The Barlow letters reveal that H.P. Lovecraft knew the Annmary Brown Memorial, located on a quiet part of the Brown campus.

Picture: ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’ on the entrance doors.

The 1907 Memorial is at once a tomb, a 530-volume library of the rarest books from the presses of the first printers (circa 1450-1500, aka ‘incunabula’), and a substantial fine art gallery. Many early woodcuts were apparently also on display, showing their early use in book illustration. A catalogue for the Gallery was issued in 1913, and a descriptive essay book on the Memorial appeared in 1925. The latter evokes the scene as Lovecraft would have enjoyed it, after entering through the doors depicting personifications of ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’…

On a midwinter when a blanket of snow darkens the skylights overhead, the fire burns the brighter on the hearth. A sidelight from the glass doors of the vestibule catches on the burnished goldleaf of the initial letters and illuminated borders in the gallery of early printed books. Some ray will touch the lattice-work and tracery of the gold-bronze door which at the far end of the building leads into the mausoleum where General and Mrs. Hawkins lie entombed. … Like its exterior, the building itself is without embellishment save for the books and pictures with which its walls are lined. The entrance hail, its walls a neutral green, is hung with water-colours and etchings … At the left is the curator’s study with its reference books and cheery fire … an open doorway leads into the galleries, the first of which contains the early printed books. … In the tall glassed-in cases which line the walls of the first gallery, the shelves are made to slant like book rests. On them are laid these “first books”, opened such that their individual characteristics may be studied with ease; and an impressive display they make, their texts as clear and the linen paper almost as immaculate as the day they came from the press. … Venerable as they are, they show few marks of age as they rest content in the light and pure air of their final home. … A surprising number of these early printed books are still in their original bindings, oak boards covered with tooled pigskin or with vellum now taut with age, and in some instances with bosses and clasps still intact.

Picture: The book galleries as Lovecraft would have known them, and almost the same as in a 1908 picture of the same view. Note the Lovecraft-alike man in the next room, viewing the pictures.

Given the 1907 opening date and the original bindings of the books, there is the interesting possibility that such ancient books helped to form the young Lovecraft’s eventual idea of the Necronomicon, at least in terms of what the hoary tome might have looked like.

Offsetting the books was a huge vivid painting by veteran traveller and artist Edwin Lord Weeks. “The Golden Temple” formed a centrepiece of the Gallery section, and depicted the holy temple of the Sikhs. Lovecraft would have seen this work in its prime, as in later decades it was long used as a ‘test canvas’ for teaching student conservators how to clean a painting. The sunlit scene thus became very ‘patchy’, but has recently been painstakingly restored as much as possible.

This picture was accompanied by another large work from Weeks, “Caravan Crossing the Desert”. “Caravan” is not online, but was described in 1916 as being “beautifully executed in high academic style” … “buff sand and the dark blue of the African sky, with vigorous figures of Arabs and camels in the foreground.” One imagines that Lovecraft would have recalled his story “The Nameless City” on seeing such a work, or perhaps Abdul Alhazred.

His ancestral interests in England meant he would also have paused long before Lamorna Birch’s “Cornwall”, in which great windswept clouds are said to race over the Cornish downs. A picture by Adriaen van Ostade of an aged wandering fiddler might have recalled to mind his “Erich Zann”.

That Lovecraft knew the interior of the Memorial is evidenced by his planning to take young Barlow there on a visit to Providence. Barlow was, of course, a fine printer and developing a connoisseur’s taste for papers, bindings and inks. One imagines that the Memorial had also been on the itinerary for some of Lovecraft’s other visitors, at least those who would not feel bored and would benefit from closely observing the bite of type into laid paper, the sheen of oak-gall ink, and the hand-tooling of animal skins. In his time the Memorial was quietly open to the discerning for four days a week, and it was free to enter — an important point for the impoverished Lovecraft.