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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Historical context

The Greatest Adventure (1929)

01 Friday Nov 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

I see that Archive.org has the short novel The Greatest Adventure (February 1929, as reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for June 1944).

The plot (below) has some resemblance to Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness. Though the only Lovecraftian comment I can find, on this interesting 1920s ‘lost race’ / ‘dinosaur survival’ combo-tale, is in the one-page introduction to its reprint in Price’s The Antarktos Cycle: Horror and Wonder at the Ends of the Earth (2006).

My plot-spoilers follow…

A whaler brings a monstrous lizard-thing to a famous scientist in California. An ice-quake in Antarctica had torn a mysterious and huge petroleum-slicked sea-passage into the heart of the frozen continent. The sailor had followed this passage, and thus found the weird lizard-thing he now shows. He also saw boulders incised with strange lizard-shaped hieroglyphs. The scientist & co. set out for Antarctica, where they find what the sailor has described. Two of the party then fly inland and from above they spy a lush green valley with giant lizard-things in it. The petroleum is partly aflame and has melted the ice, revealing the caverns below. The revealed valley also has an enormous tunnel at one end, into which the explorers fly in their plane… only to be attacked by flying lizard-things from deeper under the earth. Meanwhile, the scientist deciphers the hieroglyphs, and learns that millions of years ago a new form of life was created by an alien race, but that this new life proved impossible to control. Antarctica was then sealed to stop the alien-engineered life from infecting the planet. The boulders with the hieroglyphs were then placed around Antarctica as a ‘warning to the future’. Meanwhile, the plane explorers have blasted open a cave entrance, which has released plant-spores they think are harmless. But in the night these spores become a fast-growing plant which envelops their plane. They extricate the plane with difficulty. Thankfully the plot has provided the leaking raw petroleum (usefully held in a natural dam) which is needed to swamp and kill the noxious alien life-forms. The petroleum flood is released and set on fire, and thus the dangerous plant-spores and lizard-things are utterly destroyed. The explorers escape and the world is saved.

Somewhat similar to Lovecraft… Antarctica as a setting, mysterious stone hieroglyphs to be translated, telling of ancient aliens who artificially create ‘Frankenstein’ life-forms they could not control, but which it turns out are still very real and menacing. However, the 1929 book seems to have passed with hardly a trace. For instance, judging by Google Books the book The Search for E.T. Bell: Also Known as John Taine appears to have been able to note only one review in a California student journal. There was however one New York Times supplement review in March 1929, a review which August Derleth spotted and mentioned in passing to Lovecraft in a letter (“a lost world of horror under the Antarctic ice”) though did not send as a cutting. This aside, and the quality of the review source, would surely have had Lovecraft enquiring at the local library to see if the review could be found in the recent back-copies. However, S.T. Joshi states… “It does not appear that Lovecraft ever read Taine” (Letters to Robert Bloch, page 15). But, I’d suggest it’s not impossible that he read the 3rd March 1929 NYT review. I regret I can locate no free copy of that review, at present.

The 1944 reprint of The Greatest Adventure appeared after Lovecraft’s death, and today it can also be found on Project Gutenberg in handy readable ebook formats.

Heating and freezing futures

14 Saturday Sep 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Historical context

≈ 2 Comments

An Italian Lovecraftian this week points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with their tale “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for the Californian Summer 1935 issue). The Earth is slipping imperceptibly closer to the Sun, in their fictional future-scenario, and heating up accordingly.

The Italian author observes that… “When this story was written, fears of this kind were certainly much less present in society”. Sort-of, I’d add. While it’s true that the “fears” were not then both widespread and hysterical, there was concern that verged on alarmist. A quick scoot around the Web shows such worries were then quite prominent in the press, and such reports presumably prompted the tale. A few examples (sans CO2) will suffice…

L.A. Times summary of the year

An agency wire-report from Switzerland, reported as far afield as Australia.

British Met Office reportedly anticipating half of England being wiped off the map by flooding.

Thus, when I say they did “alarmist” fiction first, I mean they did fiction that was published in a timely manner and amplified the popular alarmist press coverage.

One can now see that this was the 1920s/30s flipside of a widespread Victorian / Edwardian false consensus of a gradual and unavoidable cooling. Here is H.G. Wells on the topic in 1931, remembering the way that this belief hobbled the optimism of the late Victorians and early Edwardians, and indeed the world…

… the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world — and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling [book] Universe Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years. Given as much as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour of regret that one was born so soon.

This is from his 1931 preface to a new edition of his famous book The Time Machine (1895). Wells refers to the idea that the Sun only had a limited store of material to burn, and must inevitably cool as it would use this material up before another million years had gone by — and with its depletion the Earth was also forever cooling and would relatively soon become inhospitable to life. Here is the younger Wells of 1894 in a leading London paper, noting the consensus of his day…

On the supposition, accepted by all scientific men, that the earth is undergoing a steady process of cooling …” (“Another Basis for Life”, Saturday Review, 22nd December 1894).

Just as many Tentaclii readers will have lived in times which saw scientists flip (in our case between the 1970s panic about a new Ice Age, and the current greenhouse warming), it appears Lovecraft and his generation lived through a similar flip.


27-minute Horrorbabble reading of “Till A’ the Seas” audiobook, free on YouTube.

L’ Antique Sentier

02 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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In French, the elegant new blog L’ Antique Sentier peeps into Lovecraft’s collection of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. The blog is subtitled “H.P. Lovecraft, New England, old books, antique photos…” and has some fine photography of books and the man himself.

Incidentally, I read in the Sully letters that at least one 5″ x 7″ negative of Lovecraft was made by Barlow, and in (presumably) the good light of a Florida summer too. I wonder what happened to those negatives?

Lovecraft and Charles Fort

24 Friday May 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Historical context

≈ 3 Comments

A Patreon patron question for May 2024:

In “The Whisperer in Darkness” HPL mentions “the extravagant books of Charles Fort”. What did he actually think of Fort the man, and Fort’s influence on the topic of ‘phenomena that fall outside current understanding’?


Late in his life Lovecraft wrote to Fritz Leiber, Jr….

“I note your reference to the late Charles Fort — some of whose books I have read with extreme interest. I don’t think his scraps of bizarre reporting made out much of a case against accepted science, but I do tremendously admire the zeal & consistency of his delvings. He makes magnificent weird source-material!” (November 1936).

Hmmm, possibly used as source material? For Lovecraft? Interesting. In which case… which Fort books were read, and when? Well, Lovecraft first encountered Fort via The Book of the Damned (1919).

But exactly when was long unknown. Joshi stated several times (e.g. in Primal Sources) that he could not pin it down. We knew he read Damned because in September 1927 Lovecraft read Fort’s later book New Lands (1923), yet states he… “didn’t find it as interesting as [the earlier] The Book of the Damned” (Selected Letters II). Actually, “read” is misleading. Lovecraft states elsewhere that he… “skimmed over Charles Fort’s New Lands” rather than read it closely. The introduction by Booth Tarkington perhaps helps explain this skimming…

“Of his attack on the astronomers it can at least be said that the literature of indignation is enriched by it”

Lovecraft was an astronomer. One can see how, encountering the coruscation head-on in chapter two, Lovecraft might have skimmed the rest.

He could have read The Book of the Damned at any time between August 1926 and early 1920 (published December 1919, and it’s unlikely the master would have grabbed the book ‘hot off the press’ from New York). The timing of the book’s publication was opportune, with Fort presenting his material to the public on the cusp of modernity — between the dissolution of old certainties and the wavering establishment of the new modern ‘hard’ sciences.

However, we now know that Fort did not seed Lovecraft’s 1919-1926 period of writing. As S.T. Joshi writes in I Am Providence…

“Lovecraft, although having previously heard of Fort, did not read any of his work until Donald Wandrei lent him The Book of the Damned in March 1927.”

Right, so there we have it. Book of the Damned (1919) read in March 1927, and New Lands (1923) read by September 1927. It turns out that Lovecraft had…

“heard of him for years, but never read his stuff […] and now [Frank Belknap] Long, who has just encountered the material, tells me that it is marvellously weird and imaginatively captivating. Ford appears to be a man of some culture & ability, far above the usual run of ‘flat-earthers’ & kindred eccentrics.” (29th January 1927).

So here Lovecraft’s sentiment about the man is being filtered through Long’s gush. On actually reading Fort, Lovecraft’s impression was less positive…

“He is a fine author to skim, but an impossible one to read! What a fascinating jumble of rumours and traveller’s tales he has assembled & what a delicious set of conclusions he has drawn from them. He is distinctly above the average of such bizarre eccentrics & seems well versed in philosophy, though weak in science, psychology, & archaeology. I can understand why Long raved so violently about him [for Fort] is full of imaginative provocation, though the style is utterly hopeless.” (27th March 1927).

Here Lovecraft values Fort greatly as a collector, and somewhat as a dazzle-eyed wanderer in the realms of mysterious phenomena. But not as a writer, even a semi-surrealist one at times, and certainly not as a scientist dissecting “phenomena that fall outside current understanding”.

Incidentally, the books were apparently best-sellers. While the Providence Public Library may have been sniffy about stocking them, they cannot have been hard to find. But it seems Lovecraft needed Long’s spur, and then loans from Wandrei’s growing library, to actually obtain and read copies. The reading dates, now known to Lovecraftians, mean that Fort cannot have had an influence on the depiction of the correlation of widely separated mysterious events, such as in “The Call of Cthulhu” written a year or so earlier. The inspiration there is far more likely to lie back in Lovecraft’s boyhood reading of detective mysteries, and in his own collection of curious and weird cuttings in his scrapbooks. He kept his own voluminous scrapbooks, but they have not survived. Lovecraft states that he finally had his cuttings well-sorted and assembled into scrapbooks by October 1926, a long anticipated labour but one which required enough spare money to buy a large number of empty scrapbooks — and thus the process depicted in “Cthulhu” partly reflects his own sorting of his mounds of cuttings into ordered scrapbooks.

Did Fort’s books offer anything of special interest to Lovecraft? Well, take your pick from a wide range. But as Lovecraft states…

“No idea has ever fascinated me so much as that of the wafting of alien life across space, & I have enjoyed reading about these doubtful phenomena in books like Charles Fort’s eccentric Book of the Damned & New Lands!”.

So there is a possible slight influence on “The Whisperer in Darkness”, and Fort is certainly mentioned in the text. But ‘slight’ because Lovecraft was dealing in the transfer of life between systems well before he read Fort. Also because the Theosophists had similar ideas, as did the pulps. But perhaps Fort himself was an inspiration, since in “Darkness” the hero Wilmarth appears to spend much time in countering believers in Fortean phenomena. This perhaps hints at Lovecraft’s desire to put some distance between himself and “Fort’s influence on the topic” of an apparent abundance of ‘real-world weird’ material, as the master’s fan-base grew to encompass the many youngsters being influenced by Fort.

“The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends asseverated them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic in manner of telling, to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists…” (from “The Whisperer in Darkness”).

But, as he wrote to one of these young fans — Emil Petaja — in 1935, Lovecraft the rationalist clearly saw such apparent mysteries through the prism of science. As misunderstandings, or as things logically explained… if one knew enough about physics, meteorology, natural history, and the cynicism of dime-extracting journalists.

“Assorted marvels like those in the eccentric books of Charles Fort are not hard to account for. Fort scraped up all sorts of press anecdotes of a certain type — which in turn were typical misstatements, misinterpretations, exaggerations, & distortions of actually observed things, or else hallucinations or fabrications. Track down any one of them to its reported place of occurrence, & the marvel evaporates. Unusual atmospheric effects, natural phenomena like the ‘fairy crosses’ of western Virginia, optical & chemical properties of dust storms & kindred things — these are the real sources of much of the Fort data. Another fruitful source is conscious press sensationalism — the kind of hokum peddled by the flamboyant American Weekly (of which [the writer] A. Merritt is associated!) or the Hearst rags. It ought to be significant that no genuine man of science has ever taken Fort seriously.” (31st May 1935, Selected Letters V).

A little later, in a letter to Petaja in June 1935, Lovecraft presses home the point for the lad. Fort is… “a curious nut, probably sincere — but infinitely gullible […] his books are interesting as a source of weird ideas, but have no other value.”

But did most of Lovecraft’s postumous fans know of Lovecraft’s faint distaste for Fort’s influence on youngsters? Perhaps not, for many decades. Since August Derleth’s popular best-seller The Lurker at the Threshold, supposedly written by/with Lovecraft, offered what appears to be a public endorsement of Fort. This could have been taken by many pre-1990s readers as reflecting Lovecraft’s own sentiments, rather than Derleth’s or the narrator’s…

“a very large, though usually suppressed, body of occurrences antipodally contradictory to the total scientific knowledge of mankind … some of which have been collected and chronicled in two remarkable books by […] Charles Fort — The Book of the Damned and New Lands — I commend them to your attention.”

So there we have it. As a man, Fort was deemed an admirable researcher, collector, and curator of a modern ‘cabinet of curiosities’, all of which allowed him to display a vivid imagination worthy of the master’s praise. As a publisher of what are said to have been 1920s best-sellers, Lovecraft might even have been a little envious, though he is silent on that point (other than to note in passing in spring 1931… “have you noticed how much more attention the fantastic and picturesque Charles Fort is receiving of late”). As a writer, Lovecraft did not admire Fort. Of course a writer is a sort of conjurer — with one hand he reveals himself in his text, while with the other he conceals. But Lovecraft does not seem to have detected any personality traits in the writing, beyond an obvious kookery and the limitations of Fort’s education and reading.

Lovecraft never met Fort in person, and so far as I know he never met anyone who had. He and Fort did not overlap while in New York City. In 1921 Fort set sail from New York City for London, Great Britain. There Fort quietly beavered away in the British Museum Library, supported by a timely inheritance from an uncle. Fort did not return to his home in NYC until 1929, by which time Lovecraft was long gone from the city.


Further reading:

The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction (2020).

Lovecraft & Fort: Martian Falcon (mystery dieselpunk novel set in New York in 1925, Lovecraft teams up with Fort).

The Newport Tower

09 Friday Feb 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Historical context, Picture postals

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There’s a still-mysterious tower in Lovecraft’s favourite ‘visiting town’ of Newport, Rhode Island.

Lovecraft would have been aware of several theories about the tower: that it was a simple colonial stone windmill modelled on a British example (possibly originally built as an astronomical observatory, interestingly); or was part of a colony of shipwrecked medieval Portuguese sailors; perhaps it was built by Irish or Welsh sailors prior to later colonists; or was actually part of a late Viking colony in what the Vikings called Vinland the Good (an idea first elaborated in Antiquitates Americanae, 1837). The latter was the more romantic notion and caught the public’s imagination, as one can see from this postcard…

‘Built by the Norsemen’

Early Viking visitors to America were not proven by hard evidence in Lovecraft’s time, though many sought hard evidence for them and sometimes fabricated it. Nevertheless the Viking theory was taken seriously into the 1940s, evidenced by the book The Newport Tower: Norse Church or Stone-Built Windmill? (1942). Today there is incontrovertible hard evidence of both Viking logging and a settlement, albeit much further north along the coast than New England. The climate being more favourable back then, at the end of what is generally known as the ‘Medieval Warm Period’.

There might appear to be mention of the Newport tower in a letter by Lovecraft. Since in a stream of consciousness riff for Morton (Selected Letters III) we have…

sheep on the hills behind Newport … the Gothick tower …

However this was not the tower in question. Rather it was the imposing and lovely gothic tower of St. George’s Chapel at Newport, able to be seen from a great distance in and around the town and one of the architectural highlights of the place. Lovecraft wrote about this tower in a poem, see page 307 of The Ancient Track (2nd Ed.) He was thus not talking about the mysterious ‘old’ tower, by then set in a placid park where Lovecraft liked to sit and write letters.

But one can suggest that Newport’s ‘old’ tower, a key antiquarian attraction of a town that Lovecraft visited many times in the mid 1930s, proved to be a stimulus for his imagination. For instance, the story-idea from circa the mid 1930s known as “The Tower”…

S. of Arkham is cylindrical tower of stone with conical roof — perhaps 12 feet across & 20 ft. high. There has been a great arched opening quarter way up, but it is sealed
with masonry. […] Tales of fate of persons climbing into tower before opening was sealed. Indian legends speak of it as existing as long as they could remember — supposed to be older than mankind. Legend that it was built by Old Ones (shapeless & gigantic amphibia) & that it was once under water. Dressed stone masonry shew odd & unknown technique. Geometrical designs on large stone above sealed opening utterly baffling.

This could well have been inspired by his musing on the Newport Tower.

His latter sentence “Geometrical designs on large stone above sealed opening utterly baffling” is interesting, since in 1946 investigators found…

a Swedish-Norwegian runic inscription on the west side of the [Newport] tower, 14 feet above the ground. The inscription included a date: 1010.

Most likely this was a slow-burning hoax by an antiquarian, as is said to be usually assumed. But it’s interesting that a decade before the discovery Lovecraft hints at something similar for his tower. One has a sudden vision of him sneaking up to the tower at dusk, with a step-ladder and a small hammer-and-chisel and a mischievous grin on his face. But probably not, even though he was fond of hoaxes.

His possibly related story-idea from the same period, known as “The Rose Window”, has a similar tower…

Very ancient house on Central Hill, Kingsport, inherited […] In back garden, ruins of a brick tower 12 ft in diameter. Rumours of evil annual use — lights — signalling — answered. Doorway now bricked up. Ivy-clad. Windowless — 30 ft standing — once 50 [ft] with windows and flat railed roof.

I’d suggest that a letter to Jonquil Leiber of November 1936 might help to date “The Rose Window”, as Lovecraft wrote…

I am greatly interested in your reference to your grandfather […] & his menacing cone-topped Devil-Tower — & the strange whistles blown by no human lips & doubtless designed as signals to the Dark Ones of Outer Space. […] I’d surely enjoy hearing of “Old Master Stebbins” daemon-chasing & other-world-communing in the Dark Tower!” (Writers of the Dark)

He later suggests an Ancient Roman stone near St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, as a good site for a tale inspired by her grandfather’s recollections…

not very far from your St. Michael’s Mount — at St. Hilary on the mainland — there is a stone with a Roman inscription […] dating from A.D. 307 & bringing the region vividly into the stream of classical history. Truly, a fitting locale for Adrian Stephens & his Devil-Tower! (Writers of the Dark)

As for the ‘old’ Newport Tower, Lovecraft would not have known about later theories suggested after his death: the wild claim that it was built by a massive Chinese fleet sailing around the world; the occultist claim it was built for Doctor Dee on a secret Elizabethan voyage to the New World; that it was a Templar temple; or rather more plausibly that it was built for astronomical observations by a local gentleman.

I’m no expert but so far as I can tell none of the evidence available is conclusive for any of the theories.

Further reading:

One can also find lone towers in Lovecraft’s poetry. See pages 41, 78, 96, 307 of The Ancient Track (2nd edition).

Flicks in Florida

19 Tuesday Dec 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Films & trailers, Historical context, Scholarly works

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Deep Cuts has a long and balanced post on Lovecraft and the movie The House of Rothschild (1934), which he saw with Barlow on arriving in Florida. One wonders what else was playing locally and was perhaps seen during Lovecraft’s visits with Barlow? Possibly the forthcoming Lovecraft in Florida will cast some light on such topics.

Popular Magazine

13 Wednesday Dec 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context

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Popping up on Archive.org, a scan of The Popular Magazine for July 1908. Let’s take a look at what might have appealed to Lovecraft. Joshi has him regularly reading… “Street & Smith’s Popular Magazine around 1905–10″.

Cover: finishing from the deck of a crowded passenger boat. Hmmm, somewhat lacking in fish-monsters.

Looking at the contents, things get more interesting the further toward the back one goes. There one finds items such as…

THE WHITE MAN’S GIFT. A tale of stirring adventure on the Patagonian pampas.

THE WHITE VEIL OF MYSTERY. Tells of the coming of two ships to a strange rock in the ocean.

TALES OF THE LOST LEGION. A Series.

Otherwise, conventional historical sea adventures, modern business tricks, mining and gold in the west, prehistoric adventure.

Even the above three pale when looked at more closely. For instance “White Veil” has nothing of “the bells of faery” about it. “The Lost Legion” is not about Ancient Romans and not set in northern England, but is a ‘lost race’ tale in America.

There are also a number of half-page fillers, such as this which brings to mind “The Dunwich Horror”…

THE two heaviest boys in the world live on a farm in Texas, and, although their united ages do not exceed fourteen years, their combined weights total 360 pounds. The elder boy—William Ashcroft — looks a veritable mountain of flesh … At five years of age he was as large as a full-grown man.

Otherwise it’s difficult to see what Lovecraft saw in it, based on this one issue, though it did sometimes carry more unusual material. September 1907, also on Archive.org, seems equally lacking in any Weird Tales type material. My guess is he picked it up for the sequel to Haggard’s famous She in early 1905, and soon after bagged a discounted three-year subscription. It certainly was good value, 224 pages a month for 15 cents.

Street & Smith proto-pulps to 1930, now online

08 Friday Dec 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Odd scratchings, Picture postals, Scholarly works

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Northern Illinois University has reportedly completed its scanning project for much of the output of the Street & Smith publishing company to 1930. At the Nickels and Dimes website one can now find, freely online, 113,342 well-scanned pages from 4,790 ‘dime’ novels and proto-pulp ‘story papers’. The work began as “a local initiative in 2013”, but grew over the years and then landed “a grant of $338,630 from the National Endowment for the Humanities” to ensure completion.

The site doesn’t yet have the new press-release about the project’s completion, but a sort-by-date shows it runs to 1930. Note that their U.S. public domain status only extends to 1928, and that only from 1st January 2024.

And there are enough pictures here, and since I have a snuffling cold, I feel can class this post as one of my weekly ‘Picture Postals’ posts. Especially since some of the serials are known to have been enjoyed by Lovecraft in his youth. Such as the ‘Nick Carter’ adventure-mysteries. For instance, one can imagine him being intrigued enough to at least pick this combo of kitties and Egypt off the news-stands for a thumb-through even at age 19…

Though if he read them that late appears to be unknown. Possibly not. Lovecraft recalled them in a letter for the musical and philosophical Galpin, suggesting they were intended for “small boys”…

“Nick Carter and Old Sleuth, dear to the small boys of other generations, and studied almost invariably without knowledge or consent of the reader’s parents!”

Though that would be small boys of the early 1900s, apparently able to read page after page of small text. Something that would likely be deemed beyond the capabilities of the screen-boggled boys of 2023.

Lovecraft read a lot of them…

“If I had kept all the nickel novels — Pluck & Luck, Brave & Bold, Frank Reade, Jesse James, Nick Carter, Old King Brady, &c. — which I surreptitiously read 35 years ago… I could probably get a young fortune for ’em today”.

As to dates, Joshi has him as reading…

“Street & Smith’s Popular Magazine around 1905–10; read the entirety of the Railroad Man’s Magazine (1906–13); he began reading the Black Cat around 1904.”

We also know he gave up on following Conan Doyle’s new Sherlock Holmes tales in 1908.

For ‘prime dime’ Street & Smith juvenile reading we’re probably more likely talking about Lovecraft at between the ages 9 – 16, the years 1899 – 1905. So those would probably be the years to look at first, on the now-completed Nickels and Dimes website. That said, his interest in occasional issues as late as 1913 can’t be ruled out. And, newly interested in the industry trends and markets for fiction, he would have at least glanced at Street & Smith’s covers on the news-stands during the mid 1920s.

He was likely drawn to Popular Magazine by the sequel to the famous She in February 1905.

Note that at Nickels and Dimes you need to enlarge the view before you go to fullscreen. You can’t enlarge once in fullscreen, it seems. Also note that key S&S magazines such as Popular Magazine appear to be missing. Evidently it’s the complete collection, but not complete in terms of the entire S&S output. If you can offer them a complete run of missing titles, or fill-in issues, I guess they’d be quite interested.

The Recluse, 1927

20 Friday Oct 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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New on Archive.org, a good scan of Paul W. Cook’s The Recluse. This 1927 issue has Lovecraft’s ground-breaking “Supernatural Literature”…

Imagine a copy of this plomping down on the doormat in 1927, and opening it to find Lovecraft had laid it all out for you.

From the Lovecraft circle, the issue also has a dream-tale by Donald Wandrei and a poem by Clark Ashton Smith. Plus a cover drawn by Vrest Orton. Even a somewhat supernatural poem by Arthur Goodenough, among others.

de Camp’s other essays, more essays

26 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in de Camp, Historical context, Scholarly works

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Spraguedecampfan has a new long review of Blond Barbarians & Noble Savages (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp. Not on Archive.org. As de Camp wrote of the item…

This group of essays is a collection of ideas that have come to me in studying the lives and works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

And news of a new book of essays, Beyond the Black Stranger and Others: New Essays on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (2023) being essays by Charles Hoffman. In Lovecraft…

* Flights to Hidden Lands: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – A Study in Contrasts

* Some Notes on Poe and Lovecraft

330 pages, currently in paperback only.

Lovecraft and Vermont

09 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Picture postals

≈ 5 Comments

My Patreon patron John is considering a visit to Vermont, setting of Lovecraft’s story “The Whisperer in Darkness”. He asks: “Are there any HPL-related sites of special interest and worth visiting in the state?”


There are several Vermont sites known to be associated with either Lovecraft, his stories or correspondents/associates. But the question is which might be worth making the effort to see today. And in the month of September, or early ‘fall’ as Americans call autumn.

Initial Reading:

Reading Lovecraft’s own essay “Vermont – a first impression” (1927) will be useful if not already familiar. It’s easily found annotated in the “Travel” volume of Collected Essays. S.T. Joshi writes…

Lovecraft visited Vermont for the first time in the summer of 1927, returning in the summer of 1928. He did not actually witness the Vermont floods (a real event) [which later inspired the early incidents in “Whisperer”].

Dylan Henderson’s brilliant and well-written consideration of “The Promise of Cosmic Revelations: How the Landscape of Vermont Transforms “The Whisperer in Darkness”” (Lovecraft Annual 2021) would also be a useful preparatory read. Along with the 1977 edition of Vermont History journal, containing a short historical essay followed by a “Whisperer” plot-summary, “Dark Mountain: H.P. Lovecraft and the “Vermont Horror”” by Alan S. Wheelock. Lovecraft’s friend Orton later corrected some of the dates and biographical facts in this article.

The Goodenough and Orton sites:

A key site is the Goodenough farm in West Brattleboro, on the south-eastern edge of the state. Which it appears can still be visited, as by these young Lovecraft fans a few years ago on Lovecraft’s birthday…

Apparently the place is now held under the auspices of The Goodenough Farmstead Trust, with a covenant on the building and surroundings for its upkeep and restoration/preservation. They’ve had preservation grants for this in the 2000s, which appears to have given it a new roof judging by the above photo. It might be interesting if John could visit and show Lovecraftians how much progress has been made by 2023, and what its use (if any) is today. Also known to a local historian as the “Levi Goodenough Farm” in 2005.

Also the nearby Vrest Orton place, if it still exists and can be visited. Lovecraft himself states that Goodenough… “dwells not much above a mile from Orton’s”. Lovecraft spent two weeks at the newly acquired Orton place, and soon hauled some old clothes out of the barn in order to undertake heavy outdoor work with Orton. The work was re-directing the bed of a stream, mostly, if I recall correctly…

Lovecraft looks short here, but it’s a clever optical illusion. Orton is standing on a higher level of the lawn, and a letter says that Orton was not a tall fellow.

I never seen no country niftier than the wild hills west of Brattleboro, where this guy hangs out. Brat itself is the diploduccus’ gold molar [a big chunk of gold], with its works of pristine Yankee survival, but once you climb the slopes toward the setting sun you’re in another and an elder world. All allegiance to modern and decadent things is cast off — all memory of such degenerate excrescences as steel and steam, tar and concrete roads, and the vulgar civilisation that bred them — […] The nearness and intimacy of the little domed hills become almost breath-taking — their steepness and abruptness hold nothing in common with the humdrum, standardised world we know, and we cannot help feeling that their outlines have some strange and almost-forgotten meaning, like vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live on in rare, deep dreams.

Lovecraft also partly drew on the landscape here for “Dunwich”, which he wrote…

is far inland [near the headwaters of the Miskatonic, and a] synthesis of the picturesquely retrograding Wilbraham country (near Springfield) with certain characteristics of southern Vermont” (Writers of the Dark).

Lovecraft probably refer to the terrain of his epic “escaped cow chase” in the company of the young Lee boys, Orton’s neighbours. This recalls the chase of the final monster in “Dunwich”. A “Lee’s Swamp” is mentioned in “Dunwich”.

My search for the Goodenough / Orton places in “the wild hills west of Brattleboro” in 2019 found…

If the Goodenough farmstead’s location is the address [340 Goodenough Road] at which the Goodenough Farmstead Trust is formally registered today (and satellite photography in Google Earth suggests it is, offering the same building layout, roof shape, and arrangement of of the grounds) then that puts it about five miles directly west of Brattleboro itself. This further suggests that Orton’s springwater-fed and oil-lit “eighteenth-century” place may have been in the hills somewhere off Akley Road, about a mile south of the Goodenough farmstead.

Amazingly, it’s not on Google Street View. Does Vermont not allow the Google cameras, perhaps? Or is it just too remote?

Brattleboro was also the home of Rudyard Kipling from 1892-1896, who less than ten years later was to birth hard science-fiction with the famous long story “With the Night Mail” (1905). He had married a Vermont girl, and their house was “on the north side of Brattleboro, towards Putney”. He wrote the Jungle Book books and Mowgli tales here.

The Akley home and farmstead:

The rustic naif artist-recluse Bert Gilman Akley (1871-1946), visited and met by Lovecraft in 1928. I recently found a postcard of the place in the Brown University repository…

The Akley house, one of the inspirations for “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Though the “set against a hillside” description also suggests the Goodenough farmhouse and the Orton house nearby. So probably the Akeley place in “Whisperer” was an amalgam. I’ve no idea if the actual Akley farmstead still exists, or if its site can be visited. Perhaps fellow Lovecraftians can advise. But it looks from the picture like it fits the other “Whisperer” descriptions of the exterior yard approach (re: the scenes with the dogs etc) better than the more enclosed Goodenough farmhouse.

The character of the very similarly named Akeley in “Whisperer” was more of an amalgam of Cook and Lovecraft himself, and perhaps Orton in terms of his able organisation of the place.

The ‘sightings of Mi-go in the floods’:

Lovecraft never saw the well-reported local floods except in press and magazine clippings, but in “Whisperer” the floods of November 1927 are used for the plot with locations…

three separate instances involved — one connected with Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville.

The “Guide to Lovecraftian Sites in Vermont and New Hampshire” also notes the Brattleboro Railroad Station and Townshend Post Office (where Akeley sent and received mail). I’ve found one evocative picture of the Brattleboro Railroad Station interior…

In the Brattleboro passenger station (an ugly new passenger and parcels depot, built circa 1916), in 1925.

Paul Cook in Vermont:

The long-time friend and avid weird book-collector Paul Cook later moved about a lot, I recall. But he was a Rutland, Vermont man and that was his home place. Under a pen-name he wrote stories of Vermont, collected recently in Willis T. Crossman’s Vermont: Stories (2005). It would be interesting to know if any of these have a weird flavour.

From Ex-presidents of the National Amateur Press Association: sketches, “Paul Cook”, page 93. A 1948 Arkham Sampler also noted that his poetry had been published and collected under the same pen-name.

In 2006 Cook’s home place of Rutland had a well-attended weekend “Lovecraft in Vermont” festival. The local newspaper’s details are unavailable outside the USA, due to the European Union’s cookie-madness, but I’ve made sure that the Internet Archive now has a copy. This led me to discover that the remarkable organiser, Lovecraftian and veritable ‘Indiana Jones’ passed away the next year, so one should not waste time trying to contact him.

Woodburn Harris:

As for research on correspondents and revision clients, it’s possible there may still be memories or documents relating to Woodburn Harris in his town of Vergennes, Vermont. He was a prominent and well-known leading man there. The recent publication of Lovecraft’s Woodburn Harris letters as a book might also interest the more antiquarian folk among the residents.

Walter J. Coates and his Driftwind:

Also, I recently looked at the location of the home of Walter J. Coates in Vermont. The address was North Montpelier, which actually turns out to be east of the main town. The East Montpelier Historical Society has online a detailed historical essay on the Coates little magazine and its editor, including several photographs. Thanks to John’s prompt I’ve now been able to re-find this (the link had been broken) and it (hurrah!) reveals the Coates / Driftwind location…

In November 1922, he and Nettie purchased the George Pray store in North Montpelier, and the Coateses and son John continued as the storekeepers.

So we do now have the place in a picture of the place, thanks to the postcard of North Montpelier I was recently able to find…

Nearby is one of the flood locations in “Whisperer”…

University collections in Vermont:

There is also an as yet un-inspected university collection in Vermont. As I wrote in June of a university collection at Burlington, Vermont…

Mention of James Howard Flower and especially his “gem” of a poem “With Shelley in My Soul”). A footnote to Lovecraft’s comment reveals Flower was a Vermont revision client whose “Shelley” poem has “not been found”. […] if anyone’s in Vermont and near the University, it might be worth an afternoon sifting through the 1919-1925 boxes of the Howard Flower-Solitary Press Collection in search of Lovecraft mentions or material. “Collection is unprocessed” according to the Library.

Coates was doing revision for them, and my guess is that some of this work may also have been passed on to Lovecraft and/or Cook. One also wonders if Lovecraft ever had any poetry or letters in any of the Flower publications. Also, can Flower’s Lovecraft-admired “With Shelley in My Soul” be found again? Also at the same Library is the Walter John Coates Papers collection, though I’d assume that’s already been well-sifted for Lovecraft material. Still, a look at the complete run of Driftwind and other publications may be of interest.

Mythos fiction:

As for imaginative reading, it’s possible a set of Mythos stories involving Vermont could be self-assembled, though I don’t think there’s yet been a published anthology. One might start with Lin Carter’s “Strange Manuscript Found in the Vermont Woods”. Said to be in Crypt of Cthulhu #39, by a trailer for it in #38.


So my initial itinerary would be:

1. The farmhouse in West Brattleboro (Goodenough) and the Goodenough grave. Possibly also nearby places (Orton and Akley) it they still exist.

2. North Montpelier and the nearby Winooski River (Coates, flooding in “Whisperer”).

3. Perhaps Vergennes, Vermont (Harris) and Rutland, Vermont (Cook).

4. Possibly Burlington, Vermont for the university archives (Flower, and Coates).

As to “worth seeing”, who knows until one goes?

Letters to Wilfred B. Talman – the second set of notes

20 Thursday Jul 2023

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Historical context, Odd scratchings

≈ Leave a comment

Below is my second set of notes on Lovecraft’s Letters to Wilfred B. Talman and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully. The book is a hefty 580-page slab, and I’m currently half way through and have reached October 1933. But in the notes below I open in April 1927 and run through to early July 1929.


Page 68. Lovecraft suggests, with a certain amount of levity, that he and some others should form a… “ways and means committee for inaugurating the counter-revolution & establishing the reign of American Fascism”. Said in the context of the context of a newly Soviet-ised, bloody-handed and internationalist communism.

Page 68. Lovecraft is familiar with the “little Benefit St. grocery”, which is likely to be gone soon.

Page 69. He gives more descriptive and demographic details on the slum area he has newly discovered on walks in Providence (see my first set of notes). Much later in the book, in 1934, he briefly notes it has been swept away by the city developers.

Page 70. “the unknown outside clawing at the rim of the known … There are things more terrible to the imagination than any phenomena connected with the nature, passions & aspirations of mankind”.

Page 71. Eddy Jr. is back, at least temporarily, invited over (probably not by Lovecraft himself) to a ‘gang’ meeting in Providence. Only in July 1932 (page 212) do we hear of Eddy again, when things seem to have been patched up between them and Lovecraft is visiting with the Eddys at their house. As I’ve established (Lovecraft Annual 2022), the Eddys were almost certainly then at 317 Plain Street, Providence (address given in a letter to Ghost Stories magazine for April 1929). This house can still be seen on Google StreetView. A delightful structure to British eyes at least, though perhaps rather mundane and samey in American eyes…

The similar next-door corner-house at No. 319 (seen here as the white one) sold in May 2023 for $225,000 (£171k). Pretty good by UK prices, it would likely be twice that in a comparable English city south of Crewe. New England seems a bit of a paradise by the standard of old England. Crazy-high professional salaries, but crazy-low house prices.

Page 76. Lovecraft had been reading about the modern-folkloric creature known as ‘The Jersey Devil’, and had “concluded that IT was an overgrown mosquito”. There is more on page 178-79.

Page 84. His distorted understanding of how own work begins to show up, since here he thinks “The Rats in the Walls” is “barren and obtrusively mechanical”. Similarly he thinks “The Horror at Red Hook” to be the “dullest” of his works (page 88) despite it being immediately picked up for hardback re-publication.

Page 84. A little more detail about the stock of ‘Uncle’ Eddy’s bookshop (see my essay in Lovecraft Annual 2022). Cook was about to invest in 70 old volumes of Harper’s magazine. Cook returns to Providence and Eddy’s on page 90.

Page 86. Lovecraft especially likes ‘survivals’ rather than ‘restorations’ in antiquities, and he makes the distinction between the two. A survival is “a lingering bit of the past [such as] the lane back of the Athenaeum” in Providence. Ah, so the mysterious little path at the side of the Athenaeum which I spotted in a photo recently may have led up to that olde lane?

Page 90. HPL was revising a tale called “In The Confessional” for de Castro. The original 1893 version of this survives, but Lovecraft’s revision of it is lost.

Page 91. January 1928. He “stopped reading” Amazing Stories “several months ago”. But will now have to glance at it again, since readers are still talking about a little something he wrote called “The Colour Out of Space” (September 1927, Amazing Stories).

Page 95. Brooklyn libraries. The Montague branch library was the nearest to him in New York City, and he had a card for it… “though I actually spent more time at the NY one in 42nd St. and 5th Ave.” Still there today, the one with the lions outside…

Page 97. He read Witch Wood by John Buchan. One of Buchan’s novels best-liked by his fans, once they step beyond the usual Thirty-Nine Steps etc spy novels. A 1927 novel of devil-worship and evil forests in seventeenth-century Scotland. Apparently rather more subtle and interestingly macabre than the usual occultist devil-worship mumbo-jumbo, and influenced by Blackwood and Machen. Be warned, however, that according to S.T. Joshi… “The dialogue portions of John Buchan’s enormously long novel Witch Wood are almost entirely in Scots dialect”. Which is not easy reading, even for a Scot.

Page 98. “Sydney R. Burliegh, the goof responsible for that monstrosity [the Fleur-de-Lys building in Providence] […] he draws historical and traditional maps in the Ortelian manner […] I have his Providence one and am about to get his South Country one. He lives in a real colonial house on College Hill.” I can’t immediately find these maps online.

Page 101. June 1928. He hasn’t been out of the house for nearly six months. “I haven’t been out since Jany. 2nd [2nd of January], and don’t know when I can ever get out again”.

Page 102. The all-night lunch wagon was invented in Providence “about 50 or 60 years ago” [early 1870s?] and is “now a standard institution” in the city. This seems relevant to Lovecraft’s night-walks in his city, in terms of his coffee / donuts-supply logistics when cafes were shut. The street carts began as a service to the semi-nocturnal newspapermen of the city. Back then, daily newspapermen worked through the night to get ‘the early morning edition’ out.

Page 107. He sees the Boston Museum with Loveman, and especially their new historical room reconstructions including a “genuine Tudor room of 1490” and medieval English stained-glass.

Page 112. Old Everett McNeil was in “Sinjin’s Hospital”, but had then been transferred (once they found he was a war veteran) to the Naval Hospital. Lovecraft sends him letters with his “legal name” of Henry. Thus genealogists should search for a Henry in birth records.

Page 113. Lovecraft describes further correspondence with a ‘Harold’ at June 1929, who is described as an “exotic cultist” who reveals alleged prehistoric Mayan lore and secrets in his articles and pamphlets. Lovecraft found him to “shine to saner advantage” in his letters, and “he seems a remarkably pleasant chap — perhaps destined to become an interesting correspondent.” Page 116 mentions “Harold’s dashing psychic method of exploring the primal past”.

Page 117. Lovecraft sees Wickford again, and remarks that he had not seen it in 21 years. Which puts the first visit at circa 1908 at age 18. This must be the village of Wickford on Wickford Cove at North Kingstown, Rhode Island. About 14 miles south of Providence down the western shore and formerly “Updike’s Landing”. One assumes that this 1908 visit would have been seen on one of his epic solo trolley (tram) excursions at that time. Possibly he was in search of what another of his letters calls “the Pequod Path, ‘the great road of the country’, and just north of Wickford Harbor”. A snippet of biography which may interest Mythos writers. Another letter reveals its later charms… “we explored ancient Wickford with its crumbling wharves, great elms, & centuried white houses”.

Crumbling wharves at Wickford, Rhode Island.

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