Poster or booklet cover design for the major Lovecraft convention, NecronomiCon Providence (August 20th-23rd, 2015).

So what was HPL up to in 1915?

* Mourning the death of his uncle Franklin Chase Clark (d. 26th April 1915). Presumably he attended the funeral service and burial. (It would be great to have a fringe exhibition in 2015 on the life and work of Franklin Chase Clark).
* Giving away his boyhood stamp collection to young cousin Phillips Gamwell, with whom he had first learned the joys of correspondence by letter, and had tested his face-to-face tutoring skills. Phillips Gamwell would later die young, on 31st Dec 1916.
* Was starting to make his formidable presence felt in amateur journalism, despite his ill health.
* Publishing his The Conservative political journal, despite his ill health.
* Running a local literature appreciation and writing group for mostly Irish-American youths, despite his ill health. With the group, publishing the first Providence Amateur amateur press journal in June 1915.
* Reading the news of the First World War in Europe, of Zeppelin bombing raids on his beloved England, and the German threat to shipping off the New England coast.
* Writing poems, including one deploring the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger ship sunk by a German submarine.
* Corresponding heavily with Kleiner and Moe, and others. To one correspondent in this year he declared it “almost an impossibility” that he would write fiction.
* First hearing something of the new Blue Pencil Club of Brooklyn, New York City.
* Posing for his photograph.
* Still enjoying The All-Story Munsey proto-pulp magazine.
* Writing monthly astronomy articles for his local newspaper, and a series for another newspaper.
* Frequently enjoying the silent cinema of the day. He loved Chaplin and would have seen Chaplin’s 1915 films (1915 seems to have been Chaplin’s big year, his breakthrough into mass popularity?), and he probably also saw The Raven (1915, stylised Poe biopic), and the famous movie Birth of a Nation (1915).
* Hearing about Houdini’s stage shows in Providence (at Keith’s Theater, week of 1st March). He probably didn’t see him then, or he would have mentioned it when he later worked with Houdini. Lovecraft had seen him at Keith’s in 1905.