A little ahead of the annual ‘Silly Season’ for news… Love-drugs!

Now, I’m not one to go for all this ‘Lovecraftian beers’ malarkey of recent years. And nor would the alcohol-aghast Lovecraft, no doubt. But pipe tobacco has a certain interest, and a little more so following my recent work on Tolkien. He was an avid pipe-smoker, and perhaps the preeminent writer of fiction depicting the joys of pipe-smoking. Thus I was interested to hear of the new Cornell & Diehl’s Lovecraftian Pipe Tobacco series. It seems to be a tin containing a sampling of each of the seven fine ‘Lovecraftian’ blends. Presumably one then orders a bespoke ‘big-bag batch’ of the preferred blend.

As for Lovecraft and smoking, he must have inhaled a fair bit of nicotine in his time (smoking was then common) and especially in New York’s gangster-haunted or bohemian cafes and also at the larger Kalem meetings.

Mids’t them I sit with smoke-try’d eyes” — line from “On the Double-R Coffee House” (1st February 1925).

But, although his mother had urged him to (she “wished that her son might take up pipe smoking”), he had been put off it early and never sported a pipe…

Anent tobacco! I fancy you will be tired of it ere long. Lest you assign to me an excess of credit for conscious asceticism, let me say that perhaps the chief factor my abstinence from the beguiling weed is that I detest the d—d stuff most cordially! Its fumes are disgusting to me, hence — though I smoked when about twelve years old just to seem like a grown man — I left off as soon as I acquired long trousers; which formed a substitute symbol of independent adulthood. I cannot see yet, what anyone finds attractive about the habit of imitating a smoke-stack!

He did once muse on the aesthetic value of tobacco tins, in Selected Letters II. Considered humdrum and thrown away, but he thought that perhaps the best of them would not be overlooked in the future…

Small objects of utility — even the cheapest — have throughout history been sometimes so well made and happily conceived as to win a place in the field of art. Humble Greek and Roman lamps, the lowly commercial pottery of Corinth, every-day bits of Chinese and Japanese lacquer-ware — all sorts of things like this have always been highly esteemed as true, even if unpretentious, art, and have kept to this day an honoured place in museums. Your tobacco-tin undoubtedly belongs in greater or lesser degree to this solid tradition, and all one can say against it is that its wide-spread duplication is likely to lessen its hold on our [present-day] aesthetic sense through sheer accustomedness. Being taken for granted, it may acquire something of the staleness of a hackneyed piece of music; though it will never be less beautiful, or less abstractly appreciated by the analysts of beauty.