Further to my recent post on Lovecraft favourite New York garden, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record archives are now online 1912-1944, and may have pictures. I haven’t had time to look, as yet. The Gardens included Lovecraft’s cherished Japan-inspired public gardens.

Most of these are on the Internet Archive, which should mean the pictures have been auto-extracted and placed on Flickr. Only… Flickr has just cancelled and deleted the Internet Archive’s public-domain illustrations channel. Durn.

Update: Yes, there are pictures. The Record archive is also available over on the BHL, but although the scans are larger there the bad contrast is the same. The Gardens website has a few of the same Record pictures online from glass plate scans, but at a uselessly tiny size.

One of my Patreon patrons, J. Miller, asks:

Did HPL ever visit the Brooklyn Museum? What did he like to see there? I may go next week, so I’m seeking tips.

Yes, he did see the Museum, which was also once known as the Brooklyn Institute. He first saw it in 1922, as a ‘visiting NYC’ tourist in the company of “Morton, Kleiner, Belnap” (see Letters from New York). A big attraction of the place was the cost. Entry was free on most days, and the place was also open into the evening on Thursdays. This is how it would have looked from the “crossing the street” view.

This first visit seems to have been a brisk look at the ‘highlights’. Since we know that then ‘did it’ more systematically and thoroughly later in the same year (see Letters to Family). I think we can assume the fine sculpture from antiquity would have been enjoyed, and would have reminded him of the sculpture hall in Providence in which he had lingered as a lad.

But there was also the Invertebrates Hall and Insect Hall in the eastern galleries, on the “second floor” until 1927. There he may well have seen the hanging giant octopus, which is known to have been there and accompanied by a giant squid, pre-Cthulhu.

I had better pictures than this, but sadly they’ve been lost. I’m not sure if this is still there to be seen today. A catalogue search for “octopus” did not reveal it, though perhaps the natural history section (if it still exists there) has another catalogue? This same Hall also had… “The marine animals of the coast of Long Island and New England, from high tide to a depth of 7,200 feet” as a long cased display. It’s possible he missed these sea-creatures on the first visit, but must surely have seen them on the second.

Lovecraft ‘did’ the Museum again solo in May 1930, seeing the new ‘Colonial furniture and interiors’ wing which was then newly offering complete rooms arranged for his antiquarian delight.

In 1933 he “…did the Brooklyn Museum with Sonny” (Lovecraft letter to Morton, 12th January 1933) when they focused on the “Dutch” section. I would suspect that this section may also have been new and have featured old Dutch furniture and interiors, but I suppose it may also have been flanked by rooms with other Dutch items such as paintings.

Equally important to Lovecraft was… “my erstwhile favourite Japanese Garden beside the Brooklyn Museum” which had been designed in 1914/15 by the young self-taught Takeo Shiota. This was likewise free, and Shiota’s initial hill and pond planting was after a decade maturing nicely by the mid 1920s. His planting was also being sensitively added to. Lovecraft found the place “always lovely”, whatever the season. This garden now appears to be part of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and may no longer be free (at a guess). Here we see it under one of the heavy snowstorms of New York City, possibly even the very same “worst in living memory” snowstorm that Lovecraft very narrowly missed when he moved into Red Hook…

There was also evidently once a pleasant sunset walk to be had after the Museum had closed, and if the leaves were off the trees. In early November 1924 he and Loveman walked at sunset from the Brooklyn Museum to Brooklyn Heights, to call on the poet Hart Crane…

The walk was very lovely — downhill from the heights on which the Brooklyn Museum stands, & with many sunset vistas of old houses and far spires. We reached the heights in the deep twilight…” (Letters from New York, p. 82)

At first glance then, the ‘Lovecraft’ version of the museum would be:

Egyptian and Roman antiquities and statuary.
British historical items, non-ecclesiastical.
Long Island and New England natural history, inc. toads, coastal marine animals,
deep sea-horrors, giant octopus.
Any colonial portraits, New England landscape painting especially Providence.
Any colonial / old Dutch rooms, doorways.
The Japanese Garden.

I’m now further into reading the Gaplin letters, in the new expanded volume. Here is my second batch of notes.

* In early 1917 Lovecraft states that he likes the travel films of Burton Holmes (p. 176), seen at the Strand in Providence. Homes shot artful travel documentaries on 35mm, and appears to have made about thirty shorts a year. Here is a small selection of his travel films which could have been seen around this time, fronting the main movie…

1916:

The Cliff Dwellers Of America.
Among the Head Hunters.
Picturesque Prague.
Motoring In England.
British Egypt.
The Real Streets Of Cairo.
The Lower Nile.
Thee Upper Nile.

1917:

Quaint Quebec.
On the Great Glacier.
Fruitful Florida.
Kyoto, the Ancient Capital.

1918:

Fire Walkers Of Bega.

Some readers may also be interested in his 1947 “Historic New England” colour documentary, 21 minutes, if it survives.

* When Lovecraft registered for military duty he gave his occupation as “writer”. He tells Galpin that he was reassured that he might therefore still be of use… even if he failed the physical. (p. 182)

* He assumed he had read all of Sherlock Holmes by 1918, but a footnote itemises what he had read by 1927: three collections (Adventures, Memoirs, Return), three novels (Scarlet, Four, Hound) and two unnamed “mediocre” stories appearing circa 1908. I assume these were the 1908 tales “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” and “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”. This shows he would have been up-to-date to summer 1908, but after that lost touch. He would have missed the rest of the tales included in the book collections His Last Bow (1917) and all of the tales in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). Thus it would be a mistake for scholars to assume Lovecraft had read… “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”; “The Valley of Fear”; “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” or any other of the Case-Book tales. A pity, as if he’d have stuck with Holmes just a bit longer he would likely have enjoyed “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” with its macabre plot and Cornwall/Africa combination.

* He owned all of Prof. Appleton’s chemistry instruction books (p. 211) as a boy. Relevant to his later work because of how the pictures line up so nicely with the themes of his later stories.

* “I tried to write a comic opera when about ten years old” (p. 214).

* He mentions the “Spanish Influenza” explicitly (p. 216). He realises around 18th November 1918, that… “This influenza is nothing light”, which seems a bit of an understatement and perhaps suggest he was behind with his reading of the newspapers. Statistics show that peak deaths in Providence occurred 13th- 14th October, and Boston had seen 3,700 deaths by the 16th October 1918.

* He had seen and strongly approved of the movie Hearts of the World (p. 219). This was a big-budget D.W. Griffith / Lillian Gish movie, partly filmed on location and depicting German brutality and atrocities against civilians during the invasions early in the First World War. Gish and Griffith later thought the movie was too anti-German, though that was at a time when the atrocities had been very assiduously ‘written out of history’ — seemingly by those who instead preferred to show the Allies (British and Americans) in a negative light. But the very widespread atrocities did happen and they were later unearthed by post- 1990 historians and are now copiously documented. If anything, the movie now appears to have underplayed the matter.

* Lovecraft lists three humorous spoofs he wrote in early summer 1923, “The Wonderful Hills”, “A Day in the Country”, and “Uncle John’s Legacy”. (p. 225). These may have been published in an amateur journal, but are now lost. They “convulsed” Lovecraft’s future wife with “mirth”.

* Lovecraft states that his uncle Dr. Clark had made a deep study of “‘descent of fire’ and legends pertaining thereto”. (p. 226). This is the idea of ‘the descent of fire from the heavens’ and its study appears to have involved examining various legends and lore for traces of early attempts to explain storm lightning, ball- lightning, ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ and suchlike. I would guess probably also the apparent ‘trapping’ of sparks (rubbed amber, flints, static electricity, etc). Such things were seen, circa the middle of the 19th century, to be an ancient current in human belief that was different from ancient sun worship and sun-lore. This stems from Muller and others in Germany who saw the philosophy of the ancients as centred around the Dawn-time, and thus the coming Sun. But by the 1870 the scatter-gun followers of his idea were seeing ‘sun-gods’ in every fairy-tale and local old-wives tale, and a basically sensible theory was made to seem ridiculous. Being someone more interested in ‘descent of fire’ would by the 1880s have made one something of a heretic against ‘the consensus’. Lovecraft does not state that he had read his uncle’s work or the notes for it, but it might be assumed that he had at least talked with his uncle on the topic.

* Lovecraft talks of the sinister odour of old Puritan houses (p. 232), a significant factor in their macabre allure for him.

A peep inside the 1945 Armed Services overseas paperback edition of The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales. This could have been what the soldiers and airmen were reading as they waited for D-Day. It was incredibly damp in England (more so than usual in a British summer) in the run-up to the invasion of Europe, and indoor pursuits such as reading were thus highly likely. After that, the men were probably rather too busy for reading.

I wonder if the thinking was that such reading would prepare the men for the horrors of battle with the Nazis? Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau was also on the slate, in the list in the back.

Is there a publication history of this item that can reveal the facts? Perhaps in one of the Derleth biographies?

“The Dunwich Horror” was also on the radio in 1945.

At the foot of the Brown repository letter in which Eddy recalls a “Poe Street” encounter on a walk with Lovecraft (see this post for details) is Winfield Scott’s additional and almost indecipherable pencil note…

Dana – says HPL would buy pulps in [?] [?] then tore off the [?] sexy-lurid covers because [“under neath counter”?]

Dana’s was the local bookshop which took the remainder of Lovecraft’s Library shortly after his death. We have no evidence of the cover-tearing in Lovecraft’s extant set of Weird Tales, as I understand it. But perhaps Dana encountered runs of other pulps in his posthumous consignment of the less desirable items. As a more upmarket book-seller, unfamiliar with New York news-stand practices with pulps, he may not have realised what could have happened to these magazines.

News-stand sellers of pulps, and later the cheap paperbacks in the 1950s-70s, were supposed to send unsold copies back to the publishers to be pulped. But that was impractical. The actual practice was to mail sheafs of the ripped-off colour covers, as proof of the unsold and supposedly un-sellable copies. Thus would the magazines be ‘returned’ for credit.

Was this practice present in New York as far back as the 1930s? Perhaps a pulp history expert can fill me in on that. But in the meantime, here is a tantalising Google Books snippet from The New Yorker, Vol. 12 1936…

So it does seem that flea-market re-sale of coverless copies was going on, at least in New York City. And on a scale large enough to make it profitable for the junk-men to invent machines to rectify the magazines. The process for lesser pulps sounds like it would have been…

1. Covers returned for credit on the next order.
2. Coverless copies locally given away to junk-men as worthless ‘pulp’.
3. The junk-men quietly pass these into the New York flea-markets.
4. The magazines spend a few weeks on the stalls at ‘three for a nickel’.
5. The junk-men return to the stalls, take away the bundles of the unwanted dregs as pulp. They may even have become ballast on ships to England.

That could help explain why Lovecraft evidently had coverless pulps among the lesser parts of his collection, as disposed of to the Dana bookshop. He and his circle could have been acquiring them in this way in New York City.

This post follows on from yesterday’s post on the Voluminous podcast (a new partly-unpublished letter, in which Lovecraft visits the Italian quarter of Providence). Also from my recent ‘Picture Postals’ post (Lovecraft and the farmers market)

I see that the Online Review of Rhode Island History has a new first-hand memoir of “Growing Up Italian in Providence in the 1940s”, in which Dr. Ed Iannuccilli’s evokes his everyday experiences of the city as a boy. Especially the fish-man. Friday was then still a big traditional fish-eating day, and it was brought up from the harbour and sold on carts…

Streetlights were suspended from the middle of the poles, with circular, scalloped metal “hats” covering the bulbs. When the lights were lit, a yellow haze emanated and created dancing shadows on the street below. They were our summer-evening clocks. […] The Grocery Man might be making deliveries from his huge truck, a traveling store, followed closely by the fruit peddler. On Fridays, the Fish Man appeared, blasting his mouth horn with the message that his truck was filled with a new catch. […] He stopped his dark green panel truck in the middle of Wealth Avenue. Laden with dead fish covered in ice, it had open sides with canvas rolled to the top and tied with thick rope, a Fish Man’s knot, I guess. Firm fish of all kinds were on display, neatly arranged, right side up, eyes open, in wooden sections fitted to the bed of the truck, a roof above protecting the catch from the hot sun. Fillets, shellfish and lobsters were stacked separately. A scale, secured with a chain, hung from a hook screwed into the top rear “two by four.” There was dried blood along the sides of the truck. Melting ice water dripped from the tailgate. The tires were low, burdened with a packed catch. And there was the aroma, fishy the only way to describe it… musty, damp and salty also.

One then vaguely imagines that the fish-detesting Lovecraft might not have been out much on Fridays, if the streets of his own section also had fish-peddlars. Not even if these had a retinue of local cats pattering along behind.

Also, I wonder if Providence had a wholesale fish-market? I’ve never heard of one, but I imagine a growing sea-port city that size must have had one. And again, I imagine Lovecraft stayed well away from it. Which would give Lovecraftians a negative data point, in terms of ‘Lovecraft was unlikely to have gone there, or half a mile around it in summer’.

Anyway, I see that Dr. Ed Iannuccilli has a complete new book of such 1940s city memories. Which may interested those who want to learn more about the everyday patina of the city as it might have been encountered, more or less, in Lovecraft’s final decade of the 1930s.