atlas (unspecified) that I am eager to peruse.

If I said that I wanted to see “the several parts of an atlas”, my requirements would be different: this is an atlas that I am aware of and it has sections, all of which I am eager to look at.

The language is a little archaic, but you get what I’m driving at, right?

HPL was an instinctive anachronism: he felt that he had been born a century too late. His writing style had more in common with the 19th Century than the Twentieth; he could write as if he was a Victorian novelist. Sadly, his Twentieth Century audience had different demands.

So, if I was to ask about a hypothetical book, of which HPL had written, you would expect that it would have a somewhat archaic title, correct?

And so, if I asked for a book “On the Several Parts of Africa” (not, “On Several Parts of Africa”) you would know what I required. Certainly, you wouldn’t bring me a book about several random parts of Africa, right? The two specifications are quite different.

In HPL’s short story “Arthur Jermyn” (and I use the truncated title, for ease of reference) the protagonist’s antecedent wrote a book called just that: “On the Several Parts of Africa”.

Why then does Chaosium want me to think that that tome is entitled “On Several Parts of Africa”?

The two titles are very different; further, the Chaosium-approved version is a mangling of the original text.

The source material states a very specific intention; why should it have been altered?

Archaic is archaic; sure, it needs some head-work to penetrate it and make sense of it. But, as arbitrators of what parts of HPL’s work goes into print and what doesn’t (and, possibly more importantly, how), an entity like Chaosium has, more than anyone else, a duty to make sure that his work retains its essential parameters: that it is true to its source.

Harms has it wrong in the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana; every reference to it in a Chaosium product gets this wrong.

Wrong is wrong.

Lift your game, guys.

*****

Observation on the Several Parts of Africa

“...Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes, animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book, Observation on the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1756 this fearless explorer had been placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.”

(Source: HPL, “Facts Concerning the Family of the Late Arthur Jermyn”, aka "The White Ape")

English; Sir Wade Jermyn; 1753; 1/1d4 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +3 percentiles; 1 week to study and comprehend

Spells: None