More brief notes on interesting items gleaned from Letters to Family…

* Lovecraft’s experience of New York City subway travel was likely not the same in 1922 as in 1924-26, due the carriage types. He appears to have been at the cusp of a changeover in the types, from old to modern. In 1922 he remarks on the very old hand-crafted and very large carriages. He preferred travelling on the largest and most palatial of these, and went out of his way to do so.

* Providence had good strong street-lighting at night by 1922, not always the case in comparable provincial cities. Relevant to the inclination to take Providence night-walks, with Eddy and alone.

* In spring 1924 Lovecraft researched and wrote three chapters of a book on “American superstitions”. This was prior to his work for Houdini, and his own Supernatural Literature. There is no footnote detailing the fate of this text, though possibly I’ll encounter more details on later pages. I’d suspect it was later rolled into the Houdini work.

A few more insights gleaned from Letters to Family…

* It was Lovecraft who introduced Long to the second-hand bookshops of New York City, and not the other way around. Presumably Long had, until 1922, purchased purely from the ordinary bookshops and perhaps via the lists of mail-order dealers. Lovecraft notes that Long had never once entered the city’s many used bookstores. On learning that he could sell books fairly easily, Long lugged a suitcase full of unwanted books downtown and sold them for $4 credit.

* Sonia’s affluence and profligacy with money are a little better understood when one learns that she had private clients. For these she made exclusive hats, and was able to work from home to turn $20 of raw materials into a $60 designer hat. In today’s money that means she was making $600 profit per hat, and there was then a huge demand for fancy hats.

* In 1922 Lovecraft knew Poe’s High Bridge as “Highbridge”, and visited it and other Poe places in 1922.

I’ve started in on Lovecraft’s “Letters to Family” volumes, and am updating past blog posts as required by new evidence.

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: the Cloisters, NYC now has the first visit as being with Sonia…

Lovecraft’s first visit was with a day there with Sonia in 1922, but another was vividly recalled by Frank Belknap Long in his Lovecraft memoir, albeit a memoir written some fifty years later. Long has it that he, Morton and Lovecraft approached the Cloisters in the gloaming dusk…

Also the recent Fly me to the moon… post has a few additional final lines…

As for finding cats on the Moon, as in Dream-quest, the 12 year old Lovecraft already delighted in the idea of other nearby worlds populated by his beloved cats, and so this seems to have been his original idea, part whimsy and part science — the idea of creatures on Venus or Mars was then still a topic on which reputable scientists could speculate in the press.

Well, well, dipping at random into the new Letters to Family books of Lovecraft’s letters, as yet unread by me in a proper manner…

1) I find one H.P. Lovecraft, then editor of The Conservative, sitting down to a chicken dinner with the radical Sunrise Club in New York City in 1922. He had been invited along as a guest by Morton. The meeting was on ‘pro and anti-censorship’. Lovecraft found the speakers risible, shallow and presenting no real logical arguments, except for a crude fellow called “Rinn” (interrupting though not a speaker, seemingly)* and a far more rigorous and longer contribution from Morton. This suggests that — even in his older years — Morton may have had more influence, intellectually and via his public speaking, than might be assumed from a perusal of his earlier pamphlets. I’ve updated the post slightly.

2) Also in Letters to Family, the fact that Lovecraft extensively covered the Brooklyn Museum for a second time in 1922, doing it thoroughly than before. Thus he must have seen the giant octopus (seen recent posts) in the Invertebrates Hall at that time. Again, I’ve updated the post slightly.

* – Joseph Francis Rinn (1868-1952), American magician most active in the early decades of the 20th century, author of Sixty Years of Psychical Research.