This week, more pictures from the Samuel Chamberlain Photograph Negatives Collection, 1928-1971, held at the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.

Summer is “a cummin’ in”, and thus it seems apt to have the pictures reflect Lovecraft’s summer travels. These show the fabric of some of the Marblehead lanes which he found so alluring.

old streets and gables and chimney-pots, and the endless maze of fanlighted Colonial doorways. … ancient houses set at all possible angles on moss-grown rock foundations and weird terraces

I’ve given them a tickle with Photoshop and a colourising, to give a flavour of the shades he loved. Though these scenes are pictured decades later, at a guess, and in the meanwhile there’s probably been a certain amount of sprucing-up, tourist-ification and antique-shoppery going on.

whilst conversing with natives there [in Salem], I had learnt of the neighbouring fishing port of Marblehead, whose antique quaintness was particularly recommended to me. Taking a stage-coach thither, I was presently borne into the most marvellous region I had ever dream’d of, & furnish’d with the most powerful single aesthetic impression I have receiv’d in years. Even now it is difficult for me to believe that Marblehead exists, save in some phantasticall dream. It is so contrary to everything usually observable in this age, & so exactly conformed to the habitual fabrick of my nocturnal visions, that my whole visit partook of the aethereal character scarce compatible with reality.