The Tomb by H. P. Lovecraft was written by him in 1917 and published in 1922. I’m reading it ‘out of order’ in that sense because I’m reading in publishing order. He was writing much better than this in 1922. So I have to be lenient with this.
The Tomb is a fairly simple story. We are first told that the young man is in a mental institution and he’ll tell us how he got there. I dislike this habit of Lovecraft’s to tell us how the story is going to end up right at the beginning. It takes away the suspense for me.
So we then go back in time to when Jervas was a ten-year-old boy from a wealthy family. Jervas was completely neglected by his parents. So much that he spent every day and every night sleeping outside a local tomb, near a burned-down mansion. Nobody ever noticed. Jervas feels he is brilliant and wise, even though he has no friends and doesn’t go to school. He reads old books. He is obsessed by this tomb but comes to accept that he’ll get into the tomb when he’s older.
Finally, when he turns 21, he falls asleep and feels he’s discovered the key to the tomb. Then he goes in at night and does things he isn’t willing to discuss. Many readers take this to mean he is pleasuring himself amongst the dead bodies. Hmmm. He keeps doing this. At some point his father sends a watcher to see why his young adult son isn’t attending balls or going to salons or doing other normal things a wealthy lad would be doing. The watcher says that the boy just sleeps outside the tomb all night.
The boy takes this to mean his secret activities are shielded by magic and he keeps doing them.
A week later, the boy ‘sees’ that the burned-down mansion is miraculously whole and he goes in to a huge party. The boy is the wildest, most party-happy person there. And then the big lightning strike which destroyed the mansion happens again, and the boy ‘wakes up’ and is now caught by some of his father’s men. The boy rails that he wants to be in the mansion and wants to be buried in the tomb. Hence the mental institution.
The boy’s father tries to tell him that the tomb is STILL locked with a rust-covered lock. Even the loyal servant explains that the lock had to be smashed open to get into the tomb, because it was so rusty, but that there was an empty tomb in there. So the boy is now obsessed with being buried in that tomb.
This is laid out to be a ghost / unsettled story, but the storyline is much simpler than Lovecraft’s other works. It’s just not that enthralling to me to hear about a ten-year-old boy’s obsession with a nearby tomb, and then a twenty-one-year-old young man’s obsession with doing unnatural things in that tomb. It’s more like a young Lovecraft working through his sadness at not having friends, not being in school, and feeling like he’s a misunderstood brilliant person who deserves more.
I do feel sorry for this kid who is being neglected by his parents. But that doesn’t make the kind of story being told here.
The Nameless City is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1921. Lovecraft adored this story, which came to him initially in a dream. The world he creates here became the basis of many future stories. Unfortunately for Lovecraft, publishers just didn’t like it. Many publishers turned it down. If I had to guess, it’s because the story goes ON AND ON at length about scenes which could be conveyed much more concisely.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand it’s a great lone-wolf archaeologist who is exploring the deep desert of the Middle East and finds a city far older than any ever known of. I like that exploration. I like the way Lovecraft describes the sights. I like the descent through twisty narrow tunnels that the character has to worm through. It’s very visceral. I like the crocodile-reptile race and the sense that it was once great and mighty but then collapsed.
On the other hand, this story just drags out SO LONG. There are a lot of areas which could have been consolidated so that the feeling isn’t so slow. Also, Lovecraft focuses primarily on sights when it would have been really powerful to delve into the feeling … the smells … the textures … etc.
I’m grateful that we don’t get into his racism here. And it’s just Lovecraft (his dream self, in essence) all alone during the story so there isn’t any comment on any other type of person, really.
Some people have said the main character dies in the tunnels. I don’t think so. It says at the beginning that: “I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows.” That really gives a sense that he lived through it and now deals with the nightmares.
Also, at the end, he’s in the tomb area. The wind is rushing past him through the open door into the bright light. Then looking into the light he sees monsters in the light who are coming toward him. The tomb door shuts tight, blocking the light (and the monsters) and leaving him in the pitch-dark tomb. So now all he has to do is climb his way back out to the surface.
The Tree, a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, was written by him in 1920. This story is set in ancient Greece. It’s about two sculptors who are best friends, who live together in a house, and who support each other in everything they do. They’re not alike – one loves to party, while the other enjoys quiet meditations in the olive groves. Still, they are very close.
Then a tyrant from Syracuse creates a competition, setting the two men against each other.
At first it seems like the two sculptors are doing all right with the challenge. They work in the same studio, watching each other work, and living their lives. Then the olive grove sculptor starts to get sick. Over time he gets sicker and sicker. The party-friend is very upset by this and tends to the grove guy hand and foot. Doctors can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong.
Olive grove guy asks to be buried with olive twigs near his body. And then he dies in his olive grove.
Shattered, his friend indeed buries the friend with olive twigs, creates a gorgeous marble resting place, and then goes back to work. He creates a beautiful statue for the tyrant. The olive twigs grow into massive trees with thick branches. Finally the sculptor sends word that, after three years, his piece is complete. The tyrant sends messengers to pick up the sculpture.
That very night, a huge storm comes. A large branch which stretched over the studio smashes down. It completely destroys the home and the sculpture. Not even a trace of the sculpture remains. Also, the remaining living sculptor is now completely missing. They don’t even find his mangled body. And the tree whispers “I know, I know.”
I enjoy the lovely language Lovecraft uses to create his scenes, but the plot here is as dense as could be. Just after the story was published, Lovecraft wrote an essay “In Defense of Dagon”. The essay primarily deals with people who are complaining about his Dagon story, but it does mention a few other stories. To the critic who had complained that the ending of The Tree had an insufficient climax, Lovecraft retorts: “It is to proclaim what has hitherto been doubtful—to shew that the things of Nature see behind human hypocrisy and perceive the baseness at the heart of outward virtue. All the world deems Musides a model of fraternal piety and devotion although in truth he poisoned Kalos when he saw his laurels in peril.”
That may have been what Lovecraft intended, but as an author he failed, given how many readers seem to have completely missed that thought and came up with completely wild interpretations of what was going on.
Anyway, I’m grateful that the story avoids racism. So if its main issue is that it’s too vague on what the actual key plot twist is, well, I can live with that.
Here’s the story of The Tree, to read for yourself:
It’s funny how used to Lovecraft’s casual racism I’ve gotten that my first thought on this short story was how much I enjoyed its writing and atmosphere. It’s only when I started going through the nitty-gritty of the storyline that I remembered how offensive many of the African details are, including the use of the N word. Even when Lovecraft wrote this story, that word was a powerful slur. Lovecraft is quite happy to use it.
I like how Lovecraft puts New England decrepit houses right up against classic horror situations like Rhine castles and Paris catacombs. This definitely is true. And at the time Lovecraft had a lot to do with promoting this imagery. Having lived in New England nearly all my life, I can viscerally feel the scenes he’s creating. My own father was a genealogist, so we would tromp around New England landscapes looking at ancient houses, ancient stone walls, etc. We knew many people who lived in 1700s-era homes. I can ‘smell’ and feel these scenes.
So the main character is biking around in Miskatonic Valley near Arkham, both fictional places, and a pouring rain begins. Our hero sees an ancient house in the distance. He goes up to it and realizes it might be occupied but then he WALKS IN. What?? This man knows New Englanders! He could easily be bludgeoned to death or shot or stabbed. You do not just walk into an old house around here.
Besides, houses of the 1700s era are falling apart. The ceiling could fall in on you. You could fall through to the basement. The mold could kill you. You just don’t walk in.
Our hero finds a book about cannibalism. We learn that some Black people in Africa have white features. Lovecraft uses the N word. There are lots of iffy issues involving the Africa storyline. Let’s just try to ignore those.
And then it turns out the house owner is in fact there. He’s large, threatening, but a gentle giant. Also it turns out he is a man from the Revolutionary War who has stayed alive by cannibalizing people passing by. And now he has his eyes set on our new visitor.
Luckily, we’re told a paragraph before the end that our main character survives. Usually Lovecraft would tell us in Paragraph One that the guy lived. We’re fortunate that Lovecraft managed to wait until near the end before revealing the twist. A lightning strike destroys the house. Is the cannibal thrown clear and runs off? Is he killed and under the rubble?
I enjoy the writing style. I like that it’s set in New England. I wish it didn’t have the Congo African white-negro sections.
Given how happy I’d been to read Ex Oblivione, and how unhappy I was with Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, reading The Terrible Old Man fell somewhere in the middle. And I suppose it’s sad that a fairly racist story now ends up in the ‘well it wasn’t THAT bad comparatively’ category.
Right at the beginning when we read the names of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva we know we’re in trouble. Lovecraft did NOT like immigrants of any kind. And even though we know they’re going up against The Terrible Old Man, we know the immigrants are going to be butchered. All the “white” locals know not to mess with The Terrible Old Man. The stupid backwards immigrants don’t know any better and will get murdered, and that is OK.
That being said, I love the writing style Lovecraft uses here. The way Lovecraft has the robbers having a calm gentlemanly meeting with the captain, where topics will be discussed, makes me happy. I really enjoy those interactions.
Sure, there are only four men and that’s it. We have the rich family falling into decay. We have some signs of mental illness. Are old crew members trapped in bottles, chatting with the ancient sea captain? Maybe. And while Lovecraft is grumpy with Czanek and Silva and Ricci, he’s perfectly fine with Scar-Face and Spanish Joe as crew members. Those guys are fine. They aren’t immigrants.
I lived in Providence right near Water Street and I know well these houses and the types of families and such. This story feels very ‘familiar’ to me where I can strongly visualize the scenes. I imagine that’s part of why I really enjoy it.
So this one is a mixed bag for me. Great location. Great descriptions. Extremely iffy trio of hoodlums.
Wow. I had enjoyed Ex Oblivione so much. And then with the very next story we come to Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family. It is a real descent from a stunning high to a fairly grimy low. Still, we are reading these in order. Let’s take a look.
This story is told ‘after the fact’ where we already know that Arthur Jermyn has killed himself in distress. And the narrator really doesn’t seem to care much about the family. I don’t know why Lovecraft feels a need to do this. He already ‘ruins’ the suspense for me and distances us from what is going on. I would find this so much more interesting if we were reading along with each generation, curious what was going to happen.
Here’s the gist of this genealogical situation.
We have Sir Wade Jermyn back in the 1700s who loves going to Africa. After a trip he comes back with a secret wife and a son. They’re always sons of course. The wife is kept completely hidden, locked away, and nobody thinks this is strange. Sure, lock up your wife. The son gets to come out.
But the son, Philip, is coarse, stupid, violent, and ugly. Just what you’d expect from Africa, apparently. The only place for him, even though he’s a Sir Jermyn son, is the navy. Philip has sex with the gypsy gamekeeper’s daughter, who of course is fine with violent stupid ugly men, and they have a son. Then Philip runs off to Africa and is never seen again.
The child, Robert, is handsome enough in an exotic European way. He studies ethnology. He’s civilized enough to lure in a 7th Viscount’s daughter with his land and titles. They have three kids – but two of them are deformed and mentally ill. The third, Nevil, is repellent and surly. He runs off with a vulgar dancer and they have, of course, a son.
While that son is still tiny, the grandfather, Philip, discovers something truly atrocious in his research of the family history in Africa. Philip then MURDERS all three of his adult children. Nevil manages to protect the infant son from harm. Philip then tries repeatedly to kill himself and dies.
But of course, surely nothing bad could be related to this African connection.
So the little tyke Alfred grows up and joins the circus. He hooks up with a vulgar singer. But he abandons her and his tiny son (always a son) because he has an obsession with a gorilla. The two of them connect at a powerful level … until the gorilla kills Alfred. Which only leaves the son.
Arthur now grows up, knowing his family is full of gorilla-lovers and mentally ill people who try to kill all their children. Arthur is a sensitive poet. The family house is falling apart around him. He also delves into the family situation in Africa. And what he learns causes him to burn himself to death, thus finally ending the family line.
What he discovers is that the hidden wife Sir Wade Jermyn brought back from Africa all those years ago was an ape. All their physical, emotional, and mental problems were caused by that tainted bloodline.
Yes, tainted bloodlines. African bloodlines which cause mental deficiencies, ugliness, violence, and so on.
No wonder friends and readers of Lovecraft often took strong issue with what he wrote.
I had in fact done my video review of this book a while ago but then never posted it because I just felt unhappy with it. Then recently I couldn’t find that video and went through yet another video review round. So I’ve had to review this book twice. Hopefully it is now set!
So Lovecraft never mentions the women by names. They are just vulgar dancers and singers and lowly gypsies. The men only have men-children except the one man who creates broken ones. We have an uncaring narrator just listing out facts. We know right at the beginning what the end result is going to be. And we have rampant racism.
I read this (many times) as part of my project to read all Lovecraft works in order, but this is definitely not one I’d care to come back to.
Read Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family for yourself:
My favorite story by H. P. Lovecraft so far, and we are up to story twelve in his writings. This is not a story about ancient castles or about muddy plains with octopus monoliths. It’s a story about feeling as if life is no longer worth living. It’s about escaping into dreams – and then beyond.
We begin with a man who feels life has run its course. We get the impression that he’s in his seventies, he’s alone in a farmhouse somewhere, and life has no meaning. It’s not that he’s in pain or suffering through cancer treatments or anything else. Life is just gray. Monotonous. There is nothing left there for him.
He tries to escape into his dream worlds. Yes, there are beautiful oceans and serene rivers, but even their beauty fails to stir him after a while. He’s drawn to the grotesque twisting trees of a forest. But even there, after a while, it just becomes boring and dull. He wants to go through the gate. Surely something beyond there will hold interest to him.
To me this resembles the story The White Ship where the main character moves from location to location, and each is interesting, but even so the main character is never quite satisfied. He wants to get to that place beyond the realm where nobody has ever returned from.
Finally the main character learns of a drug which will help him get to that unattainable realm. He takes it, and sure enough, the gate opens. He’s able to step through.
Beyond it, there is complete peace. No people. No scenery. Just white light and a dissolving of self. No memories. No burdens to shoulder.
In his real life, Lovecraft had wanted to enlist in WWI and was actively blocked by his mother. His mother told everyone he was too weak and feeble to fight. This was the world Lovecraft had to deal with. And then his mother died. He was wholly cast adrift. One could see how Lovecraft would just want everything to ‘go away’. To not deal with thoughts or memories any more.
New Twist in my stalled-for-10-years Low Carb project!
Lulu, where I originally had published my paperbacks, has just SHUT DOWN all my low carb paperback books from global distribution. Suspicious.
Now I have to race even faster to get them all loaded into Amazon, which I’d been handling at a reasonable, steady pace.
I can only load 3 a day because Amazon now has anti-AI blockades in place preventing more uploads per day. My books are NOT AI written – they are all hand-written by me – but Amazon’s blockades apply to everyone as a safety measure.
Everything has gone haywire :).
These are my 3 updates for today! Yes they are still 2021. My focus right now is ONLY to get the Amazon side to match the Lulu side so everything moves exactly where it belongs.
Once everything is on Amazon, I can start updating again.
One of the downsides of being a reasonably well-known author is that scammers love to take advantage of your built-in name recognition to sell their own works. Over the years I have had ALL sorts of problems with scammers putting out books on my exact topic, using MY NAME, and in some cases using covers nearly identical to mine, all to get their hands on ‘quick easy money’.
And here we have yet another example.
Since about 2000 I’ve published 13 Low Carb Diet books and run a popular Low Carb website. I have hundreds of reviews on my books. People looking for diet advice often find me and write to me. Around 2020 I got very interested in the low FODMAP eating plan, which is similar to low carb. I put low-FODMAP on my list of things to write about.
I did not write my book quickly enough.
In 2021, a person decided to publish “The Easiest Low-FODMAP Diet Cookbook 2021” under the name of Lisa Shea.
How do I know this person isn’t a “real” Lisa Shea nutritionist who just happens to have the exact same name as me?
Well, for one, the author NEVER mentions the name Lisa Shea ANYWHERE in the entire book. Not even on the copyright page or title page. There’s no biography. No publisher listed. It says in the intro that the author is a nutritionist. An author who is a nutritionist would ABSOLUTELY have a biography page where they played that credential up. It would be a big part of their sell for the book. Instead, the book itself is wholly generic.
Next, when I run sections of the book through AI checkers, I get warnings that the content is too AI-like:
“You should edit your text until there’s less detectable AI content”.
And we’ll note that 2021 was just when AI was starting. So the author was probably using some sort of rudimentary AI crutch to write this.
The vast majority of this book is made up of low-FODMAP recipes. Some quick google searches had me finding the EXACT SAME RECIPE on the web, same ingredient order, everything, published pre-2021 by random other people. And we are talking about some extremely specific combinations of ingredients for non-standard recipes. So that is always a warning sign.
The book is also full of formatting and typo issues. Look right on the cover:
They let “for” and “IBS” run together to say FORIBS. That’s a fairly obvious issue that SOMEONE would catch if this was an actual serious author. The same typo is on the title page.
How about Chapter 1?
That’s it. That’s the end of the page. “This chapter will cover the” – and that’s it. The next page starts a new section.
Who would have not even checked Chapter One’s first page?
There’s all sorts of formatting and typo issues throughout this book. I’ll just mention a few more. We’ll begin right in the introduction! There’s a random indent half-way through the paragraph. There are phrases like “… the regular stomach upset that I experienced since childhood can be reverse by knowing …” – that “reverse” should be “reversed”.
This is right at the start of the book. And it keeps on having issues like this.
There’s many strange hiccups. Every single recipe has the formatting issue of turning “you’ll” into “you-space-apostrophe-space-ll” and calling your pantry a “store cupboard”. Degree signs aren’t actual degree signs (which are circles) but a super-scripted number zero.
And yes more typos. This one was extra odd because they spelled “filling” wrong (as “filing”) on step 5 but then spelled it properly on step 6.
There’s a four-page table of contents without page numbers. That’s fine because the pages themselves don’t have numbers on them! So the table of contents is fairly useless.
Researching the ISBN for this book – ISBN: 9781008938557 – it is owned by the Lulu self-publishing company. This book isn’t actually available ON Lulu though. So it looks like someone used Lulu to self-publish their book, created X number of copies, and then listed those copies on Amazon in paperback and hardcover format. They listed the publisher simply as “Lisa Shea”. So the actual person / company behind this is wholly hidden.
Fortunately, when I bought my hardcover copy to research this situation, I bought the very last one available for sale. There are now NO new paperback nor hardcover copies of the “Lisa Shea” FODMAP book on the market. The only ones on the used market have now ratcheted up to astronomical prices due to the way the automated pricing mechanisms work. So the chance of someone accidentally buying one and thinking it’s by me is slim to none.
People often ask me, when someone infringes on your identity as an author, can’t you just write Amazon to complain? The challenge is this.
In the cases like with my chair yoga book, where someone was specifically duplicating MY EXACT BOOK topic, title, and author name, I can challenge it, because it is a clear attempt to steal customers from my existing book.
However, there are legitimately other human beings out there with the name Lisa Shea. I can’t prevent them from publishing books. And I hadn’t yet written my low FODMAP book. So this author wasn’t trying to “steal” my low FODMAP content or traffic, because I didn’t have my book out yet. They were just taking advantage of my reputation in this area.
So I just kept putting this issue off in 2021 … 2022 … 2023 … but finally in 2024 a block of time opened up for me to be able to work on a solution. So my solution entails:
1) Get their low FODMAP book off the market somehow. Luckily, this was easy! I only had to buy the last hardcover copy to effectively do that.
2) Write my own low FODMAP book like I’d always wanted to do. Tie it into my Low Carb series so it 100% was clearly labelled and marketed as by being the established Lisa Shea who has written about low carb books for nearly 25 years. That will make it clear to my readers that it’s an authentic book by me.
Maybe it’s just as well that I waited until 2024 to tackle this, so that the “other Lisa Shea” low FODMAP book would ‘take itself off the market’ naturally. And now I can move forward with my writing plans for low FODMAP content.
Ask with any questions! Hopefully you never find yourself in a similar situation with an author trying to in essence ‘ride on your coattails’!
If you publish paperback books and ebooks, you’ll want to consider all the most popular and effective options for both formats. Here’s a view into how this works.
I first started publishing my 13 low carb books back around 2000, when I began writing online about my experiences with the low carb diet system. At the time Lulu was a big part of the self-publishing market, so I published the physical paperbacks through Lulu. Those paperbacks then distributed to Amazon and the other markets.
On the ebook side, I posted the ebooks directly on every system available, including GooglePlay, Lulu, Kobo, and of course Amazon. I also used the distributor systems of Draft2Digital and Smashwords to reach other markets like Barnes & Noble and Apple iTunes.
Over the years, Amazon has become dominant, and being optimized for the Amazon market has become a key to high sales. It’s critical to have the key words, categories, and everything just right with Amazon’s options. A third-party vendor won’t necessarily have all of those fields updated or even available. Third-party vendors reduce to the ‘lowest common denominator’ across all publishers they work with.
In addition, Lulu now has a policy that you have to PAY for a proof copy EVERY TIME you make any change at all to your paperback book. Since I have 13 low carb books, and tweak them multiple times a year, this quickly becomes unreasonable. For that reason my updates have stalled, which isn’t great for my marketing and sales.
So I’m at the point of preparing to move my paperback books out of Lulu and into Amazon as their primary source location. This became a massive project to organize where all of my low carb paperback books and ebooks were even available. Because it turns out:
* SmashWords was no longer a live ebook publishing system. SmashWords auto-migrated all my books into Draft2Digital, into a separate account from my regular Draft2Digital one. I now had two sets of all my low carb ebooks feeding out from two Draft2Digital accounts into 12 different vendors’ systems.
* Lulu was supposed to be distributing my Lulu ebooks out to Apple and to Barnes & Noble. It turns out that at some point Barnes & Noble stopped displaying Lulu ebooks. So those Barnes & Noble ebooks were simply not visible.
* Kobo was hanging in there. Still, did I really want to deal with updating 13 ebooks regularly in Kobo when I could just do that updating in Draft2Digital and have the ebooks auto-distribute to Kobo along with the 12 other vendors?
So my plan of action going forward with my low carb paperback books is:
* Migrate, one at a time, each paperback book from Lulu to Amazon. This is a process that needs to be done DELIBERATELY SLOWLY in order to maintain the books’ reviews and connections to existing locations on Amazon. Each book needs to be added as-is (no changes) to Amazon so it can “take the place” in the Amazon listing of the original Lulu book. It needs to get tied to the matching ebook. I would then LEAVE the Lulu listing alone. That Lulu page’s existence in search engines and links still provides value to me. If people see the old date on its cover, they might think ‘I wonder if there’s an updated version somewhere’ and find the Amazon one. Try to avoid ever deleting pages or links that promote your products.
* Once Amazon is fully populated with my paperback books, I will edit each one and bring it up to a 2024 version.
My plan of action for my low carb ebooks is:
* Shut down all the Kobo entries for my low carb ebooks. In Draft2Digital, turn on the Kobo distribution option. Once the ebooks are distributing into the Kobo system, I can write Kobo and they will move the reviews I had earned for those ebooks onto the new entries. I’m shutting down the Kobo direct entries simply because it is a lot of hassle to maintain book descriptions / contents / covers in so many systems manually.
* Shut down all the low carb ebooks in my SECONDARY Draft2Digital account that was auto-created by the migration from SmashWords. This SmashWords-to-Draft2Digital account migration became a gigantic mess. It turns out the secondary account had my ‘cocktails’ ebook and my main account didn’t. I asked Draft2Digital if they could move my cocktails ebook over to my main account. Draft2Digital said nope, it is stuck in the migrated account. So I will delete that cocktails ebook wholly from the migrated account and create it fresh in my regular Draft2Digital account. It’s the only way to have everything in one main Draft2Digital account.
* Shut down any distribution options in the Lulu ebook area. Apparently those distributions are having issues anyway. Only have the Lulu ebooks on Lulu itself. Those ebooks, at least, I can update without needing to pay for it.
* Whittle this down so the only places I have to maintain the ebooks are: Amazon, GooglePlay, Lulu, and Draft2Digital. Draft2Digital then broadcasts out to about 12 other sites. Note that I *could* have Draft2Digital broadcast out to Amazon, but for reasons explained earlier, I only ever want to work on Amazon books from within the Amazon system itself. Draft2Digital does not distribute to Lulu nor to GooglePlay.
I know this is a lot of information about a variety of different systems. I hope this will help people who are planning out their paperback or ebook distribution plan. The details should also help people who have been with a publisher and are looking to move their content to be in a different or additional publisher.
