A new question from a Patreon patron: “Did HPL ever mention the U.S. state of Michigan, or its city of Detroit?”

There is nothing to be found in the fiction or poetry, but small gleanings can be picked up elsewhere.

In his youth Lovecraft would have been aware of the astronomy work at the University of Michigan, and he mentions this in his essays “Are There Undiscovered Planets?” (c. 1906) and “Does ‘Vulcan’ Exist?” (also c. 1906 and about an as-yet undiscovered planet)…

Another remarkable ‘discovery’ was that made by Profs. Watson and Swift at Ann Arbor, Mich., during the eclipse of 1878, when both observers pointed out two objects, one as the hypothetical Vulcan

Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark had published a number of articles in the Detroit Medical Journal. Lovecraft also knew some the very early and tangled history of Detroit and noted its ill-fated Governor of the 1790s and his grisly end…

thirteen of the pirate Blackbeard’s men were subsequently hang’d near by — as well as the royal governor of Detroit, Henry Hamilton

This was as gory as some of the 1920s newspaper reporting it seems, The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales noting that…

Throughout the 1920s, newspapers and journals broke stories about alternative religions (almost always labelled as cults) that made extravagant claims about their ability to secure earthly power and riches for their followers. Additionally, tabloid-style papers like the New York Herald claimed that cultists were responsible for a variety of murders and disappearances (for example … a Detroit murder cult).

… and referencing as the source Phillip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Lovecraft was later aware of Detroit as the home of the far more mass-murderous automobile cult. For instance, he writes…

Brattleboro came in the dead of midnight. The rail journey was at an end, and five miles of narrow hill road in a Detroit chaise brought me to the isolated Orton dwelling.

Houdini tried to get Lovecraft to visit Detroit, early in their business relationship. But Lovecraft demurred…

Our slippery friend Houdini, who was here early in the month, and rushed me to hell preparing an anti-astrological article to be finished before his departure — a matter of five days … He says he has a devilish lot more for me to do and has been trying to get me to meet him in Detroit at his own expense to talk things over — but I have maintained that I can do business best within sight of my native town’s Georgian steeples.

The amateur journalist and early Lovecraft collaborator Winifred V. Jackson seems to have had a connection, as she was married there for her first marriage. The amateur whose supernatural desert story provoked Lovecraft’s own “The Transition of Juan Romero” was from Michigan, or at least was educated there…

Philip B. McDonald graduated M.E. (Master of Engineering) from Michigan College of Mines. In Lovecraft’s The Conservative, McDonald was stated to be ‘Assistant Professor of Engineering English, University of Colorado’ in July 1918.

“The Transition of Juan Romero” being a quick ‘demo story’ for Lovecraft’s friends, to demonstrate how a ‘total makeover’ revision could be achieved. Hence the unusual desert setting, which had been in the original tale… and which I later discovered to be ‘Area 52’ of UFO fame.

Lovecraft had a late post-1933 correspondent-protege from Michigan, the telegraphist Richard F. Seawright (see Letters to Richard F. Seawright, 1992).

Major amateur journalist meetings were not unknown in the state, and Lovecraft had verbal and written reports from those who attended. Which may also have given him some impressions of the state…

I had an enjoyable visit from our good old colleague Mocrates the Sage [Moe], now on a visit to various eastern points after a sojourn at the Grand Rapids N.A.P.A. Convention.

Amateurs evidently gleaned some linguistic amusement from listening in on the local lingo during such convention visits, and Lovecraft reported that one…

James F. Morton, Jr., lent a climactic touch [to the end of one meeting of amateurs] with some inimitable stanzas on the pronunciation of English as practiced in various centres of culture, including Kalamazoo.

In chronicling the early interest in Lovecraft, S.T. Joshi observed substantial contributions from Detroit…

In 1958 the University of Detroit’s literary magazine, Fresco, devoted an entire issue to works by and about Lovecraft.

There was also Maurice Levy’s Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (1988) from Detroit and the Wayne State University Press.

On eBay, a run of The Netopian, 1921-27. This was the local Hospital Trust pictorial magazine which Lovecraft took and read. There are two runs in the archives in Providence, but neither has yet been scanned from paper. Likely to have at least a half-dozen pictures of interest to Lovecraftians, I’d guess.

A run of Popular Mechanics magazine, 1902-2016 is being uploaded to Archive.org from microfilm, with 500 now uploaded (some still processing and just showing the cover). Including Lovecraft era titles. Such as this one from January 1926, just over a year before “The Colour Out of Space”…

New on Archive.org in public PDF, The Pulp Jungle (1967) by Frank Gruber. A pithy and entertaining memoir of writing for the New York City pulps from 1927 and through the 1930s, as recalled in the mid 1960s. The uploader notes…

It’s now a rare book, long out-of-print and increasingly difficult to find on the second-hand market.

Frank Gruber, pulp writer.

Phil Hine on H.P. Lovecraft and Pan, the ancient mythic figure. The young Lovecraft was enraptured by the 18th century’s sylvan poetic evocations of Pan. Hine also discusses the story “The Temple” from a pagan perspective.

Rock Hill Herald profiles the Lovecraft-contemporary known as the ‘Goat Gland King’, the sort of quack that Lovecraft appears to laugh at in several works. In this case, John Romulus Brinkley was active from 1916 into the early 1930s. He offered expensive quack treatments claiming that goat-gland transplants would “restore sexual vitality and fertility to impotent or ‘tired’ men”.

However as I’ve noted in “On Lovecraft’s glands”, while laughing at such things Lovecraft also held long-standing notions about ‘glands shaping personality’ and believed glandular compulsion to be the major factor driving various forms of sexual aberrancy. It appears to have followed, for him, that the more tiresome emotions could be ignored because they were just the passing result of “glandular secretion & hormonic discharge”.

These notions were not the result of some cranky middle-aged idée fixe but were more or less a normal take-up of the emerging science-based ideas of his time, half-baked though some of them may now seem. But he was perhaps unusual in extending his glandular thinking to aesthetic capabilities, which may have raised a few eyebrows among the reputable scientists in the field…

There are subtleties & overtones on my side that you can never get [on the] emotional & imaginative wave-lengths. […] we’re simply not built the same way & our glands simply don’t function the same way” (To Woodburn Harris, 1929).

One’s glandular state was then for him a kind of determinism. One had been ‘born that way’, and nothing could be done about it. But he once mused that this dulled state was perhaps not perpetually fixed. Some future eugenic improvement might open up people to new aesthetic experiences that they would otherwise be incapable of…

While nothing in our normal experience is ever likely to call forth any additional senses, it is not impossible that experiments with the ductless glands might open up a fresh sensitivity or two — and then what impressions might not pour in?” (To Ashton Smith, 1933).

In this he seems to vaguely anticipate the technocratic post-war ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who suggested that experiencing electronic media and information-flows might extended man’s “entire nervous system” and thus “produce an entirely different state of being” with access to expanded aesthetic senses. No need for those old 1930s goat-glands, just plug in your gleaming 1970s Home Cinematron screen.

New to me, the HPLHS has a two-page Providence Sunday Journal replica newspaper sheet. It marks the moment that most people in Lovecraft’s Providence learned that a major author had been living among them. HPLHS are expert prop-makers, so despite the lack of yellowing I suspect you can be sure it’ll look and feel, and perhaps even smell, like a real fresh-and-inky 1940s city newspaper sheet.

You also get the reverse, which continues the long article.