Once around the Bloch: an unauthorized autobiography of Lovecraft correspondent Robert Bloch, on Archive.org to borrow.

A couple of interesting points. In the earlier part of the 1920s, living in suburban Chicago…

Children’s books were not yet a major concern of the publishing industry: as a result of the cultural lag, libraries offered favorites of a previous generation. Tom Swift was still inventing, and G.A. Henry’s heroes were busily saving a vanishing British Empire. My father would introduce me to the dime-novel demi-gods of his own boyhood, buying reprints which detailed the exploits of Buffalo Bill, Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell.

This would seem to somewhat contradict Whitehead’s statement that many American boys were no longer aware of the Sherlock Holmes stories, although admittedly Holmes had by then gone off the boil and is not mentioned by Bloch. Lovecraft’s friend and fellow-writer Whitehead, a close observer of American boy-culture in evening clubs and summer-camps, had remarked in a 1922 essay on the…

fact that there is just now growing up a generation of readers for whom the Doyle of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is an obsolescent figure.

But perhaps there were regional and urban/rural differences in consumption at that time, and urban Chicago was not the same as semi-rural Florida in term of boyhood reading tastes or availability. Possible also a difference between summer-camp boys and those who had to work through the summer.

The teen Bloch later visited the Weird Tales offices. On editor Farnsworth Wright and his business manager at Weird Tales…

Both men had a rare sense of humor, which is probably why they tolerated a teenage interloper like myself.

We don’t tend to think of Wright as having “a rare sense of humor”, but apparently he did in person.