Revelations of a Spirit Medium (1891) was a tell-all book which debunked the tricks of the spiritualist ‘mediums’. In doing so the book deeply inspired the teenage Houdini. Long suppressed by ‘buy and burn’ spiritualists, the book was then released in a handsome new 1922 facsimile edition complete with bibliography and glossary. This week it has also appeared as a new full public-domain audio reading on Librivox…

the most wonderful of the ‘medium’s’ phenomena will be so thoroughly explained and so completely dissected that, after reading this book, you can perform the feats yourself

I don’t see it listed in Lovecraft’s library or noted in the Letters, but given the date of the 1922 edition and the Houdini influence, it would certainly have been familiar to Lovecraft’s Providence friend C.M. Eddy Jr. (he was often in the employ of Houdini, as an undercover agent in disguise). At a guess, Lovecraft may have skimmed it when preparing The Cancer of Superstition. Which as Joshi explains…

appears to have been a collaborative revision on which Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy worked at the instigation of Harry Houdini

Also Houdini related, Deep Cuts has been lucky enough to get a copy of Miscellaneous Letters and looks at “Her Telegram To Lovecraft: Wilhelmina Beatrice ‘Bess’ Houdini”…

Lovecraft does not mention any further communication with Bess Houdini; while it is possible he sent her a note of condolence on her husband’s death, or that they exchanged a final note on The Cancer of Superstition, if that is the case those letters do not survive. All we have is a single telegram, the text of which is reproduced in Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Letters.