Lovecraft correspondent Fred Anger planned an index to Weird Tales and an edition of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yoggoth, both with Louis C. Smith. It seems that Smith has long been a minor and almost total mystery to Lovecraftians. But he can now be fairly easily traced through his fannish activities, although his birth and death dates, and his post-war occupation, remain elusive.

John Cheng’s book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) names Smith as… “Louis C. Smith on the Berkeley-Oakland side of San Francisco” and details on page 217 some of Smith’s early fannish involvement…

   “In 1928 Aubrey MacDermott, Clifton Amsbury, Lester Anderson, and Louis C. Smith on the Berkeley-Oakland side of San Francisco Bay began meeting monthly as the Eastbay Science Correspondence Club (ESCC). Raymond Palmer, originally a Chicago SCC member, suggested a national merger [with his own organisation and they became the] Eastbay Scientific Association, merged into one club under a constitution drafted by Dennis, Clements, and A. B. Maloire of Chehalis, Washington.”

Cheng appears to be drawing here on Joseph L. Sanders’s Science Fiction Fandom (1994), although I am unable to access his footnotes.

Harry Warner Jr.’s book All our yesterdays: an informal history of science fiction fandom (1969) noted on page 59 and 67 respectively that…

   “Louis C. Smith had dozens of custom-bound volumes that he entitled ‘Fantastic Fiction….’ and that “Louis C. Smith kept a card index in the thirties that contain facts on more than a thousand books” but that is all I have been able to access online.

Evidently Lovecraft was not dealing with a couple of vapid star-gazing schoolboys. Smith was serious about bibliographic undertakings.

Smith also contributed letters to the Jerome Siegel (1914-1996) fanzine Science Fiction, and had a letter in the very first issue in November 1932.

Smith had an article or letter in the August 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan, in which he noted that “A. Merritt is of French Huguenot ancestry”. Smith and his friend Fred Anger provided “An Interview with E. Hoffman Price” published in The Fantasy Fan, December 1934.

Smith contributed an article on “Phillip M. Fisher, Jr.” to Fantasy Magazine, August 1935. In 2011 this was due to be reprinted as an introduction to the book Strange Ocean Vistas of Philip M. Fisher (George A. Vanderburgh’s Lost Treasures from the Pulps #12) but this is a volume that although prepared seems to have been delayed.

An article “Phantasy’s Trend” by Louis C. Smith appeared in The Phantagraph fanzine of February 1936.

The Futile Press’s The Science Fiction Critic (December 1936/January 1937, “Volume One, Number Six”) contained work by a “Frederik and Louis C. Smith”, the Smith item titled “Fantasiana”. One wonders if the “Frederik” was Smith’s friend Fred Anger. It seems likely he was. The Science Fiction Critic fanzine was edited by Claire P. Beck, and that particular edition was the first issued from her new address at Lakeport, California.

Smith had a column titled “Fantastica” in the fanzine Helios (Oct-Nov-Dec 1937).

According to the online The FictionMags Index Smith had letters published in Weird Tales: “Feb, Dec 1933, Dec 1934, Aug 1935, Nov 1936”.

Smith had a column published in the Tesseract fanzine: December 1936; and January 1937 (titled “Authorsophy”, stated as being… “a column by Louis C. Smith which quotes Edmond Hamilton, E. E. Smith and others”); and March 1937; and October 1937 (titled “Science in Fiction”). Tesseract was apparently the product of The Science Fiction Advancement Association of San Francisco, with which Smith was presumably involved since he was evidently living in the city. In 1941 Smith was noted in a SF fanzine as living in San Francisco…

   “recent news from America is that that eternal infernal bibliography-in-preparation bug has now bitten old-time fan Louis C. Smith and Fantasia-editor Louis Goldstone, both of San Francisco.” (Futurian War Digest, 1941, No.14).

This quip probably refers to Smith’s venture with co-editor Jack Riggs, on a 28 page index of SF pulp stories: Unknown Index: Fantasy Fiction in Three Sections, Table of Contents, Index of Titles, Alphabetical List of Authors, Berkeley, Calif., 1944 or 1946. A book record at Worldcat describes this work as an… “Index to the 39 issues of Unknown and Unknown Worlds.”

The cover of this work actually gives us an address: “1620 Chestnut Street, Berkley-2- California”

However, this may have been Jack Riggs rather than Smith’s address, since the 1941 Fanzine Yearbook in section two of Le Zombie (January 1942) gives the title and address of Smith’s own fanzine:

   “TELLUS    Louis C. Smith, 1845 Prince Street, Berkeley, California. Mimeographed; monthly; two; 16 pages; 10 cents.”

Tellus is in the Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries… “Tellus. Nos. 1, 2 (1941), 3 (1942), 4 (1943), 5 (1944), 6 (1945)”

This fanzine run might be usefully inspected for any article by Smith remembering his contact with Lovecraft or his circle. It might also give biographical details for his friend Fred Anger.

Smith’s home was also a venue for weekly fannish SF meetings in his city, according to a footnote to an article in Astounding Science Fiction in 1942 (Volume 28, Issue 6, page 110)…

   “Every single member is an Astounding SF fan, which isn’t as astounding as it may seem. We meet every Friday evening at 1845 Prince Street in Berkeley with Louis Smith as director.”

All goes rather quiet on the Louis C. Smith front after this. But in 1971 a paper was presented to the first Popular Culture Association National Conference (East Lansing, MI, April 8-10, 1971) by a Louis C. Smith, titled “John Clark Ridpath and Popular History – Neglected and Forgotten”. Ridpath was a popular historian 1869-85. It might suggest that Louis C. Smith became a academic or more likely an academic librarian, since he obviously had the bibliographic bug in him.

Lovecraft correspondent Fred Anger (William Frederick Anger, probably b. 15th Sept 1920) was a young Lovecraft fan and letter writer to the pulps. The Lovecraft Encyclopedia states he planned an index to Weird Tales and an edition of Fungi from Yoggoth, both with Louis C. Smith, neither of which appeared. He contributed an interview to The Fantasy Fan fanzine.

Here are two fragments of Anger’s youthful letters to pulps…

   “Fred Anger, of Berkeley, California, writes: “Weird Tales is certainly improving steadily. Every new copy gets better and better; evidently there is no end to your progress. The first installment of The Trail of the Cloven Hoof is as good a piece of weird fiction as it is possible to find. Mr. Eadie has given us nothing but the best in all the years he has been writing. The Trail of the Cloven Hoof equals if not excels The World-Wrecker of several years ago. Congratulations, Mr. Eadie. Through the Gates [of the Silver Key?… his letter is incomplete, at least in the digital source I have access to]” — “By Air Mail,” a letter to Weird Tales, September 1934, Vol.24, No.3.

John Cheng’s book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) quotes Anger on page 62, as being representative of writers to the pulp letters pages…

   “Readers were not naive about letters columns. Some readers questioned the validity and representative character of published exchanges. “I hardly think that the small cross-section of the Science Fiction readers as represented by your Discussions is quite a fair example of the readers as a whole,” wrote Fred Anger, 2700 Webster Street, Berkeley, California. “It is inclined to be prejudiced and it is not a customary editorial policy to print letters which really express opinions.”

Cheng does not say to which pulp Anger was writing here, nor does he footnote the quote. It was not Weird Tales, but rather an SF pulp with letters pages titled “Discussions”. Presumably this must have been Amazing Stories. This might suggest Anger was a hard SF as well as a fantasy-horror fan. I have found an online indication that his letter was published in a 1935 issue of Amazing Stories.

Anger appears to have been very antagonistic to Robert Bloch, then of about the same age…

   “Another fellow named Fred Anger never missed a chance to criticize Bloch” (Gary Romeo, “Stars of the Pulps”, Sand Roughs #5, Winter Solstice, 2002).

This was apparently because Bloch didn’t like Conan and had called R.E. Howard’s character “Conan the Cluck” in print.

The Lovecraft correspondence with Anger seems accounted for, and safely in the Selected Letters and held in a public collection…

“H.P. Lovecraft Correspondence: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, United States. The collection consists of 5 holograph postcards (Aug. 31, 1934 to Sept. 2, 1926), 10 holograph letters (Aug. 14, 1934 to Aug. 14, 1935), 1 typescript letter (Jan. 16, 1936), one chain letter (typescript and holograph, undated), one typescript letter signed by August Derleth (April 21, 1968). The letters and postcards are written to Fred Anger from Lovecraft, mostly from his home in Providence, Rhode Island. They relate to their common interests in writing weird fiction and issues relating to publishing their work. Transcriptions of the materials have been made and are available in the archives.”

I have found a further note (.xls file) that this was an…

“Acquisition Donated to the Archives by William F. Anger in 1973”

One assumes that the letter from August Derleth (April 21, 1968) was to alert Anger of the importance of his old Lovecraft letters and items? If so it would likely have Anger’s home address in 1968. Has anyone ever checked this archive, other than perhaps Derleth? Its presence at Minneapolis might suggest that Anger was around Minneapolis, Minnesota in the 1970s? Or perhaps was an alumnus of the university?

Generally lacking in the older Lovecraftian printed literature is a death date for Anger, although I Am Providence states 1920-1997. I have found a Polish listing of correspondents which states “1997”, and interestingly this also notes that Anger personally knew Clark Ashton Smith.

Presumably this 1997 death date was drawn either from Joshi or from Ken Hill’s information given on the alt.horror.cthulhu discussion group in 2008…

   “William Frederick Anger, born in 1921, according to AN H.P. LOVECRAFT ENCYCLOPEDIA […] I don’t find any references to him after the 1930’s. The Social Security Death Index lists a William F. Anger, born 15 September 1920, died 2 September 1997; last known residence, Buffalo, N.Y.; social security number issued in New York State.”

This is the only mention of Anger on that alt.horror.cthulhu thread. An open genealogy website confirms that “William F Anger’s last known residence is at Buffalo, Erie County, NY (New York) 14203.” Another database usefully states…

   “William F Anger, died 09/02/1997 buried at Bath National Cemetery in Bath, NY.”

This has enabled me to find a picture of his gravestone at Bath National Cemetery (Plot: R, 0, 53), the inscription of which tells us that he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War…

Presumably the U.S. Navy archives may have more details of his war service. YN3 indicates he was a “Petty officer third class” in the Navy.

None of this proves that the East Coast Anger is the same as as the West Coast Anger. But my hypothesis would be that after California fandom in the 1930s, where he apparently knew Clark Ashton Smith personally, Anger served in the Navy in the 1940s. He then possibly (my guess) took advantage of the post-war G.I. Bill to get an university education, and went to live in the East Coast. Given that he was a Lovecraft fan I wonder if he may have tried for Brown University? What he did on the East Coast for fifty years, if indeed he was living around New York from circa 1947 to 1997, I have as yet been unable to discover. There seems to be not a whit of him in the fannish record that’s available online.

I’ve been taking a quick look at the possible candidates for another elusive Lovecraft correspondent: C. L. Stuart of 17 Brockett St, E Milton, Mass.

It seems here we have another Barlow error. The address should read “Brackett St.” The location is four miles south of the centre of Boston, near the coast.

I have found a rather likely personage in the form of the East Coast author and encyclopedia editor Charles Leonard Stuart (aka Leonard Stuart).

He first shows up in the online record as a magazine editor in the 1890s, then as Assistant Editor of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900). In 1910 he edited Current Cyclopedia, and by 1911 he is credited with the revising and editing of Webster’s New Illustrated dictionary. He then tackled the editorship of the Everybody’s cyclopedia (1912) (a complete reference library condensing the world’s knowledge in plain English) with George J. Hagar. This must have been a success, since two years later he was the chief editor of the People’s Cyclopedia (1914)…

Prepared by more than two hundred of the most eminent editors, educators, scholars, scientists, inventors and explorers under the chief editorship of Charles Leonard Stuart

A “Charles Leonard Stuart” has a 1922 copyright registry entry for a nationalist book in 1922 (cranky 1920s racialist stuff, with lots of worries about Papist influence and a chapter on Eugenics) which might have caught Lovecraft’s attention…

The Age of Understanding; or, Americanism and the standard of world nationalism: a true outline of history and science. Boston, R.G. Badger, 1922.

The book is available online at archive.org as by “Stuart, Leonard, [b.] 1868”. A short biography in this volume calls him an…

   “…encyclopedist and author of French-American ancestry; b. near Coutances, France, 12 February 1860; s. of Sara Stuart-Johns of Cornwall, England, and of Philippe Le Sueur, grandson of Pierre Le Sueur (d. 1792), the founder of French Methodism” […] settled in New York City in 1897 […] since has been continuously associated with international encyclopedic and educational book publishing work. Contributor to leading encyclopedias and periodical literature. Editor of the New Century Reference Library (1907); Current Cyclopedia of Ready Reference (1910); People’s Cyclopedia (1914); etc.; author of The Story of Human Flight (1907); A Misunderstood Scientist (1907) ; The Passaic and Its Falls (1910); The Great God Pan (1913); Unity, Life’s Ideal (1914); The Tycoon and the Suffragette (lyrical comedy; 1914); The Cosmic Comedy or the Kaiser’s Dream (1919) [possibly a wartime update of his 1901 The Cosmic Comedy; or, The vital urge]; The Age of Understanding or Americanism the Standard of World Nationalism (1922); A Roamer in Lyonesse (1922); The Eon or The Quest of the Lotus (MS.) [given as “The Eonic Quest” on the title page], Residence Glencliff, N.Y.

After 1922 he becomes quiescent in terms of publication. One assumes he might have retired to Brackett St. in the early-mid 1920s, aged about 65. But I can find no proof of this, other than it certainly looks like a nice retirement spot on Google Street View.

There are number of items in his Age of Understanding biography which would have interested Lovecraft, and might have prompted him to write offering revision services:

  1. The Great God Pan: an All-time Story (1913, Tudor Society, 35 pages). A copy is in Harvard Library, digitised but not yet placed online. This suggests it may have been a scholarly monograph.

  2. The Cornwall and Lyonesse connections might have intersected with Lovecraft’s quest after his own ancestors. I can find no trace of any title called A Roamer in Lyonesse, nor any work on Lyonesse from 1922 to 1935 under any likely name. Possibly the book was anticipated for 1922, but never appeared. Possibly it needed revision work, and if so the topic would have been directly in Lovecraft’s line of interest. Lyonesse is, of course, the Cornish/Arthurian folk story of the lost land under the sea.

  3. The manuscript of his esoteric-sounding “The Eon or The Quest of the Lotus” (aka “The Eonic Quest”) might also have been revision work for Lovecraft. I can find no trace of this work either, under those titles.

Woodburn Prescott Harris (1888-1988) was a Lovecraft correspondent circa 1929, of whom little is known. Only three Lovecraft letters to Woodburn Harris survive, but one is a gargantuan 70 pages. Harris was an English and Drama teacher, seemingly a Shakespeare specialist, who married in the 1920s and thereabouts quit teaching to become a farmer at Vergennes, Vermont. How Harris came to know Lovecraft is uncertain, but it seems that it was only later that he took up Lovecraft’s revision services. Lovecraft wrote of Harris…

“Our intelligent rustick friend Woodburn Harris has suddenly blossom’d into a prolifick professional client — being intent on saving the country [by publishing on the prohibition of liquor]” (Selected Letters III, p.130).

In the list of the addresses of Lovecraft correspondents sent by Barlow to Derleth, Barlow has added a very curious note (Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. gives the list in full in the Lovecraft Annual 2012). Barlow noted for Derleth of Harris that he…

“should have many pink discussions”.

The meaning of this word “pink” seems uncertain. Barlow was gay and Derleth (so I’m told) was bisexual, and the book Selected Papers on Lovecraft (p.69) tantalisingly noted in passing the… “the incredibly erroneous views on sex of Woodburn Harris”. This small constellation of hints might lead some to consider that “pink” could be a code for gay.

But on the face of it “pink” was more likely to imply the correspondence was politically communist in tone. I have found one contemporary reference online, with a similar usage: “I was a member of this parlor pink discussion group back in 1942”, referring to membership of a group with “communistic overtones” (Investigation of Communist activities in the Chicago area, 1954). Also a mention of detecting “well-organized pink discussion groups” in the context of anti-communism (U.S.A. journal, 1956). So it would be tempting to presume that Barlow’s meaning of pink was the same as “pinko”: a once-common term in the 1940s and 50s, meaning someone who was a communist sympathiser or a fellow traveler with socialism. The OED dates “pinko” to as early as 1936, and Barlow’s notes were written 1937.

This seems the most plausible explanation, yet it is one that appears to be directly contradicted by Lovecraft himself…

“As for our young communist — I have just set Farmer Woodburn Harris of Vermont on to him, and expect some brilliant fireworks. Harris is a political conservative of the traditional Yankee mould, and his keen wit and horse-sense will form a delightful foil to young Weiss’s bolshevism…” (Selected Letters III, p.187).

Harris had been an Acting Sergeant Major in the First World War, was the son of a minister and had been a school principal, and by 1930 Harris was a reader of Joseph McCabe’s (apparently sober and balanced) pamphlets concern the facts of the historical reality of Jesus. Harris defended McCabe from shoddy criticism in a letter to the editor in The Outlook, July 9, 1930, p.398. These facts and the Lovecraft comment above suggest that Harris was certainly not a communist “red”, or even a “pink” sympathiser.

So it appears that the word “pink” remains an enigma, unless perhaps someone with access to the Barlow and Derleth letters can shed any light on its use and meaning in those letters?

Possibly the solution to the riddle is that Barlow knew of Weiss’s correspondence with Harris, thus the “pink” nature of the letters that Harris might have in his possession? But against Weiss’s name on the list Barlow notes that Weiss was an outright “Red”. So why might he use “Pink” elsewhere on the list, when “Red” would have served if he was referring to Weiss’s correspondence with Harris?

Perhaps Barlow himself (apparently a communist sympathiser at one time) had once had some correspondence with Harris on politics?

Woodburn Harris circa 1917.

Woodburn Harris in the Middlebury College News Letter, Aug 1956, “Class of 1911” (class reunion photo).

The Editor of The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis, is currently writing a book on the history of walking in America. You may remember that my recent book on Lovecraft in New York had a lot to say about the nature of Lovecraft’s walking, including noting his occasional use of canes. Wayne Curtis has a preview of his book, an article which explains the culture of walking cane use as a mode of gentlemanly display…

“A century and a half ago, walking sticks and canes weren’t just associated with the aged, but with young dandies and others of dapper inclination.”

These included “system canes”, of special interest to writers now since they can serve a pivots for a plot in a story with a historical setting. These could conceal and deploy anything from…

“a picnic utensil set, opera glasses, an ear trumpet, a perfume bottle, a detachable baby rattle, a blow gun, a winemaker’s thermometer, a folding fan, a telescope, a flask with cork top, a pocket watch, a sewing kit, a compact and mirror, a full-length saw blade, a microscope, a pennywhistle, a set of watercolors and paintbrush, a whistle for hailing a cab, and gauges for measuring the height of a horse.”

On Lovecraft’s main cane, here is Kirk on the Kalem Klub establishing their Sunday “dandy walk” promenade, in which they strolled in their best suits up and down Clinton St…

“The occasion required the “wearing” of a cane, but the acquisition of this adjunct to our Sunday splendour proved no great problem. Lovecraft produced an heirloom [a walking cane] from Providence which was undeniably authentic, and at once chastely severe and unobtrusively classical.” (Letter from Kirk, in Lovecraft’s New York Circle, Hippocampus Press, 2006, p.225).

This cane was presumably Winfield’s “silver-headed walking stick” (L. Sprague de Camp), which Lovecraft had inherited, and which Lovecraft must have taken to New York. de Camp says that Lovecraft came to wear Winfield’s sartorial garb on special occasions. A dandy cane was certainly part of Lovecraft’s dream vision of himself as a young man…

“After carefully tying my stock, I donned my coat and hat, took a cane from a rack downstairs, and sallied forth upon the village street” (recalling a dream he had, in Selected Letters I, p.100).

In a letter to Frank Belnap Long in 1927 he wrote…

“be sure to depict me [in Long’s new novelette, presumably “The Space Eaters”] in my new Puritan frock coat. I think I shall adopt an umbrella also — as a constant companion…” (in Selected Letters II, p.172)

There may be more on Lovecraft’s ownership of walking sticks and umbrellas, and use of them on special occasions, in the collection Lovecraft Remembered, edited by Peter H. Cannon, but I don’t have access to that. It seems that fancy canes, at least until 1927, were generally used only by Lovecraft on special occasions. But one also wonders if he took a stout defensive cane or umbrella on some of his more insalubrious New York night-walks and his deeper rural rambles, if only to defend himself from dog attack. Rabid dogs were then a concern, albeit a minor one, over and above the fear of general dog-bite from aggressive farm and village dogs.

Some notes on H.P. Lovecraft’s British correspondent, Arthur Harris (1893-1966), of Penrhyn Bay, Llandudno.

Harris was a professional printer in North Wales, and a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft. Harris’s long-running amateur publication was titled Interesting Items, sized approx 7.4” x 4.4” and well printed. It was one of the longest running amateur publications, and the oldest of the British amateur publications.

Harris also appears to have printed amateur publications for others…

   “the late George W. Macauley recalled printing an issue of his journal The Hay Field with Arthur Harris’s press in Wales” (The Fossil, #352, Jan 2012, p.7)

Harris also printed small pamphlets. In a four-page pamphlet edition of the poem “The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania, 1915”, he gave H.P. Lovecraft his first standalone publication. The poem is Lovecraft’s polemical response, in the context of the early years of the First World War, to the notorious German U-boat sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania off the coast of Ireland.

S.T. Joshi notes in The Lovecraft Encyclopedia (2001) that Lovecraft usually corresponded by letter about once or twice a year with Harris. In the mid 1990s the Library of Brown University…

   “acquired a collection of 52 letters and 5 postcards written by Lovecraft to Arthur Harris of Llandudno, Wales, between June, 1915 and January, 1937. This cache of previously unpublished correspondence is important…” (Brown University Library, Annual Report of the University Librarian, 1995, Page 20).

I’m not sure if these have yet been transcribed and published. I’m guessing that these letters are perhaps related to, or essentially the same as, the set of photocopies sold on eBay in February 2013…

   “58 letters from Lovecraft to Arthur Harris an amateur publisher from North Wales who published some very early Lovecraft pieces, the letters begin from 1915 and they maintained a correspondence the last letter being dated 1936. The majority of the letters are from the earlier period. There are a few other pieces (again all photocopies) articles and poems. Plus some letters relating to the original collection.”

A print fanzine called World of H.P. Lovecraft issued a #7 issue in 2010, edited and compiled by Les Thomas, which appears to have had materials on or from the letters…

   “The latest issue of The World of H.P. Lovecraft featuring Arthur Harris Collection listing unpublished letters and H.P. Lovecraft literary references”.

This description is a little vague, and so it’s difficult to learn if the actual contents of the letters are given — or just a listing, or a listing and selected extracts.

An undated edition of the trade publication The Small Printer (volumes 1-2, page 42), partly available online, ran an obituary titled “Arthur Harris of Llandudno”. This is presumably from 1966, since the obituary opens…

   “Arthur Harris died during March. Although he was a professional printer from 1909 until his retirement he was better known by his activity in the world of amateur publishing…”

Sadly, no more of this obituary is available online. It seems probable that the local Llandudno press would also have carried an obituary for Harris in the first half of 1966, and someone with access to the local North Wales archives might usefully look it up and place it online.

The Library Association Record of 1966 ran a survey of originality in printing among the little and private presses in Britain, noting of Harris his…

   “Interesting Items, which he started printing [as a schoolboy] with rubber type, and pushing under neighbours’ doors, in [5th Mar] 1904. Mr. Harris, who has a collection of 13,500 amateur magazines… [up from 8,000 in the mid 1940s]”

S.T. Joshi notes in The Lovecraft Encyclopedia that the original title for Interesting Items was Llandudno’s Weekly.

Harris was a member of the British Fantasy Society in the 1940s, and is noted in their publications as attending at least one convention. It appears that by the post-war period Harris was also being noted as a major collector of early British comics…

   “Arthur Harris of Penrhyn Bay, Llandudno, owner of that unique collection of nearly 3,000 comics (needless to say the decent British variety), has recently given three talks concerning them [in Llandudno in 1952/3]. (The Collector’s Digest, Vol. 7, No. 75, March 1953, page 67).

There appears to be no record online of what became of his collections. Hopefully his relatives sold them off circa 1966/7, rather than simply burned them all. [Update: in the latest Lovecraft Annual Kenneth J. Faig Jr. notes an article in The Fossil from 1981, which indicated the collection had by then passed to Roy Heaven.]

His home at Penrhyn Bay was and still is actually quite detached from Llandudno town, being in the bay on the far side of the huge and rocky Little Orme’s Headland. Before modern development, the place was very small and remote…

Although in true British fashion, the size of the place didn’t stop it having a museum devoted to weird and wonderful relics…

I’ve been having a quick look at which stories might be relevant to Lovecraft’s own mythos (rather than to the later expansions of the Mythos) in the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith. So far as I can tell the most substantially Lovecraft-relevant stories are…

  The Return of the Sorcerer
  The Nameless Offspring
  Ubbo-Sathla
  The Holiness of Azederac
  The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

I also read that the following are Lovecraftian in tone or approach…

  The Hunters from Beyond
  The Coming of the White Worm
  The Dark Eidolon
  The Dweller in the Gulf
  The Plutonian Drug
  The Treader in the Dust
  The Seven Geases
  The City of the Singing Flame
  The Abominations of Yondo
  The Eternal World
  Xeethra
  The Epiphany of Death
  A Star-Change

But then I was confused by finding a list of the contents of Robert Price’s The Klarkashton Cycle (his Chaosium collection of mythos-related stories of Clark Ashton Smith) (Thanks to Matthew T. Carpenter for the listing and notes on the versions and titles)…

  The Ghoul
  A Rendering from the Arabic (alternate version of The Return of the Sorcerer)
  The Hunters from Beyond
  The Vaults of Abomi (alternate version of The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis)
  The Nameless Offspring
  Ubbo-Sathla
  The Werewolf of Averoigne (alternate version of The Beast of Averoigne)
  The Eidolon of the Blind (alternate version of The Dweller in the Gulf)
  Vulthoom
  The Treader of the Dust
  The Infernal Star (fragment)

For someone not really familiar with Clark Ashton Smith’s work this is confusing, and I wonder if the Chaosium collection was distorted (use of alt. versions, re-titling, etc) because of copyright restrictions? Or did it perhaps venture beyond the original Lovecraft mythos in scope (I’ve never seen mention of Smith’s werewolf stories as mythos)?

Am I right in thinking that there’s really not yet been a definitive book collection of the Smith stories which have more than a brief “mentioned in passing” relation to Lovecraft’s fiction?

H.P. Lovecraft inherited a small mortgage on a working quarry at Manton, Dyerville, three miles west of Providence. The book Report on the Geology of Rhode Island (1887) gives its mineral deposits as being on “Manton Road, N. of Elm Farm”, with the presence of a farm suggesting it was possibly quite a rural location at the time the Lovecraft family invested in it.

In the 1920s this investment gave Lovecraft a peppercorn rent cheque of around $37 twice a year, although L. Sprague de Camp quotes a 1927 letter in which Lovecraft appears to imply that the cheques may have bounced…

“Every Feb. & Aug. the guy sends in a small cheque, but never pays up — so I’ve come to regard him as something of an institution, and feel a very proprietary interest in his rocky freehold. … I’d stand a good chance of losing my modest thou. [$1,000] if I ever had to foreclose [the mortgage].”

Although perhaps what’s meant here is that the mortgage was never ‘bought out’ with a lump-sum.

The quarry was indeed declining, as Lovecraft’s complaint about foreclosure suggests. At Lovecraft’s death, L. Sprague De Camp stated (Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, 1976) that the quarry was valued at only $500. And in the 1971 Preface to Selected Letters III, 1929-1931, Derleth and Wandrei wrote that…

“The old family-owned stone quarry in East Providence became exhausted and the income from it came to an end.”

The Books at Brown special Lovecraft issue (1991) noted that Lovecraft visited in 1927 when he…

“delighted in showing his friends over the small Providence quarry operated by the De Magistris”

The quarry was run by an Italian manager Mariano de Magistris, and his Americanized sons one of whom owned a roadster car. The name of their business was the Providence Crushed Stone & Sand Co., located at Violet Hill, Manton Ave. (A photo of the Crushed Stone Co’s trucks circa 1914 can be purchased here).

C.E. Miller’s Rhode Island Minerals and Their Locations (1971) describes the quarry thus…

“Providence: Manton or Violet Hill Quarry. This quarry, formerly operated by the Providence Crushed Stone and Sand Company, is one of Rhode Island’s famous mineral hunting grounds of the past…”

This “is” might appear to imply it was still accessible to mineralogists in the 1970s, but another book by Miller suggests it was then long closed as a working quarry. Miller’s Minerals of Rhode Island (1972) lists it as…

“A ‘bluestone’ quarry located at Manton near Providence. Closed 1941. George English described the foliated talc from here as the best in the USA.”

Other names for it appear to have been Manton Quarry, Manton Avenue Quarry, and Violet Hill Quarry. The American Mineralogist journal described it as being a pit quarry…

“geologically speaking, of a very complex nature. At Manton a quarry is located the rock of which is used for road material. Inasmuch as quarrying operations have produced a pit the geological and mineralogical problems can therefore be studied in considerable detail. […] With the continuance of the [quarry] operations minerals new to the area have been uncovered”.

The American Mineralogist journal (Volume 11, 1926, pp. 334-340) gave a complete list of the minerals found there, to which I have appended a slightly later published list of new finds (Volume 13, 1930, pp. 496-498) as the quarry was dug deeper…

For Titanite the quarry was… “Excellent – world class for species…”. The quarry certainly seems to have been a fine mineral resource all round, many of them quite unusual or attractive — one wonders if today it might have given Lovecraft an income in the mail-order sale of small polished samples.

Lovecraft’s friend James F. Morton used the quarry to get some of the fine mineral samples used for his outstanding Paterson Museum collection (Books at Brown Lovecraft special issue, 1991). One sample taken was an unknown ultra-heavy mineral, which Morton promised to try to identify for the curious de Magistris (and which one of Lovecraft’s letters later reminded Morton about). Some of the mineral types found there seem distinctly Lovecraftian in appearance. This is Stilbite, for instance (not on the above list, but found at Manton)…

The quarry was “easily reached by the Manton Ave. trolley car”, noted the American Mineralogist journal in 1920, and was located on “Cortez St. and Manton Ave.”. The mention of “Cortez St.” makes it easy to locate on Google Earth. It appears the quarry has today been landfilled and new apartments recently built on it…

Are there any connections with the fiction? Probably not in terms of a location used in Lovecraft’s fiction — but there is a “Joel Manton” in Lovecraft’s story “The Unnamable” (1923). Possibly this was a name Lovecraft chose because of his linkages with Manton — where there was also a Lovecraft “ancestral shrine” in the form of “the Thomas Clemence house beyond the village of Manton”, which Lovecraft had always heard about but which he only visited in 1933 (Selected Letters IV, page 288). Interestingly, though, when the fictional Manton is called upon to describe “the unnameable” he describes it as a “pit”…

“It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination.”