New from Beehive, The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Works & Worlds of Herbert Crowley. He’s not to be confused with occult loon Aleister Crowley.

It’s an expensive hardcover, and the Society of Illustrators calls it a… “sumptuous, towering monument of an art book”. The buyer gets a 20,000 word biographical monograph within the 108 pages, which I imagine means that the art on the remaining pages is the ‘best of’ rather than a full illustrated catalogue of his works.

‘Krazy Kat meets Edward Lear’ might be one way of summing up the works.

So far as I’m aware, Lovecraft did not see Crowley’s newspaper strips. Even in the reading room of the Providence Public Library he was probably not able to get the New York Herald, where the strips appeared. Though we know he read the New York Post shortly after he returned to Providence, so as to ‘keep up’ with New York. Also, Lovecraft had arrived in New York just as Crowley was leaving that city.

But Lovecraft was aware of Krazy Kat and may have seen it occasionally as it was widely syndicated. In his essay on “Cats and Dogs” he talks of the blind idiot-love owners have for grotesque dogs, comparing it to…

the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily ‘cute’, which we see like-wise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the “Billiken” or “Krazy Kat” order, found in the “dens” and “cosy corners” of the would-be sophisticated cultural yokelry.