This post is a follow-on from last week’s Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design.

Rhode Island School of Design’s Pendleton Museum was an annexe to its main galleries and a favourite Providence spot for Lovecraft. It was a ‘must-see’ stop on the tour of the town given to his visitors, partly because entrance appears to have been free. The interior appealed greatly to Lovecraft because it was a faithful recreation of a Colonial era house. It was said to have been based on the Edward Dexter house in arrangement.

Pendleton House” [opened 1906] … “sedulously maintained in order to give the visitor a faithful picture of Georgian interiors as they really were.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Kleiner, 1919.

Attached to the [Waterman St.] museum proper is a perfect reproduction of a colonial mansion, containing the finest collection of American colonial furniture in the world.” — Letter from Lovecraft to Galpin, 9th August 1936.

When Lovecraft talks about a perfect Colonial interior, this is the sort of exemplar he has in mind at the level of the upper-classes. Albeit in richly plain colours, creams and warm polished woods, brass and flashes of gold gilding, rather than the dour black and white seen here.

Pendleton Museum or Pendleton House had its public ‘entrance through Waterman St.’, rather than its own frontage. Visitors would have had to walk through the Rhode Island School of Design galleries in order to reach it.

It was set to be matched with a long-anticipated Colonial style courtyard garden, but this was delayed again and again until finally the plans for it were drawn up in 1933, and the Garden was eventually realised until 1934. One assumes that Lovecraft was likely to have attended the opening event for the Garden, but I don’t know of any record of that.

Vintage cassette audiobooks, currently on eBay (not from me) along with “The Lurking Fear” in the same format.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a manga book. From 2012, 256 pages, and nice art evoking charcoal and engravings. Possibly not all pages have art, as it may be a short adaptation + the original text.

From Peru, and presumably intended for Carnival time there, the Mascara Lovecraft (a life-sized Lovecraft mask, for wearing). The price seems to convert from the Peruvian Peso P to U.S. $ at about $40. I didn’t go looking but I’m guessing they might be importing from the larger Carnival market in Brazil, so you may also be able to find them available elsewhere in Latin America?

They also have a Poe mask…

Now available to my Patreon patrons, a picture of Marblehead at sunset, in my cleaned and adjusted b&w version. It should be printable at large size, such as a 12-inch wide print. The technical details are: 3,700 pixels at 300dpi, as a .JPG, saved at 100% with no compression.

Lovecraft was of course greatly enamoured of Marblehead at sunset, and while there are some postcards this is perhaps the best artistic picture of such and dates from Lovecraft’s time. The seagulls even resemble night-gaunts! Patrons also get the colour original public domain version (partially cleaned by me), which they can tweak and sharpen to their own tastes. Artists may even want to have a go at replacing the sail boat with a newly-risen Tentacled One. There’s a white dot in the sky on the left which I’ve left uncleaned, as I think it’s a star emerging from the sky.

A new blog article on “Borges, Lovecraft, and Metaphysical Horror”. Be warned, there are huge plot-spoilers for Borges, in so far as he has plots.

Borges actually explores hidden knowledge [and its implications] … Borges’ horror is [thus] the culmination of Lovecraft’s program

Previously on Tentaclii:

“Lovecraft to Borges: cities in deserts”; “Borges leitor de Lovecraft”; “The Necronomicon seen from the Aleph: pseudo-intertextuality in Lovecraft and Borges”; and “Mathematical Monstrosity: Lovecraft’s geometry, Borges’s infinity, and beyond”.