New on Archive.org, the collected and bundled parts of the Argosy version of A. Merritt’s “Metal Monster” as serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1920.

Lovecraft came to it late, and in the seemingly unchanged(?) book version. He wrote of it in a letter of 1934…

[I read] A. Merrit’s old yarn “The Metal Monster”, which I had never read before because Eddy told me it was dull. The damn’d fool! (nephew — not our late bibliophilick friend). Actually, the book contains the most remarkable presentation of the *utterly alien and non-human* that I have ever seen. I don’t wonder that Merritt calls it his “best and worst” production. The human characters are commonplace and wooden — just pulp hokum — but the *scenes and phaenomena* …. oh, boy! …

In a subsequent letter to Rimel in summer 1934, he suggested the novel “needs extensive revision”. Lovecraft had met and privately dined with Merritt at his New York club in January 1934, which makes this an interesting comment. One then has to wonder what might have happened had Merritt hired Lovecraft as his revisionist in January 1934. Could that have been the purpose of the sumptuous private dinner? Merritt sold at least one novel to Hollywood for a major feature-film at about this time (on the screens as Devil-doll, 1936), and might have had the cash for such. But it was not to be.

Incidentally, the “late bibliophilick friend” in the above quote was ‘Uncle Eddy’, the Providence writer Eddy’s obliging bookseller uncle. The use of the word “late” suggests that either his shop had closed by 1934 and he had retired, or that he had recently passed away. The modern-day RIAMCO Collection of Lovecraft has the following catalogue entry for a press cutting, which might help to pinpoint his retirement date if it could be seen…

Lovecraft, Howard P. [letter to ] to Wandrei, Donald. Undated, with envelope postmarked Jul. 31, 1931. Headed: “Nether Crypts – Lammas-Eve” only. Enclosed is a clipping from The Providence News-Tribune [22 Jul 31] about Arthur A. Eddy, proprietor of Eddy’s Bookstore on Weybosset Street in downtown Providence.

The cutting is not in the Wandrei letters, as published. The name should be Arthur E. Eddy.