August was a busy month here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters. Theo Beale observed that 50 Shades of Grey, “according to its description it is little more than John Norman’s Gor brought back to Earth, minus the sword battles and the awesome tarn birds.” Brian Murphy reported on the debate surrounding breaking The Hobbit into three films, and Andrew Zimmerman Jones, live at the scene for the Dungeons & Dragons Next keynote at GenCon 2012, checked in with all the details.

I covered the controversy at Weird Tales magazine as the editorial team abruptly aborted plans to publish an excerpt of Victoria Foyt’s Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden, and Scott Taylor brought us several more installments of his popular Art of the Genre column. Howard Andrew Jones explored the pleasures of the classic Jungle Stories pulp, and C.S.E. Cooney reviewed William Alexander’s novel Goblin Secrets. And that’s just a sample of the Top 10 articles.

Missed any of the news and updates when they were hot off the press? Not to worry — here’s your chance to catch up. What follows are the 40 most popular articles on the Black Gate blog in August. Don’t thank us, it’s our job.

1. 50 shades of Paedo?
2. Weird-Tales Pulls Novel Excerpt Following Fan Uproar
3. Category: New Treasures
4. Three Hobbit films for the LOTR fans =Trouble
5. GenCon 2012: Dungeons & Dragons Next keynote Liveblog
6. Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series
7. Art of the Genre: The Art of Steampunk Couture
8. Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming mix
9. Escape to the Jungle
10. Goblin Secrets: A Review
11. A Brick-and-Mortar bookstore score
12. The thrill of the Unexpected: Why I Edit Clockwork Phoenix
13. Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Total Recall 2012
14. Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Bourne Legacy
15. Solomon Kane Crosses the Atlantic to U.S. Movie Theaters in September
16. Category: Comics
17. Teaching-and-Fantasy-Literature-uses-of-Terrible-Comic-Adaptations
18. Re-discovering-Sax-Rohmer
19. The English Civil War with Clockwork War Machines: an Introduction to Clockwork & Chivalry
20. The-Wily-Dalilah-Arabian-Nights-Feminist
21. New-Treasures: Wizards-of-the-coast-releases-Dungeon-Command
22. The-End-of-the-World-as-Everyone-Knows-It
23. Forbes-Publishes-List-of-Worlds-Top-Earning-Authors
24. Harry-Harrison: March 12 1925 – August 15 2012
25. Letters to Black Gate: Ed Carmien, Scott Taylor, Matthew David Surridge, and our Digital Future
26. Michaele-Jordan-reviews-Dark-Tales-of-lost-Civilizations
27. Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Part I)
28. Art-of-the-Genre: The-Old-School-Renaissance
29. Vintage Treasures: A Box of 1950s SF and Fantasy Magazines, and the End of the First Era of Space Exploration
30. Black-Gate-goes-to-the-Summer-Movies: The-Expendables II
31. New-Treasures: The-Book-of-Cthulhu-edited-by-Ross-E-Lockhart
32. Cynthia-Ward-reviews-Lost-Things
33. Gencon-2012-Begins
34. Alana-Joli-Abbott-reviews-Libriomancer
35. Category: Art
36. Category: Art-of-the-Genre
37. Gencon crafts
38. Romanticism-and-Fantasy:-William-Wordsworth-Part-One
39. Writing-business-Web-Design
40. New-Treasures: The-Black-Opera-by-Mary-Gentle

The Top 30 Black Gate blog posts in July are here.