S.T. Joshi’s blog today reports that he saw some actual copies of the old Sydney Bulletin, while on his recent Australian tour…
Danny and I also went to the library of MacQuarrie University to look up the Sydney Bulletin, well known to readers of “The Call of Cthulhu.” What was my amazement when I discovered that this was not a newspaper, but a magazine of political, social, and literary commentary, with an abundance of fiction, poetry, and artwork (not a little by Norman Lindsay). In short, this paper could not possibly have printed the news article that Lovecraft quotes in the story.
So we’ve assumed the title to be a newspaper, but it’s not. That Lovecraft states that it “escaped the cutting bureau” suggests its non-newspaper nature. His use of “an old number of an Australian journal” also suggests a journal, rather than a newspaper. Since one would call a newspaper an issue or edition, while a “number” is usually reserved for referring to a magazine or journal. The Sydney Bulletin was a weekly title, one of the biggest in Australia.
In the story it’s a title had by the “the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note” [aka James F. Morton], who though local and provincial “has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts”. A page from it is used as shelf-paper for some “reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves”, again suggesting that the paper quality here is a little better than the fragile moisture-absorbing old newsprint of a colonial daily newspaper. The page also contains “a half-tone cut” being “the picture of the hellish image”, again suggesting a paper able to take pictures rather than pulpy daily newsprint.
Evidently then this is a publication with some small interest in curious rocks and carvings, presumably these being notable in a fresh new colonial Australia which had little other history to hand, and this is why the museum mineralogist was sent the issue (or perhaps just the tear-sheet).
Hyde Park, Sydney, in 1932.
The “crouching image” the paragraphs report had gone into the keeping of the “Museum at Hyde Park” in Sydney (there is a real Australian Museum, on the south-west edge of the Park). This may suggest the conduit by which issues of the Sydney Bulletin item might have reached “a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey” who was an expert on mineralogy.
Technically the real Bulletin appears to be classed as a newspaper, much as the Spectator in London was classed as a newspaper despite being a magazine in format. There were postage-rate advantages to being regarded by the Post Office as a newspaper, if the title has many far-flung postal subscribers. In the Sydney Bulletin‘s case it was apparently held by the “Bulletin Newspaper Company”.
It also published horror stories, at least in its early “coarse” years. For instance a book collection of Ernest Favenc’s stories (such as the macabre “Haunt of the Jinkarras”, ‘black cloud of madness / racial regression’, etc) gives an indication of scale of the Bulletin in its early years when it was publishing Favenc…
Stead’s Review of 1901 summed up the title as it was in the 1890s as…
The only distinctive Australian journal which has made any mark outside Australia is the “Sydney Bulletin”. It is a curious product, clever, wicked, lawless, sarcastic, cynical, scoffing, but it is nevertheless a distinct creation.
An academic article on magazine circulation in Australia in the 1920s suggests it was still one of the top national titles in that decade, and had maintained its biting edge — though by then it had added poetry and theatre reviews and the like. The turn toward literature came in 1915-16, and developed from then on, but this was underpinned by a new reputation for financial news and coverage of mining and suchlike. Thus, presumably, it had a new interest to mineralogists by the early 1920s. That section may have been spun out by 1924, as Wild Cat Monthly, though.
From a scan and OCR from 1924 I found a report in the West Coast Sentinel… “In recent issues of the Sydney Bulletin there have appeared several paragraphs relating to…” a horrible outback massacre in history. This report gives the Bulletin item in question. The format suggests that in 1924 the Bulletin did indeed have an interest in macabre history and strange doings of the type cited by Lovecraft, and that it published these as short two-paragraph items.
Another source has the writer Jack McLaren sending in what sound like similar “paragraphs” circa 1918-19, as a Bulletin correspondent…
From Cape York he sent a stream of paragraphs to the Sydney Bulletin under the pseudonym of McNorth, while also writing Red Mountain (1919), the first of about twenty adventure novels” (By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland)
Yet in Lovecraft’s paragraphs in “The Call of Cthulhu” he does appear to have the Bulletin act more as a reporting newspaper, in terms of having them send a telegraph cable-gram to “Our Auckland correspondent” in order to add a final paragraph to their report.
Were “paragraphs” often present in the Bulletin? It’s difficult to say more about the nature of it without seeing a full run of the Bulletin from the first half of the 1920s. After all it was a weekly, and perhaps such paragraphs only featured once a month. But it does not appear to be scanned and online, though evidently it exists in the archives to be seen by S.T. Joshi.
How did Lovecraft come to know of this weekly (and the museum, placed in its accurate location), a title that appears by the 1920s to have been a sort of somewhat coarsely patriotic Australian equivalent of The Spectator? Lovecraft can’t have been sent clippings from the Bulletin by his correspondent Geo. Fitzpatrick of Sydney, since the two men don’t appear to have come into contact until 1929. But it occurs to me that Lovecraft may have seen issues of the Sydney Bulletin in the New York libraries, and been more interested in it than otherwise because it was a potential outlet for paid story publication. He did after all seem to keep his overseas rights, so far as I recall, and these were not grabbed by Farnsworth Wright.
Incidentally, the Bulletin‘s pungent and cutting politics were of just the type to cause the anarchist Morton to have quickly disposed of it, by using it for “shelf-paper” in his museum, had he been sent a full copy of that 1924 “number”.
