At the foot of the Brown repository letter in which Eddy recalls a “Poe Street” encounter on a walk with Lovecraft (see this post for details) is Winfield Scott’s additional and almost indecipherable pencil note…

Dana – says HPL would buy pulps in [?] [?] then tore off the [?] sexy-lurid covers because [“under neath counter”?]

Dana’s was the local bookshop which took the remainder of Lovecraft’s Library shortly after his death. We have no evidence of the cover-tearing in Lovecraft’s extant set of Weird Tales, as I understand it. But perhaps Dana encountered runs of other pulps in his posthumous consignment of the less desirable items. As a more upmarket book-seller, unfamiliar with New York news-stand practices with pulps, he may not have realised what could have happened to these magazines.

News-stand sellers of pulps, and later the cheap paperbacks in the 1950s-70s, were supposed to send unsold copies back to the publishers to be pulped. But that was impractical. The actual practice was to mail sheafs of the ripped-off colour covers, as proof of the unsold and supposedly un-sellable copies. Thus would the magazines be ‘returned’ for credit.

Was this practice present in New York as far back as the 1930s? Perhaps a pulp history expert can fill me in on that. But in the meantime, here is a tantalising Google Books snippet from The New Yorker, Vol. 12 1936…

So it does seem that flea-market re-sale of coverless copies was going on, at least in New York City. And on a scale large enough to make it profitable for the junk-men to invent machines to rectify the magazines. The process for lesser pulps sounds like it would have been…

1. Covers returned for credit on the next order.
2. Coverless copies locally given away to junk-men as worthless ‘pulp’.
3. The junk-men quietly pass these into the New York flea-markets.
4. The magazines spend a few weeks on the stalls at ‘three for a nickel’.
5. The junk-men return to the stalls, take away the bundles of the unwanted dregs as pulp. They may even have become ballast on ships to England.

That could help explain why Lovecraft evidently had coverless pulps among the lesser parts of his collection, as disposed of to the Dana bookshop. He and his circle could have been acquiring them in this way in New York City.