A few more insights gleaned from Letters to Family…

* It was Lovecraft who introduced Long to the second-hand bookshops of New York City, and not the other way around. Presumably Long had, until 1922, purchased purely from the ordinary bookshops and perhaps via the lists of mail-order dealers. Lovecraft notes that Long had never once entered the city’s many used bookstores. On learning that he could sell books fairly easily, Long lugged a suitcase full of unwanted books downtown and sold them for $4 credit.

* Sonia’s affluence and profligacy with money are a little better understood when one learns that she had private clients. For these she made exclusive hats, and was able to work from home to turn $20 of raw materials into a $60 designer hat. In today’s money that means she was making $600 profit per hat, and there was then a huge demand for fancy hats.

* In 1922 Lovecraft knew Poe’s High Bridge as “Highbridge”, and visited it and other Poe places in 1922.