Category Archives: Maps

I Luoghi di Lovecraft

29 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Now available from the Italian Amazon site, the Italian travel guidebook for Lovecraft, I Luoghi di Lovecraft: novissima guida ad uso del viaggiatore. In English translation it’s something like, “The Places of Lovecraft, a new guide for the use of travelers”. Published by the Imaginary Travel Ltd and written by Michele Mingrone, Caterina Scardillo and Sara Vettori.

Apparently written to the Lonely Planet series style-guide, although the book is not one of their titles. Which means one gets things like history and shops, monuments to see, hotels, transport, and so on. It even ventures out of New England and has sections on Antarctica, the Nameless City, and even the Dreamlands.

Visit R.I.

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Visit Rhode Island has a new page, “Sci-Fi + RI = H.P. Lovecraft” promoting Lovecraft tourism for 2019. Although it repeats the questionable local claim about the… “Providence Athenaeum, where Lovecraft frequented”. The Athenaeum claim appears to be slowly becoming one of those dubious ‘Claims That Will Not Die’ which are often to be found in a city’s marketing to unknowing tourists. He included it on the whirlwind tour of Providence he gave friends, due to the Poe connection, and late in his life he had to consult some scarce books there which gave the history of Nantucket, but so far as I know that was the extent to which he “frequented” it. I know of nothing to suggest he used it as a regular library. Why would he, when the Providence Public Library was free, huge, and one of the best in the USA?

Perhaps the wider tourism industry needs a recognisable brand-mark/stamp for tourism materials: “All Claims Vetted For Authenticity by an Independent Panel of Local Historians”? Although that would be the whole of Stratford-upon-Avon kaput, as only Mary Arden’s House (located a few miles outside Stratford) has any real claim to a provable connection to Shakespeare.

If you’re travelling to Providence and New England in 2019, perhaps for research or for NecronomiCon 2019, here are a couple of handy and authoritative guide-books you might find useful. Which it’s possible you might not be able to pick up locally, not even in the Arts & Sciences Council shop to be seen in the above Visit Rhode Island article.

* Henry Beckwith’s Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts (second edition, revised and enlarged). Paper only, about $50 used. Unless someone has a garage full of paper copies still to shift, this could probably use a $6 ebook edition in time for NecronomiCon 2019. Anyone care to contact the copyright holder about doing that?

* Off the Ancient Track: A Lovecraftian Guide to New-England & Adjacent New-York (2013, revised and enlarged). Paper only, but a very reasonable $10 from Necronomicon Press.

You may also want my free map of Lovecraft’s Providence.

Another hand-drawn map of Providence, 1907

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

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I previously posted a hand-drawn map made for a 1907 series of ‘Open Days’ in Providence, from The Official Program of the Old Home Week.

Now I’ve found a scan of the pocket walking booklet for the same event, A Little Guide to Providence, 1907. The neat little Guide focusses largely on the artistic and cultural life of Providence, as Lovecraft would have become aware of it circa age 16-17.

I’m pleased to see that the booklet has a version of the same map without the gutter problem of the earlier scan. At the back it has another map made in the same charming hand-made style as the first. I’ve rectified the slight lens distortion, perspective skew and colour-cast, as well as dropping them to 3,800 pixels so they’re manageable.

Looking at the map, it strikes me that if one were to combine Kingston and Plymouth placenames via a “Kin–mouth” amalgamation then one would come very close to the name Innsmouth, and with the “kin” perhaps pointing to that story’s underlying plot element of ‘kinship’.

Maps for Lovecraft’s letters

01 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Maps, Odd scratchings

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The eastern part of America, visualised as a map of the Greyhound long-distance bus routes for 1935.

Lovecraft was, of course, an experienced bus-hopper in the summer months. Though in his later years his poverty could usually only countenance the cheaper options for such transport, and the Greyhound lines were not the cheapest….

“We’ll have to investigate Chauncey. Westerly coaches pass through Hope Valley (so do the New York Greyhounds), but the fare is probably rather formidable.” — letter to Morton, January 1933.

He may also have juggled a cheaper fare by not going all the way…

“I generally proceed by coach out some main highway, then striking across country afoot till I reach another coach-bearing highway along which I can return. In this way I have explored many regions which I never saw before — some delectably-unspoiled” — 1933 letter.

Still, the map is indicative of the key destinations that could be reached by the long-distance coach-bus routes, and may be something to print out and slide in alongside the volumes of his letters. In order to keep track of him, as he reels off the more major placenames to his correspondents. The more fine-grained map of his home ground, which I posted here earlier, would be needed for the smaller little towns and settlements in Mass. and Rhode Island.

More generally useful, especially for those outside the USA, is an Erik Nitsche map of the ‘mental picture’ that Americans had of the nation’s patchwork of regions in 1939, without all the state lines confusing matters…

I also found a good map of the British Empire, as the Anglophile Lovecraft would have known and understood it, in a map of 1929…

The dozy-looking “Prince in whom we all delight” turned out to be a duffer, but was replaced by someone better (see the excellent movie The King’s Speech for the story).

Halloween Postcard Special: along the Innsmouth shoreline

31 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Maps, Picture postals

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Below are a selection of Lovecraft-era postcards from the shoreline at Newburyport, Lovecraft’s base model for the town of Innsmouth in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

Mostly toward Joppa and Plum Island, the stretch of shortline that runs about a half-mile to a mile south-east of the main town, along the Merrimack River waterfront.

“Newburyport is one of the most hauntingly quaint towns in America [… it has a] spectral hush & semidesertion […] In Haverhill, 8 miles up the Merrimac [River], they call it ‘The City of the Living Dead’ [Among its other features, he noted] the unpaved sidewalks on pre-Revolutionary streets with rotting, half-deserted houses south of the Square. When I first saw Newburyport I mistook the central square for a mere neighbourhood shopping centre, & kept on the car (it was a trolley-car then) in the expectation of reaching some real ‘downtown’. Only when the line ended — at the ‘Joppa’ fishing hamlet — did I realise that the half-deserted square I had passed through was actually ‘downtown’!” — H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters IV, pages 259-260.

Lovecraft apparently got off at the end of the line, presumably toward the islands end of the Joppa stretch, and walked back to town. If he had followed the line further he would have found the route hooking around east and over to the islands resort area, such as it was, which was more to the east of the town as the crow flies. He probably didn’t step out to the Plum Island section except on postcards, or perhaps on another trip or from the train or bus. Though he did accidentally go to “the end of the line” on the tram on his first visit, that being out on the edge of Plum Island. He then walked back into town.

Also, the old railway track…

“Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge of the river-gorge.” — “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.

For further details on Newburyport and Lovecraft, see Chapter 3 of David Goudsward’s book H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley (2013). Also the book Legends and Lore of the North Shore.

Want more postcards and a map? See my earlier Old Newburyport post of 2014, which also has couple more pictures of Joppa.

Lovecraft Country

21 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Here’s an elegant map, which might make a useful folded bookmark or paste-in for Lovecraft scholars. Especially those reading through the ever-increasing number of shelf-strainers that contain Lovecraft’s Letters and Essays, and who are trying to follow the old gent as he zig-zags through the coastal summerlands and backwaters of New England to alight on the doorsteps of fellow amateurs, correspondents and antiquarian museums. The map is from the 1922 edition of The geography of New England.

300dpi, in a 3Mb .jpg file. It’s not a fold-out, so there’s not much I could do about the gutter when aligning the two pages in Photoshop.

Also useful, for following Lovecraft’s more local walks into the city-centre, is a 1907 street-map of central Providence. Hand-drawn by a local, it was intended for use as part of a city-wide ‘open day’. As such it shows the hopping off points for the tram lines that Lovecraft would have used to get out and about, and it usefully highlights and has a fine-grained local awareness of which stores and buildings are worthy of notice. Again, there was not much I could do about the map’s gutter, as it wasn’t a fold-out map.

Antarctica, newly height-mapped

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Maps, Unnamable

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This may be of interest to Lovecraft artists who use 3D. A new all-terrain height-map of Antarctica has just been released, with a mapping resolution that’s high enough to spot one of Lovecraft’s Star-Headed Old Ones and possibly even to count the number of points on his star (2m resolution in rocky parts). There’s a Google-Maps-like Web Viewer of this summer 2015-16 snapshot of the mighty continent’s terrain.

Presumably the data sets will soon be loaded to the main 3D terrain download service TerrainParty, which is free and public, from where you’ll be able to get it with relative ease to creative 3D landscape software such as Vue, Terragen, World Creator Pro etc. And you can then create any true-life vista of Antarctica you want, without risk of frost-bite or shoggoth attack.

Lovecraft’s 125th Birthday presents and parties – the big parcel

20 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Maps, NecronomiCon 2015

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Here’s my quick round-up of the celebratory free items and events and doings in celebration of H.P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday, on 20th August 2015…

* I’ve made a large map of some Providence locations the living Lovecraft would have been familiar with…

lovecraft_providence_final_hires_2015-thHigh resolution version here (5Mb in .JPG).

The map omits the Athenaeum — I can find very little evidence of his connection with it. It also omits the schools/YMCA and buildings/places variously said to have inspired his stories, except for “The Call of Cthulhu”‘s ‘Fleur-de-Lys’ building (hard to avoid as it’s alongside the Providence Art Club his aunt and other relatives were connected with). But the map does add cafes, of which he was so fond — one he is known to have frequented near the public library. The other is a general indication of the dock-front cafes for sailors and watermen, which he used at various times (possibly initially discovered at dawn after his early pre-NYC all-night walks?) because they were so cheap and served large portions.

* MalakiaLaGatta has a fine 125th Birthday poster…

MalakiaLaGatta-deviantart

* The Trunk Space has a night of Lovecraft performance art in Phoenix, AZ, tonight.

* Cambridge, Mass. has an “In the Mouth of Madness” Lovecraft film festival from the 20th – 24th August 2015, showing Lovecraft and Lovecraft-influenced movies on the big screen.

* There’s a big costumed H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Party in the East Village, New York City, with proceeds going help the homelessness in the city. Over in the West Village, NYC, there’s a The Weird West Village walking tour: H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Edition walk. The Lovecraft Bar in NYC is also hosting a party on the 21st August.

* The public library in Jacksonville, IL is holding its own Lovecraft Festival today.

* Buffalo, NY has a Love, Light & Magick evening of Lovecraft readings.

* There’s a “Celebrate H.P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday at the Love Fest in Second Life“, Second Life being the well-known virtual world.

* South San Francisco Main Library has a “Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft!” event this evening, 20th August from 5pm to 7pm… “Join us in celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday with board games, a film screening, and treats!” Sounds like it might be aimed at young teens?

* The book launch of Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s — at the Carlton Cinema, Toronto, August 20th — will happen alongside “a screening of animated shorts that celebrates H.P. Lovecraft’s 125th birthday”.

* Willits Kinetic Carnivale is a big steampunk kinetika gathering based around the Mendocino County Museum in California. They’re certainly aware that the event co-incides with HPL’s birthday, but the extent of HPL art and costume theming may be limited — their art gets prepared and planned for months in advance.

* A superbly stinky and rare giant Corpse Flower is about to blossom in Denver, just in time for HPL’s birthday…

corpse

* Pasedena’s Mountain View Mausoleum is holding an October production of Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” in October, and they’ve having a Birthday preview reading at the Huntington on 22nd August 2015. “Wicked Lit” at the Huntington in Pasedena starts 7pm, and also includes readings from the Scottish Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant.

* And, of course, there are a variety of Birthday related events in Providence, based around NecronomiCon 2015. Including a new Lovecraft plaque/post sited at 454 Angell Street. Designed, created, and installed by Gage Prentiss, “with placement help by Donovan and Pam Loucks”.

plaque

There was also a Hiding Under The Covers Birthday event in Providence, but it was on the 19th. However, as this post is being published midnight on 19th/20th UK time, there might still be time to rush down there if you read this quick enough.

I guess one might also consider the cool appearance by a likeness of Lovecraft in a recent film by the great director Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Midnight in Paris) to be a sort of birthday present, as the movie is released about now…

“Woody Allen deployed [the Providence Athenaeum’s] bronze bust of Lovecraft while filming Irrational Man in the Athenaeum. He positioned the impossible-to-ignore, overlarge head right between the lead actors during a pivotal exchange. The goofy image did suggest irrationality of some sort.”

Although the new movie is “set in Newport” rather than Providence, it seems that a variety of New England locations were melanged into Allen’s vision of Newport. Which I suspect looks rather unlike Innsmouth when viewed through Allen’s lens (gosh, wouldn’t that be a film — “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as filmed by Woody Allen, in his Shadows and Fog mode).

Irrational Man is apparently a small-scale intimate summer story with a few Hitchcockian twists, and is premiering in cinemas/theaters about now. I don’t hold much store by movie reviewers after the dim-witted parroting reviews that destroyed Tomorrowland, but a quick glance at the Google Search snippets for Irrational Man reviews suggests the reviewers have had moderately good things to say.

Update:

* TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal note Lovecraft’s birthday.

* Cake, apparently at an event at Calgary Public Library…

cake

Fruit Hill

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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“Around the All-Hallows period I unearthed a highly picturesque district on the city’s very rim — Fruit Hill [now the Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, its grounds, and the adjacent Captain Stephen Olney Memorial Park], from one point of which I caught a view of almost incredible loveliness which included a twilight-clad descent of walled meadows (with a wood and glimpses of a sllnset-litten river at the bottom), dim violet hills against an orange-gold west, a steepled village in a northward valley, and over the rocky eastward ridge a great round Hunter’s Moon preparing to flood the scene with spectral light. Since then there has been some cold weather — even a premature touch of snow — but yesterday was warm again, and I took a walk through the same Fruit Hill region, now pretty well toned down to bare boughs and grey and brown effects. My season of hibernation looms close — but in my present ancient hilltop quarters I do not mind an indoor existence as badly as I might.” (Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 14th November 1933, in Selected Letters IV, p.318)

fruithill
From: large scale topographical map of Providence, 1935.

Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature

23 Thursday Oct 2014

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Call for Papers: Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature…

Literature for children and young adults is a rich source of material for the study of literary maps, one that has been largely overlooked, despite the growth in academic interest in this area of study.

Not so relevant to Lovecraft, but this call might be interesting to those researching similar genre authors, especially those in the sword-and-sorcery genre where the addition of fan-made maps have enhanced the fiction’s appeal to later generations of young teens.

There is the surveyor mapping in “The Colour Out of Space”, and one passing moment when Lovecraft follows a rough local map… “I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared” in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. This latter probably reflects his own practice during his numerous antiquarian visits to strange towns. There are also carved wall maps in At The Mountains of Madness which are found, copied and followed. But Lovecraft’s fiction is probably more interesting for the implied idea that certain spaces could not be found, or had not yet been placed, on maps.