Bret Kramer of Sentinel Hill Press has noticed that a few of a series of “Yankee Yarns” New England folklore radio-broadcasts are now on Archive.org. They’re from Boston’s Alton H. Blackington, who broadcast 1933-53 and who would drive thousands of miles and interview many people to get his tales and get them straight. He also made such trips pay by being a newspaper photographer and running a New England stock-photo company. After finishing with radio he continued as a popular stage lecturer and published the best of the Tales in print as several volumes under the titles Yankee Yarns and More Yankee Yarns…

A mine of ideas for the region’s fiction writers, as well as a repository of folk-life, I’d suggest. Perhaps even more importantly, a large chunk of his photography collection survived…

“[the core of] the collection is the dozens of images of typically eccentric New England characters and human interest stories. Most of the images were taken by Blackington on 4×5″ dry plate negatives, however many of the later images are made on flexible acetate stock and the collection includes several images by other (unidentified) photographers distributed by the Blackington News Service. … His photographic vision extended to include hermits and eccentrics, skilled craftspeople, and the living relics of old traditions, including lighthouse keepers, whalers, and the last living town crier. … Blackington [had a] narrative eye and appreciation for the eccentricities of New Englanders and the vestiges of its long past”

… which raises the possibility of using some of it to help produce a new “Lovecraft’s places and faces” book, by pairing images related to or evoking Lovecraft’s travels with his letters and public-domain maps. Or perhaps a Ken Burns-style documentary made along the same lines, “panning and scanning” across such pictures.