This is the third in what is becoming a short series of postings on Lovecraft and the bookstores and libraries of New York City. I’m developing another chapter for a future new expanded edition of my Walking With Cthulhu book, it seems.

“… bidding the Longs farewell at the 96th St. station I proceeded forthwith to the Public Library in 42nd St. — where [as you will remember, on previous occasion] we saw the manuscripts — to read a new Arthur Machen tale, The Shining Pyramid, obtainable there but not removable from the building.” — H.P. Lovecraft, May 1925.

Here is the Library exterior seen in a rare postcard from approximately street view, whereas most postcards show a bird’s-eye view…

I think the background tower here is The Empire State Building, completed 1931, so it wouldn’t have been towering over the scene as Lovecraft approached the Library in 1925.

Let’s accompany Lovecraft into the building and up to the Reading Room. Lovecraft approaches the entrance frontage from approx. street level…

He knows the entrance well. Here’s the entrance as it was in winter, 1927…

And here’s a view on the entrance that Lovecraft would likely have been familiar with, on ascending the steps…

I’m uncertain if he borrowed books from here, as apparently the Circulation shelves / issuing desks tended to become very crowded…

The 1916 Handbook notes of the postcard picture (above) of the Circulation room…

“Central Circulation Branch (sign over door reads, “Circulating Library”). This is one of the forty-four Branches of The New York Public Library, intended for the circulation of books for home use. In this instance alone the Branch is situated in the Central Building and is supported by the funds of the Library and not by the City. The room is interesting because of its activity. The view of it reproduced in this book had to be taken when but few people were there, but during afternoons and evenings, especially in the autumn, winter, and spring months, the room is frequently over-crowded with readers and borrowers of books.” (my emphasis)

Thus he may have been relatively unfamiliar with the lending library, and passed it by. But possibly he often stopped off at the Exhibition Hall for temporary shows, the Exhibition Hall apparently being on the First Floor. The entrance to it is seen here during wartime…

I don’t know of any conveniently dated listing of exhibitions held here in the 1920s and 30s, by which we might see if any would have especially appealed to Lovecraft and his circle.

But let us assume that, on this day, Lovecraft merely looked over the notices and posters for forthcoming exhibitions and then continued walking up to the third floor and the Reading Rooms…

Given its contents such as American History, Genealogy, Maps, Manuscripts, and small Art and Exhibitions rooms, this is likely to have been a frequent haunt of Lovecraft.

This was the Third Floor Hall, onto which the stairs from the lower floors (seen in the picture) emerged…

Given his constitution he may have rested after climbing all those stairs. Either on the rather chilly stone benches seen above, or on the more warm looking benches in the Picture Gallery…

And then, in one of the wings of the Reading Room Lovecraft, most likely read “The Shining Pyramid” by Machen…

Of course, in May 1925 and later the building would have been far more crowded than shown above.

Having left the building, he might have walked away through the park at the side of the Library…

Though the library closed late, and in May it may have been dark by the time he departed.

Here he is on the “Publick Library” in September 1925, having discovered and closely perused a book there on Providence history, again on the Third Floor of the library…

“Belknap now took an omnibus home, whilst the Old Gentleman kept on walking toward the Publick Library. Having reached that haven, I proceeded to the lair of the Kimball book [he read this… “At the northern end of the Main Reading Room i[n] the room devoted to Local History and Genealogy (No. 328).”] The closing bell drove me forth from Providence to the garish terraces of Babylon at 10 p.m.”

Without actually looking up the details, I’d fairly sure he also drew on the New York libraries for the book The Cancer of Superstition for Houdini. He did the same for his own Supernatural Horror in Literature. While that intensive library-work is beyond the scope of this short blog post, we can assume he delved quite deeply into the Public Library’s arcana. Lovecraft was not then familiar with the ways and devices of heraldry, and he was only later introduced to the details of the art by a friend in the genealogy section of the Providence Public Library.

Today the main “Publick Library” in New York City has strong collections on esoteric magic, spiritualism and witchcraft, divination and Theosophy, as well as a nationally important archive of Lovecraft letters.

Schulte’s Book Store was at 80 – 82 Fourth Avenue on ‘Booksellers’ Row’ in New York City. Here is Lovecraft writing home, about being unable to resist bagging a 10 cent collection from the store, despite his growing poverty…

“[…] Here I’ll have to admit a fall from grace so far as non-purchasing is concern’d, for a great volume of Bulwer-Lytton, with most of the weird novels complete — Zanoni, A Strange Story, and The House and the Brain — for only ten cents, proved a fatal bait; and I departed from the Schulte Emporium with less in my pocket and more in my hand. But only a dime, remember!” — from a Lovecraft letter of 20th May 1925.

The store was on a ‘Booksellers’ Row’ in the city. That name was first applied to the old Bookseller’s Row, near “St. Clement’s Dane Church in the Strand”, reportedly pulled down in 1903 at which time the New York Observer report it… “is now a mass of fallen and misshapen walls in process of removal, the lime-laden dust pervading the historic atmosphere.” Fourth Avenue then appears to have become the new ‘Booksellers’ Row’ perhaps circa 1911 and was a New York fixture until the 1960s, with a few stores hanging on into the 1970s. Ephemeral New York has a good short article on “Fourth Avenue’s Book Row”.

Schulte’s is seen at the lower end of the above map and was run by Theo Schulte, and from 1925 also by his new business partner Philip Pesky. They had a crowd of bookish boy assistants, and shipping packers in the packing room, all eager to learn the trade. It was the sort of place where Binkin, later to buy a huge Lovecraft collection and hence recall that Lovecraft had once patronised his book store, might have started off in the trade — and thus seen Lovecraft’s face on a regular basis in the 1920s.

By 1938 the store’s magazine adverts had it that the store… “invites you to browse among their interesting stock of over 500,000 used books.” (Saturday Review of Literature). A 1939 Harper’s Bazaar profile had it that the store was located “in about the most Victorian section of New York”. It was also well known that Schulte was always willing to buy good books that one had finished with.

There’s no interior photography that I can find online, but there are two evocative passages that describe the interior experience of the store as it would have been had by Lovecraft and his circle…

“Schulte was the eminence grise of the book trade … His shop at 80 [and 82] Fourth Avenue was legendary. Like the other bookstores, it had a large sidewalk stock out front, where you can choose for your pennies, tomes in old—fashioned binding and printing. But inside, behind front windows that proclaimed it LARGEST SECOND HAND BOOKSTORE IN NY, it was uniquely impressive with a huge main floor, tall balconies, and a cavernous basement. It was also well stocked. “Inside,” according to Guido Bruno’s Adventures, “are shelves laden with books in delightful disorder left by the book-hunter who looked through them before you. So large was the place that the staff could not keep up with all the action: shoppers were responsible for switching on and off the bare bulbs that lighted the alcoves and labyrinthine paths of the store.” (from Thieves of Book Row: New York’s Most Notorious Rare Book Ring).

By the 1960s it had less books than the 500,000 of its heyday, and Mr. Schulte had passed on in 1950…

“Surveying its barn-like main floor, its basement and three-sided balcony, an awestruck customer called Schulte’s “a great amphitheater” in which there seemed to sit “arranged all the books that were ever penned.” When I visited it, every stair step and nearly every floor board in the place creaked with nearly every footfall, but there were 140,000 books on its shelves, and, if a person could not find what he wanted, there were these lines to reassure him: “The Mounties always get their crook! And Schulte’s always get their book,” in proud, if flawed, poesy. If there wasn’t enough on the main floor, it was upstairs to Asia, Africa and Religion, two land masses leading on to infinity — up there amid pipes and low-hanging bare light bulbs, which customers turned on and off as they moved from section to section. Tables were heaped with books in stacks running thirty high and, if you saw a title that looked tempting near the base of a stack, it was quite a trick to slip it out without spilling a tower of books.” (from McCandlish Phillips, City Notebook).

Incidentally, amazingly it was Lovecraft who in 1922 had introduced the New York native Frank Belknap Long to the second-hand bookshops of New York. Not the other way around.

Two postcard plans of Roger Williams Park, Providence. Here’s the first. This card is from about 1907, and thus indicative of the park which Lovecraft would have known as a boy…

I can just about read the words, and can spot things like a “Dutch Garden”. Which is a distinctive garden form also appears in “The Lurking Fear”, forming the setting for the “deserted mansion”. The distinctive garden form is, as I wrote in a footnote to my annotated “Lurking Fear”…

“A rectangular formal garden laid out with angular geometric sunken paths, creating a densely packed atmosphere. Often planted with Dutch tulips and other vivid and erect flowers, and with a rectangular sunken pool in the centre.”

One also has to wonder if the riding of the zebra in Lovecraft’s Dream Quest might not be some distant reflection of his boyhood desire to ride the zebra on the Park’s merry-go-round…

There was also a bandstand. S.T. Joshi notes that… “There is a curious letter to the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal for August 3, 1913, complaining of the inadequate seating for band concerts at Roger Williams Park (the letter suggests that Lovecraft was a frequent attendant of these concerts)” — I Am Providence.

A later letter reveals that he went there with family, in his grandfather’s time…

“I had just as good a time as I ever used to have in youth listening to the concerts of Reeves’ American Band at Roger Williams Park with my grandfather. Old days …. old days……”

“Reeves’ American Band from Providence”, 1902.

These would have been the faces an eleven or twelve year old Lovecraft would have seen playing their instruments in the Park. His own group of friends occasionally formed their own amateur Band, with penny whistles and zithers and the like, presumably in juvenile emulation of the Park band.

At about this time he was also a keen bicyclist, and evidently bicycling was permitted in the Park…

This was posted 1906, so might have been photographed a few years earlier, making the boys in the picture about Lovecraft’s age.

He also wrote that he had visited a ‘cosmic’ exhibition at the Museum there, c. 1916…

“There is now on exhibition at the museum of Roger Williams Park a remarkable collection of astronomical photographs, taken by the celebrated Prof. Percival Lowell of Flagstaff, Arizona, whose theories concerning [‘canals’ on] the planet Mars are so widely known. The pictures are in the form of glass transparencies, exhibited in a darkened room, and illuminated from behind, so that they stand out with vivid clearness”.

Evidently Lovecraft later had some correspondence with the Museum Director, on his return to Providence from New York. The “History of the Necronomicon” is partly written on the back of a 27th April 1927 letter to Lovecraft from William L. Bryant, the Director.

Here are some pictures of the animals in the interior of the Museum. Note the lobster and sea-things in jars and bottles…

He was also amused by the various exotic animals to be seen alive in the grounds of the Park. For instance, he once commented on a photo of himself…

“Note the proboscidian effect,” [meaning his large nose, in his photograph of him made by Robert Barlow] he said, “my only local rival in that field being the elephant at Roger Williams Park. Keep this curio if it’s of any use — I ordered six prints from Barlow.”

He also investigated the new Benedict Monument to Music in the Park, dedicated in September 1924, which had been built while he was away in New York City…

“I took the [trolley] car for Roger Williams Park to search out that new classick marble temple which I had never seen…”

He writes that he was moved to ecstasy by the austere classical style and quiet setting of this acoustic stage for musical performances…

“All visible objects [were] the hushed and tenantless greensward, the piercing blue of sky and water, the gleaming and half-erubescent whiteness of the towering temple itself combin’d with the background of translacustrine forest and the warmth and magick of mid-spring to create an atmosphere of induplicable fascination, and even of a kind of pagan holiness.” — quoted by L. Sprague de Camp in Lovecraft: A Biography.

Here is the second map of the Park, a two-tone postcard probably from the 1930s. Note the dragon in the top-right, next to a male peacock. Was there a dedicated lizard-house, or does this simply indicate the Menagerie house?

Lovecraft still visited and strolled the Park at this point, in summer, as one of his letters for 30th July 1933 is headed from “Bench in Roger Williams Park”.