This week’s ‘Picture Postal’, from the Providence Magazine, the local Board of Trade magazine in 1915. This was the ‘early view’ Lovecraft was referring to in a letter written after he visited the Shepley Library in Providence in 1923. I thank Ken Faig Jr. for the identification.

there is one monstrous fine drawing of the town in 1762 […] precisely what I had long wish’d to see

Thus the Curator was not being snide or fobbing off Lovecraft, when he suggested that he could have a copy… if another was found to exist in the archives. It was not an antiquity, and the archives might indeed have a duplicate copy of a liberally-dispensed magazine from less than a decade ago. Or there might be duplicate prints of such a modern item.

It’s possible Lovecraft may have seen the more expansive un-cropped version, and in a less harsh contrast…

His use of the word “monstrous” perhaps even indicates he saw the original large sheets, meant to be transferred by tracing to a stage backdrop.