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Peter Lamborn Wilson

06 Monday Jun 2022

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I hear that Peter Lamborn Wilson is now with the angels.

Doubtless some thumping great 650-page biography will, one day, proffer a paragraph that draws strange parallels between P.L. Wilson and H.P. Lovecraft. For instance, living as-if back in 1911, quitting New York City for the rural Hudson Valley, engaging playfully with the weird Fourier-ist backwoods of American history, dreaming of wandering mad Arab visionaries and Sufi dream-voyagers, seeking traces of lost Egyptian desert utopias, musing on the hermetic ‘will to power as disappearance’ in the service of eventual re-emergence and re-discovery in other places and at other times.

But for now I plant a few quick signposts-in-the-sand, following a quick catch-up survey of where his post-2001 work might be found.

His latest book appears to be Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis (2022). Which should help clear up any misconceptions gained about them in Lovecraft’s “Red Hook”. This follows on from his Cauda Pavonis: Esoteric Antinomianism in the Yezidi Tradition (2019).

His The Temple of Perseus at Panopolis is a 400-page table-trembler which imaginatively and poetically… “aims to give a thick impression of a single Egyptian city, Akhmim, called by the Greeks Panopolis or ‘city of Pan’. As a time-machine, this book will take the reader back to the 5th century AD, when the last champions of Paganism were battling against the coming triumph of Christianity.” Sounds interesting. A little later on his heavier book False Messiah: Crypto-Xtian Tracts and Fragments (2022) is said to prod at the various esoteric encrustations that have attached themselves to Christianity.

His fantastical fiction is to be found in Night Market Noodles & Other Tales (2017) and his collection of Borgesian and Nabokovian hoax-fictions False Documents (2015). I can’t find any other such collections. I’ve never read any of it, but it’s on the list now.

Riverpeople (2014) is his “epic” mixed poetry and prose text, which appears to be akin to Moon’s PrairyErth but shorter. It’s on the landscapes and people of his adopted home-place in the Hudson Valley, above New York City. The Esopus River, to be exact, which it appears Lovecraft knew in the form of his cherished “Esopus grist mills”. Riverpeople is flanked by a book of essays arising from his interest in early American weird-history, The American Revolution as a Gigantic Real Estate Scam: And Other Essays in Lost/Found History (2019). Another sentiment with which Lovecraft might have nodded in agreement, if not quite agreeing with the romantic anarchist politics (the ponderous and un-readable fellow anarchist Murray Bookchin frowned on Wilson too, which I consider to be a Good Sign). Wilson’s related essays, such as “Back to 1911: Temporal Autonomous Zones” and “Caliban’s Masque: Spiritual Anarchy and the Wild Man in Colonial America”, are to be found in the miscellaneous clear-out collection Anarchist Ephemera (2016). Which, since it’s Creative Commons, is on Archive.org as a PDF.

Like Lovecraft he was also a poet. I can find three chunky volumes of selected poems published in 2018, Lucky Shadows and Vanished Signs and Thibault or the Secrets of the Sea. Said by Autonomedia to have all been selected from his “1999–2014” poetry, and then split into books distributed among three different publishers. A note on Vanished Signs suggests a chunk of that volume is from his earlier Ec(o)logues (2011), which was apparently an evocation of “anarcho-surrealist” bucolic ruralism. Sounds like News from Nowhere for the Terrance McKenna generation. After that the poetry seems to swing a little darker with the final(?) School of Nite (2015) which was a 60-page photobook with sombre photos and poems.

His essay collection New Nihilism (2018) collected essays on comics-and-freedom (said to be excellent), evading the corporate media, and his enduring love of Celtic culture and history (not the cringe New Age gift-shoppe variety) among other topics. Sadly he does not appear to have ever engaged with Lovecraft in essay form. That would have been an interesting long essay. But it’s one that we shall now never have.

New book: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H.P. Lovecraft

06 Monday Jun 2022

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Newly listed on Hippocampus, Ellen J. Greenham’s book Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert…

In Greenham’s analysis, Lovecraft’s cosmicism offers human beings limited options in madness or death as responses to the inescapable revelation of their own insignificance and ephemerality in the universe. The neocosmicism of Dick, Heinlein, and Herbert offers another pathway in the framework for how humans might respond when facing engulfment. Rather than yielding to despair, neocosmicism offers an experience that leads to the revitalisation of the human’s relationship with the universe it inhabits.

SFFaudio Podcast #684

05 Sunday Jun 2022

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As some people’s thoughts turn toward the usual beach-front summer vacation, the new SFFaudio Podcast #684 has an unabridged Gordon Gould reading for “The Strange High House In The Mist” by H.P. Lovecraft followed by discussion.

Lovecraft claimed the story was inspired by the “titan cliffs of Magnolia” (Mass.). Yet I find that the postcard and glass-plate makers have singularly failed to capture any “titan” cliffs, and the candidates of “Rafe’s Chasm” and “Mother Ann” seem to lack the necessary attributes.

Yet it appears he was not being ironic…

I ended up with the titan cliffs of Magnolia — memories of which prompted “The Strange High House in the Mist” — and found their charm undiminished. [He had seen them in 1923]. You can’t imagine their majesty unless you’ve seen them — primal rock and sea and sky …. and the bells of the buoys tolling free in the aether of faery!

In 1933 he recalls…

the striking sea-cliffs of Magnolia — with the yawning abyss of Rafe’s Chasm.

Well then… maybe they just never had the right photographer? Perhaps at low tide one could walk around below them on the beach, and that way they looked more impressive?

However, the search of Magnolia does yield me the required Father Neptune…

Lovecraft’s maps

03 Friday Jun 2022

Posted by in Lovecraftian places, Maps, Scholarly works

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Along with the forthcoming mega-index to the completed volumes of Letters, it struck me that we could also use a companion volume containing maps. ‘Orienting’ maps, in outline but still somewhat detailed. Map that quickly tell readers where one place was in relation to another. I’d suggest the following:

1. Lovecraft’s Providence (the topography and places known as a boy)

2. Lovecraft’s Providence (post-1914).

3. Lovecraft’s College Hill and Marketplace (including tunnels).

4.   ”  Places near Providence (Dark Swamp etc).

5.   ”  Brooklyn.

6.   ”  New York City.

7.   ”  New England coastline.

8.   ”  Dots-on-the-map. A general ‘dot-map’ of Lovecraft’s excursion and trip destinations east of the Mississippi and up into Canada.

9.   ”  Florida and his southern excursions.

10.   ”  Circle locations (their origins, places).

11.   ”  Far-flung Empire (his interest in particular far-flung places, places used in fiction etc).

Appendix: Map and mapping sources known to have been owned, used, consulted by Lovecraft.

Appendix: Bibliography of maps known to exist, relating to the original Lovecraft material (i.e. not the wider and later Mythos).

Appendix: List of important addresses in Lovecraft’s life.

Might be done in a suitable period style…

‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Fulton Street

03 Friday Jun 2022

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This week on ‘picture postals’, a hunk o’ the actual place. Fulton Street, Brooklyn, to be exact. Or as good as, in the form of a .PNG cutout (i.e. on transparency) for Tentaclii readers.

This follows on from last week’s discovery of the location of Lovecraft’s fave restaurant at 7 Willoughby Street, just around the corner from Fulton.

Preview:

Download: fulton-st-cutout.png

Also, a couple of Willoughby Street ‘out-takes’ from my recent posts on John’s. These are ten years before Lovecraft’s New York sojourn, and are from the 1915-16 pictures made to forestall any damages litigation before the subway was dug.

Here we look along Willoughby Street, in 1915, from what is now No. 15 down to No. 1. The theatre (by then a cinema) is still on the corner at that point, but by Lovecraft’s time in the city would have become the Edison Electric Co. office building that still stands today as No. 15. The Elevated railway can be seen in the distance, as it swings around the Brooklyn Citizen newspaper building and heads down Fulton. The second barber pole seen here about marks the site of 7 Willoughby Street, later John’s, and part of its “Hungarian Restaurant” sign can be seen.

Here we look across the foot of Willoughby Street at that same point in time. The spot is seen on the bird’s-eye view.

The Brooklyn Citizen newspaper building is in the immediate foreground on the left, and their hoarding gives the news headlines. It looks like three newspaper hawkers are waiting for the early-morning newspaper bundles to land on the sidewalks. Behind the edge of the Citizen we can just see the signs that indicate the start of Willoughby Street, including Bristol’s restaurant at No. 3. The middle-distance of the picture shows roughly the stores that would have been opposite John’s. Note that the run of stores directly opposite are neatly boarded up, presumably in advance of the subway work, and (as seen on other pictures) their frontages tell people to use an entrance around on Fulton.

The Elevated railway on the right of the picture heads down into Fulton, but we see a passenger stop and the steep stairs up to the platform. Perhaps this was a frequent station for Lovecraft and friends, when John’s was the “spaghetti headquarters”… though of course the trains it served may have been headed the wrong way for some of the ‘gang’. The bird’s-eye postcard view, however, also reveals a station platform opposite and going the other way.

“Sunday morning elevated”, Lovecraft on the platform of the Elevated.

“I don’t think I shall miss such social activities as I have had”

02 Thursday Jun 2022

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I see that The Silver Key (blogger-scholar and author or Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery) is also off Facebook, and has a few observations…

passive scrolling, and ‘likes’, which is what Facebook / Instagram / TikTok, etc. encourages, eats up your time in an insidious fashion, far more than you know.

He’s now powering into LinkedIn though, which I guess is kind of Facebook for the business crowd. I’m not on LinkedIn either. Or Instagram or Twitter. In my case, my departure from Facebook (abruptly blocked for the cryptic reason of having the “potential to reach too many people”) has seen me continue to post all the useful localist information that I used to fillet-and-post. But instead of on my Facebook Groups, all that’s now at a WordPress-powered hyperlocal called The Potteries Post.

What was new on Tentaclii in May

01 Wednesday Jun 2022

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Time for another monthly round-up of items miscellaneously Tentaclii-fied.

In my regular Friday ‘Picture Postals’ posts I completed my photographic stroll around Lovecraft’s beloved Japanese Garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, discovering among other things that it was far larger than imagined and also had vast hot-houses. A possible partial inspiration of “The Shadow out of Time”, and definitely inspiring for his friend Belknap Long’s later wartime Curator of the Interplanetary Gardens series for boys. I looked into where the Eddy Jr. tale “Black Noon” might be found today, which spurred a ‘Picture Postals’ post on both the Dark Swamp and the adjacent Durfee Hill, with a new composite map and a side-trip (as Lovecraft did) into Pascoag and pointing up its “Red Hook” connection. One small new discovery was made, indicating why Morton might have wanted to visit Durfee Hill.

In other pictures, a picture was found of the 132 Wickenden Street branch of Lovecraft favoured “Jake’s”, and I mused on if he might have ever set foot in this branch. Faig Jr. suggests not, and it certainly looks like there’s no evidence. But I pointed out the proximity to the New York boat docks. Rather usefully, I also found the opening times for both this and the main branch. The ferreting away at “Jake’s” then led me to discover a very nice picture of the main site at 9 Canal St. Providence, and not just an exterior either. A superb interior with customers and owners, which I promptly cleaned and colourised. To top this discovery, later in the month I found the very elusive “John’s” in Brooklyn, though sadly not as an interior. Also “Bickford’s”, another Brooklyn favourite. This formed a quartet of posts — Bickford’s, Johns, pictures of John’s, and then ‘who John was’. With many new discoveries and pictures along the way. Now we at last have the addresses and names it’s possible that other Lovecraftians, especially those who know the history of New York City and have access to paid U.S. newspaper databases and city archives, will be able to find more in the future.

In scholarly work, there was news via S.T. Joshi of the two new volumes Miscellaneous Letters and Letters to Woodburn Harris and Others, set for August 2022. The Spanish edition of Joshi’s I Am Providence is out. The German Lovecraftians reported the imminence of their scholarly volume on the “cultural interplay between H.P. Lovecraft and Germany”. Which I assume will be issued in German, though hopefully someone will be translating it soon. Leslie Klinger’s annotated The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories appeared, an affordable cut-down one-volume paperback version of the previous volumes. The selection and ordering looks very suitable for beginners, and I believe he used the Joshi texts.

In my reading and note-taking on the Selected Letters I got as far as ‘Notes on Selected Letters II – part one’. The concluding part two is coming soon. I made the seemingly new discover about the strong likelihood that his reading of New Lands by Charles Fort influenced “The Colour Out of Space”. If he read it before and not after March 1927, that is.

In matters relating to historical context, I linked to useful blog post elsewhere about William Dean Howells, musing on which added to my knowledge about censorship in Lovecraft’s era. A PulpFest post also had me thinking about Lovecraft’s role in networking the productive end of early SF fandom, and thus ultimately in the exploration of space (via SF’s influence on the Space Race). I also spotted a scholarly book on Theosophy’s wider cultural impact, which I assume must include Weird Tales, Lovecraft and some of the circle.

In open archival material, I grabbed and rectified a nice new eBay scan of the Old Brick Row in Providence. A useful simplified map of Providence was found. The newly online archives of the Year Book of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers, 1923-1931 may also hold some as-yet undiscovered treasures. I also discounted the notion that Lovecraft might have known the novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, but along the way discovered a very interesting bit of proto-sci-fi.

As for the Lovecraft Circle, I noted the new Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Volume 2, and that J. Vernon Shea’s late memoir of Lovecraft is online as printed in Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 1966) with interesting surrounding context. Fritz Leiber’s collected and collectable science-fiction cat stories, Gummitch and friends, turned up to “borrow” as a scan on Archive.org. I did some digging re: the facts on an obscure and as yet untranslated 1980s mythos anthology from Spain.

Not much in the arts this month, though I don’t track the waves of videogames and Lovecraftian films. But I see there’s a “Quest of Iranon” opera production set for the stage in June 2022. Tanabe’s Innsmouth No Kage manga graphic-novel is to be published by Dark Horse later in the year. The overlooked ‘Lovecraft as character’ novel, Martian Falcon (2015) was discovered and it looks rather fun.

The only podcast this month was in the form of the welcome return of Robert M. Price’s The Lovecraft Geek — and with a cracker of an episode.

In scholarly software, PDF Index Generator 3.2 looks well worth having. The AI auto-coloriser DeOldify can now be run without Internet access, via a Windows installer. Also rather handy for some, you can block the drop-down suggestions on Google Scholar. These block lines are what I cooked up for uBlock Origin and they currently work on Scholar…

Also handy is a Web browser UserScript to Display the total time for a YouTube playlist. The old one had stopped working, but this one works for now. Try it with the new ‘best of’ Tom Shippey on Tolkien playlist.

As usual, please consider becoming my patron on Patreon, as these days every little helps. Despite Prime Minister Boris firing various “big bazookas” of money at the public over the last three years, not a penny of it has yet reached me. So the monthly Patreon is very useful. Thankfully there have been almost no departures of patrons due to Tentaclii’s recent domain change-over. Mentioning and linking to Tentaclii is also useful, and costs nothing except a moment’s time.

Many thanks, and stay clear of the Monkey Pox!

Jaroslav Foglar exhibition

31 Tuesday May 2022

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I’d never heard of Jaroslav Foglar before, but the writer has an exhibition on in Prague until 4th September 2022, “The City As A Phantom: Prague inspirations of Jaroslav Foglar”.

Foglar’s lived and worked in Prague as a young child, eagerly absorbing the atmosphere of the places where he lived, worked or met with friends. Then he transformed it into the mysterious city of his novels. Foglar elevated the seemingly mundane urban scenery into a mystical and mysterious labyrinth, connecting many time-layers, each living their own lives and fascinating and enticing to explore. Such an image of the city [based on Prague] opens up to the reader in many of the author’s novels, most notably in his most famous trilogy, which motivated a whole generation of readers to search for the original motifs and locations of the book.

So he sounds like a mix of an authentic (rather than ersatz modern ‘young adult’) ‘urban fantasy’ and the typical Scouting-type boy-adventures of the 1930-40s. Although written for boys his novels have apparently… “left a deep trace in Czech popular culture”, despite his work being banned under first the Nazis and then communism from 1950 – circa 1968. With a brief respite in the early 1960s when he seems to have been permitted to work on a newspaper comic-strip. One biography of growing up under communism states that boys would avidly seek out his ‘banned’ books in the city’s second-hand bookshops.

A 2017 article, on his concurrent strong influence in Eastern Europe on outdoors education, notes he is… “mostly unknown to the international audience” either as a writer or educator. It also offers a useful one-line summary of his themes…

Foglar’s specific outdoor adventure characteristics include timelessness, place, romance, mystery and challenge, and traditions with rituals.

From what I can tell after a quick scoot-around he also appears to have influenced comics too. There was a 2018 comics tribute to his work and characters…

For the ‘Amazing New Adventures’, dozens of contemporary authors and illustrators from the Czech Republic and Slovakia came up with 50 different visions of how to continue the tales. Some of the authors were even born after the original series ended, and only know it in retrospect, while others lived in the 1960s and even 1950s. These new adventures range from stories set back in the 1940s with the same basic look and lettering as the original series to very modern takes on the themes, with science fiction, horror or comic aspects and freestyle illustrations reflecting new trends in graphic novels.

Sounds interesting… but his fiction and comics have never been translated into English if Amazon is anything to go by. I’m guessing the original books don’t work well outside of Eastern Europe and perhaps their “mystical and mysterious” aspects may not have aged well?

The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century

31 Tuesday May 2022

Posted by in Kipling, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Online Books recently catalogued The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, which it had spotted in a nice clean .TXT version at Gutenberg. A fascinating curiosity, it seems, is Mrs. Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827). A lively proto-steampunk and partly aerial adventure by all accounts, albeit stretching over three volumes. And perhaps thus a possibility for adaptation to expand Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control (“With the Night Mail”) universe, on which Tentaclii has had several posts.

Three volumes is a bit daunting though. Has it been abridged? Yes, it has, “The only modern edition is abridged” says L.W. Currey, but doesn’t name the edition. Amazon reveals this as a “University of Michigan Press; Abridged edition (1995)”, aka “Ann Arbour”. Google Books reveals it was a paperback and also “illustrated”.

The SF Encyclopedia has “one of the very earliest Proto SF texts … a somewhat melodramatic plot”. Sounds great, and apparently lots of early sci-fi inventiveness too.

The SF Encyclopedia perhaps usefully comments on the University of Michigan edition is a “much cut bowdlerization”, basing this on one negative review. Some 100 pages cut and touches of new smoothing added at the joins, it seems. I’m fine with that, for reading enjoyment rather than scholarship. If the feminists who claim her (very much ‘in passing’) want to produce a sumptuous critical edition of the three volume table-trembler, then go ahead.

It looks like the abridged University of Michigan edition sells for £30 on eBay, and would be tricky to get via Amazon. Since there’s Amazon’s usual utter confusion on editions, and you might end up buying some public domain shovelware you could get free elsewhere.

Archive.org refuses a search for “The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century”, presumably because of the ! mark, and has “No results matched your criteria” for “A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century” in the title. So it’s difficult to compare editions there. But eventually, via Google and then an author search, deep down the Archive.org results (she wrote a lot about gardening after her marriage to a botanist) one finds the University of Michigan Press edition is available to borrow.

Also there is an 1828 second edition of the three-volume work: I, II, and III. But Gutenberg’s clean .TXT compilation of all three volumes will be preferred for some e-ink devices such as the original Kindle 3. This, together with judicious skimming, is perhaps the best option for reading.

I should also note the 18 hour LibriVox recording, which again is a bit daunting.

It never seems to have been adapted for media or comics.

I’m not alone in only just hearing about this novel. A 2018 blog post by Gothic Wanderer (not linked due to absolutely massive plot spoilers) remarks that she is vastly superior to Mary Shelley. And, yet despite being claimed by feminists…

The novel has received almost no critical attention. I have spent twenty years reading and studying Gothic fiction and yet I only learned of the novel’s existence in the last year. It is time for it to be studied more.

S.T. Joshi observes, in his weighty survey Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, that Loudon does not share Shelley’s radical politics — which may perhaps explain some of the neglect. Joshi also points up a few of the horror passages, before passing on to Poe in his survey of early mummies.

It seems that Lovecraft and his circle did not know the novel.

Who was John Pucciatti?

29 Sunday May 2022

Posted by in Historical context

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Yesterday I at last firmly located the elusive “John’s”, the favourite Brooklyn spaghetti hang-out of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.

Here again is the ad, from a 1925 radical magazine. “John’s” at “7 Willoughby”.

Who was John Pucciati (1885-1967), who ran John Pucciatti’s Spaghetti House (popularly known as “John’s”)? He was a quite a character in 1910s and 20s New York, and is still remembered to this day. Difficult to research via Google, though. Because for some reason Google Search dumbly insists on removing the quote marks from “John Pucciatti” after the first page of results. But thankfully there’s eTools, which has no such dumbness built in.

The basic details are:

“Established in 1908 by John Pucciatti, an immigrant from Umbria, its menu offered an appetizer, main dish, dessert, and cup of coffee for under a dollar.”

He was an early Italian anarchist. Lovecraft knew a few of these…

There’s nothing about ‘anarchists’ to be afraid of! … they are very harmless folk. … Despite their bold talk they are timid & ineffectual creatures, most of whom would not hurt a fly if they could. I know many of them … [such as Morton, and likely also Loveman in a rather closeted way.] [They are to be distinguished from the Greenwich Village ‘radicals’ who adopt] a slovenly insincerity & cheap posing habit, which merely uses the guise of radicalism as an easy way of attracting attention.” — H.P. Lovecraft, July 1929.

Pucciatti was perhaps of a different order than Morton or the posers at New York parties. Maybe more syndicalist, depending on how much experience he had of the dramatic and very sudden industrialisation of Italy, before leaving for America. Though we can’t be sure, since he doesn’t appear to have left any writings. On him Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City can only offer that his restaurant was one of…

… a multitude of Italian cafes and restaurants offered cheap meals and distraction, serving as important social and political centers. Founded in 1908 by John Pucciatti, an immigrant from Umbria, John’s on East 12th Street was legendarily known as “the favorite meeting place of free thinkers of all nationalities”. Other popular anarchist hangouts included Albasi’s grocery on East 106th Street and the Vesuvio restaurant on 3rd Avenue near 116th Street in East Harlem, where for one dollar radicals could enjoy a cheap meal while debating politics and socializing.

Another book, Making Italian America, has the same and adds a little more from a recent biography of the socialist labour-organiser and editor Tresca…

In the United States, the sovversivi’s most popular hangout was John’s Spaghetti House on East Twelfth Street in New York City (now simply John’s), which was commonly advertised in Italian radical newspapers as ‘the favorite meeting place of free thinkers of all nationalities’. Established in 1908 by John Pucciatti, an immigrant from Umbria, its menu offered an appetizer, main dish, dessert, and cup of coffee for under a dollar. Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, and other famous sovversivi regularly ate there, often holding special radical banquets at John’s private apartment upstairs.

At the time he started his main branch, aka ‘John’s of 12th Street’, the Wild West was still wild and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were rooming just around the block. Pucciatti had at least one local artist fresco the walls, paid in free meals. The place was classy, a formal white-tablecloth Italian restaurant with apron-ed waiters. But by the early 1920s the place seems to have slipped over from idealistic tub-thumping 1910s Italian anarchism to illegal tub-brewed booze… and thus the first wave of U.S. gangster-ism. The slide being quite evident from 1922. John’s became a popular watering hole for proto-mafia gangsters such as Lucky Luciano. Who was not so ‘lucky’ one night as he left the place, being gunned down outside. At this time it…

also operated as a well-known speakeasy [i.e. illegal booze purveyor] during prohibition. The ground floor continued as a restaurant, while wine and whiskey were made in the basement and served in espresso cups on the second floor.

Entrance to the upstairs was via a hidden staircase. Head hooch-brewer Mama John had a candle lit in the window when the fresh booze was ready to be served. Any sign of the cops in the area, and the candle went out. One article states that John’s on 12th Street was “ground zero” for the subsequent growth of the Italian Mafia in the U.S. This may explain his low-profile as a business during prohibition, keeping out of directories and not advertising except in journals likely to bring the right type of clientele.

After the war the main John’s catered to off-Broadway actors and the theatre crowd, and continued to be considered one of the top Italian eateries in America. As shown by a tourist Guide Book…

John’s at the corner of 2nd Ave , and 12th St. (the heart of the off-B’way theatre area) has been satisfying the palates of folks for 50 years. Under the guidance of Dan and Ann Pucciatti, the north Italian hostelry…

The 2009 book Restaurant Startup & Growth magazine tells us that his son…

Danny Pucciatti, took over day-to-day management of the [main] restaurant in the 1950s when his parents retired. Eventually he sold the establishment to current owners Mike Alpert and Nick Sitnycky in 1973.

It’s still there today, and still a leading place to eat good food.

But what of Brooklyn? Nothing seems to have passed into New York restaurateur lore about the 1925-30(?) Brooklyn branch, which is presumably why it has eluded Lovecraftians until now. The opening of this branch can however be dated by the 24-month block of adverts which John took out in Worker’s Monthly. In March and April 1925 his first adverts appeared, but the Brooklyn branch was not advertised. “Indian” here is perhaps a typesetter’s mistake, later corrected to “Italian”?

Then in May 1925 the Brooklyn branch appears on the ad, and the ads (inc. Brooklyn) continue on through February 1927 when they cease. I assume the 24-month block-booking was over. So the Brooklyn branch opened in spring 1925, and it was still in existence in early 1927. John’s first appears in Lovecraft’s 1925 Diary on 4th May, so that both fits and confirms. Possibly there was a grand 1st May ‘May Day’ opening day, something that would be most suitable for an anarchist. Lovecraft returned to John’s to eat on the 6th and 7th May, and frequently thereafter. In the letters a typical encounter with “John’s — the Italian joint around the corner in Willoughby St.” is…

stopping only at twilight, when I wended my homeward way, pausing at John’s Spaghetti place for my usual Sunday dinner of meat balls and spaghetti, vanilla ice cream, and coffee. Incidentally — not many doors away, on the other side of Willoughby St, I found a restaurant which specialises in home-baked beans.

This fits the facts, as the “home-made baked beans” shop was further up and on the other side as can be seen on 1940s.nyc. But John’s remained Lovecraft’s spaghetti “headquarters”, as he later phrased it. He was getting the best that 1920s New York could offer, made by cooks born in little hill-villages in the old country. Which must have been quite some spaghetti. He would afterwards find it difficult to get a comparable ‘New York flavoured’ spaghetti meal in Providence.

Back in New York, John’s had closed before summer 1931. On page 937 of Letters to Family Lovecraft states it was “defunct” by July 1931…

All three now set out for dinner — at the old Bristol Dining Room in Willoughby Street near Fulton, next door to the now defunct John’s, which was my Brooklyn headquarters for spaghetti in the old days.

Was John ever on the premises? Unless any Lovecraft letters can show otherwise, back in the mid 1920s it may well have been that John Pucciatti — the anarchist who looked like a Roman nobleman but who was actually from the “little medieval village of Bevagna, between Spoleto and Assisi” — wasn’t sitting down at a table to chat philosophy and art with Lovecraft. He appears to have lived and worked at his main branch. Still, he might have popped in now and again, when he wanted to escape from the big-name gangsters and the fumes of Mama John’s back-yard hooch-brewing.