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Tentaclii

~ News and scholarship on H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937)

Tentaclii

Category Archives: Picture postals

HPLinks #30 – Dragon-Fly, insectile Lovecraft, weird spaces and landscapes, dead goths, AI Shadow trailer, Barry’s Library, and more…

19 Wednesday Mar 2025

Posted by asdjfdlkf in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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HPLinks #30.

* On eBay, “two issues of Barlow’s The Dragon-fly, 1935 and 1936. The listing offers some interior pictures.

* New in open-access, the Routledge book The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human (2023)… “tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still-life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film.” Includes the chapter “The Insectile Informe: H.P. Lovecraft and the Deliquescence of Form”…

What resonates not only throughout Lovecraft’s work, but also across the scholarship establishing and legitimising him as a writer stretching his ear towards the non/in/anti-human, is the discourse of the valorisation of form: ‘man’ — the ultimate apparition of form— emboldened against the murmur, the buzzzzzzzzz of a background without form.

* A new open-access book from Italy, in Italian. In translation the title is Geometries of Terror: architectural spaces and weird literature (February 2025). Includes, in Italian…

   — The Localization of the Supernatural Between Weird and Modernism

   — Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s “The Tomb” and the Representation of Places of the Unknown

   — The Word and the Void: Ghostly Spaces in Western Literature

   — The Architecture of the Unconscious: Hauntings, Places and Non-Places in the Works of Robert Aickman

The book is under Creative Commons Non-commercial, thus translations for a non-profit ‘zine or blog are possible.

* The open-access Journal of the Short Story in English has a new special issue on ‘Creative and Critical Responses to Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction’ (2024). Includes “Fragmented Temporality, Digression and Experiments in Consciousness Representation: Arthur Machen’s “The White People””.

* Leslie Klinger, talks about his annotated books in a new podcast interview, including his two hefty volumes of annotated Lovecraft.

* I’ve newly found a postcard of the “Dunwich Woods”. Actually of the English Dunwich, perhaps circa the 1920s, but it could easily be from Lovecraft’s Dunwich. Possibly of use to RPG gamers, as part of a prop pack?

“Dunwich Woods”

* The editors of the Cardiff University open-access journal Studies in Gothic Fiction have issued a February 2025 official notice — they have suspended activities and are no longer accepting submissions. The seventh and final issue was themed ‘The Popular and the Weird: H.P. Lovecraft and Twenty-First-Century Adaptation’, and is still available online for now.

* More Lovecraft and modern philosophy. In the Italian PhD thesis Ontologies of the Future in Contemporary Philosophy: Stiegler and Meillassoux (2021), near the end one finds the long chapter “Overpassing Mediation: Meillassoux and Lovecraft”. Meillassoux being a French philosopher. Freely available online, in English and open-access.

* In Spain, the event CTHULHUton 2025 at the end of March 2025…

* Comic-book industry/history magazine publisher TwoMorrows has been left unpaid, following the financial collapse of the huge Diamond distributor. Diamond had long distributed comics and associated niche magazines to retail stores. TwoMorrows ask readers of their long-running ongoing magazines (Cryptology, RetroFan, Comic Book Creator, Jack Kirby Collector, etc), to “renew their magazine subscriptions” if possible, to help with cashflow. To those of us in the UK they’re offering “new lower international shipping rates” or bookshop distribution via Turnaround Distribution. Lovecraftians everywhere may be especially interested in the one-off monster books page.

* On YouTube, an impressive trailer/visual-pitch for a big-budget movie adaptation of “The Shadow Out of Time”.

* And finally, the sumptuous illustrated catalogue for the auction of The Library Of Barry Humphries, 26th March 2025. Freely available online, as a .PDF file. Slaver over the gothic and weird goodies you could have had, if only you’d sold a couple of bitcoins and the auctioneer’s hammer had fallen in your favour.


— End-quotes —

“[On the streets of College Hill] I acquired a fascinated reverence for the past — the age of periwigs and three-cornered hats and leather-bound books with long-fs. My taste for the latter was augmented by the fact that there were many in the family library — most of them in a black windowless attic room to which I was half-afraid to go alone, yet whose terror-breeding potentialities really increased for me the charm of the archaic volumes I found and read there. […] Living in an ancient town amidst ancient books, I followed Addison, Hope, and Dr. Johnson as my models in prose and verse; and literally lived in their peri-wigged world, ignoring the world of the present.” — Lovecraft, “Ec’h-Pi-El Speaks”.

“As a devotee of the past, I have naturally read more English than American books, and have felt profoundly the charm of those scenes and events amongst which my race-stock was moulded and developed; so that my conception of home and of natural beauty has come to centre in that soil around which so vast a majority of ancestral associations hover — “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” — Lovecraft, “In Defence of Dagon”.

“I am not really literary in the purest sense of the word. Books & authors, as such, do not interest me; since I want only what they transmit. It is beauty — the beauty of wonder, of antiquity, of landscape, of architecture, of horror, of light & shadow, line & contour, of mystic memory & hallowed tradition — that I worship, & I never think of talking about books when I can talk of the stars or the hills or the abbey towers of dim, far lands or the steep roofs that cluster on the slopes of archaic towns. That is why I have read so relatively little, & why science with its breathless mysteries & inconceivable vistas has so often crowded mere letters from my sphere of paramount interest.” — Lovecraft to Donald Wandrei, February 1927.

“So many promising & deeply interested weird fans live in places where bizarre books are unobtainable — places like Milltown, Mont., Asotin, Wash., Auburn, Cal., West Shokan, N.Y., &c. &c. — that we feel we ought to give them the benefit of whatever volumes of the sort we may chance to possess. Hence a rather active programme of borrowing is carried out among ‘the gang’. And it is not only the small-towners who need to borrow — for even the largest city libraries are sometimes devoid of the most important weird items.” — Lovecraft, to Natalie H. Wooley, January 1935, on the ‘underground library’ he helped to run in the 1930s.

“that Canton madhouse”

26 Friday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

≈ 7 Comments

In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, he writes of the “sanitarium at Canton” and going to “… that Canton madhouse, and [then] together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth.” Canton, Massachusetts, is about twelve miles south of the city of Boston. And about two-thirds of the way from Providence to Boston. At circa 1900 there was, however, no madhouse or even a disease sanatorium there.

But the presence of Canton Junction on the Providence – Boston train line suggests Lovecraft knew it, at least from the train windows. There is a large viaduct which carries the train, and Lovecraft would have enjoyed sweeping views across the Canton topography. He must have been across it many times.

Longest and tallest railway viaduct in the world, when built in 1835.

Interestingly Canton is about two miles east of Walpole, and of course Walpole is also the name of the father of the gothic novel. There was however no asylum at Walpole, Mass. Looking at the list of train stations on the line, and the map, Lovecraft may have been able to see East Walpole in the distance, across the marshland, from the Canton Viaduct.

There was however a large and real asylum at Foxborough (aka Foxboro) (opened 1893, closed 1976), originally the state’s treatment asylum for chronic alcoholics. Foxborough was two train stops before Canton, on the Providence to Boston line. It’s thus not impossible Lovecraft knew that asylum from the train window, as it was likely within sight as the train passed.

Train line passing alongside the asylum site, Foxboro station just a quarter mile south. (With thanks to the ghost-hunter who identified the laundry building of the site, and thus gave me my bearings).

A blogger who has investigated it talks of a road approach through marshlands made of “cranberry bogs [that] looked like blood pools”. He also usefully notes… “After 1905, the Massachusetts Hospital for Dipsomaniacs and Inebriates went through a gradual transition to a psychiatric institution”, which another source states was due to the alcoholic inmates constantly escaping in search of drink. Thus by the time Lovecraft came to write “Innsmouth”, it was indeed a general “madhouse”.

What of “my poor little cousin” in “Innsmouth”? I assume he was loosely modelled after Lovecraft’s beloved-and-lost cousin, Phillips Gamwell. Thus Gamwell’s home in Cambridge, Mass., might be the place to look. But I can find no asylum or sanitorium there.

There was also the large official Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane, at Worcester, which may have formed a mental model for Lovecraft. It certainly looks like the sort of place many readers will have in mind.

What of Canton, Ohio? No madhouse there. The nearest was Massillon which is eight miles away, and also the main Ohio state asylum at Columbus some 130 miles from Canton…

But my feeling is the Foxborough asylum was the inspiration for the Lovecraft called the “Canton madhouse”, knowing that readers in his circle who knew the Boston – Providence railway line would make the connection with Foxboro madhouse (four miles south, on the train track, from Canton).

Lovecraftians will also recall Lovecraft’s planned but never written ‘Foxfield’ stories. See: Will Murray’s “Where Was Foxfield?” in Lovecraft Studies No. 33 (1995). Also to be found in Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos. For those unable to pay the prices now asked for either of these, The Lovecraft Encyclopedia usefully summarises the essay… “it indicates that Foxfield is east of Aylesbury and Dunwich and northwest of Arkham.”

Maxfield’s, at Warren

19 Friday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in New discoveries, Picture postals

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I had little hope of ever finding a picture of Julia A. Maxfield’s ice-cream parlour, which was something of a repeating rural venue for the Lovecraft circle. But one has popped up at last. I’ve here colourised it. The card is still available, for a hefty price, on eBay.

Saturday morning all three of us went to Colonial Warren — down the east shore of the bay — and staged an ice-cream eating contest at the celebrated emporium of Mrs. Julia A. Maxfield — an aged matron of antient Warren lineage who has won fame by serving more flavours of ice cream than any other purveyor either living or dead. There are twenty-eight varieties this season, and we sampled them all within the course of an hour.

The game was, in the course of one hour…

Each would order a double portion — two kinds — and by dividing equally would ensure six flavours each round. Five rounds took us all through the twenty-eight and two to carry. Mortonius [Morton] and I each consumed two and one-half quarts, but Wandrei fell down toward the last. Now James Ferdinand and I will have to stage an elimination match to determine the champion!”

There were a number of visits and other contests…

Another time we visited the colonial seaport of Warren, down the East shore of the bay — incidentally stopping at a place (quite a rendezvous of our gang) where 28 varieties of ice cream are sold. We had six varieties apiece — my choices being grape, chocolate chip, macaroon, cherry, banana, and orange-pineapple.

Then back home via […] ancient Warren […] at which latter place we paused at the famous Maxfield’s (a rendezvous of Morton, Cook, & other visitors of mine) for a dinner consisting entirely of ice cream – a pint & a half each. HPL: chocolate, coffee, caramel, banana, lemon, strawberry.

After digesting Warren’s quiet lanes and doorways we went across the tracks to Aunt Julia’s, where we tanked up on twelve different kinds of ice cream — all they’re serving at this time of year [March]. The antient gentle-woman, of course, was not there – since (as I wish to gawd I could) she spends all her winters in Florida — but the bimbo in charge was very pleasant, and we got quick service since we were the only customers.

American Biography (1924) confirms the at-or-near 71 Federal Street location. At Warren…

is where ‘Elmhurst’, famous for Mrs. Maxfield’s ice cream, is located on Federal Street.

However the 1932 Providence Directory has it on Narragansett Av. There were likely several different ways of approaching it. Today Federal Street looks like a fine place, but seems too short in terms of numbering. Perhaps it once ran on, and would thus have given us a No. 71? Narragansett Av. also seems gone, but one wonders if it once ran along the shoreline and Federal Street ran on to meet it? But it would probably take a local sleuth to pinpoint the location and say if the building survives.

As for Lovecraft’s ice cream craving, it began early, if the evidence of its use in his seminal poetry is anything to go by. In his early comic/cosmic poem “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” (1916)…

Each eve he sought his bashful Muse to wake
With overdoses of ice cream and cake

The 1925 telegraphic diary has plentiful of mentions of ice cream in New York City.

By 1934 ice cream has become something of a staple meal on his travels south. June 1934, in Charleston…

Still on 20¢ a day for food, but off the canned stuff. Morning — 5¢ cup of ice cream. Evening, 10¢ bowl of Mexican chili and another 5¢ cup of ice cream.” […] I “frequently make a full meal of it (and nothing else) in summer.

December 1936. Ice-cream now a costly luxury, as poverty deepened. But still…

Occasionally, of course, extravagant additions [to one’s meagre diet] occur — such as […] a chocolate bar or ice cream at an odd hour [… and yet] the old man still lives — in a fairly hale & hearty state, at that! Oddly enough, I was a semi-invalid in the old days when I didn’t economise. Porridge? Not for Grandpa!


His ice cream cravings were such that in “The Exiles”, a Ray Bradbury ‘Mars’ story after Lovecraft’s death, Bradbury portrays the Martian Lovecraft as an ice cream-aholic…

Lovecraft hurried to a small icebox which somehow survived this red furnace and brought forth two quarts of ice-cream. Emptying these into a large dish he hurried back to his table and began alternately tasting the vanilla ice and scurrying his pen over crisp sheets of writing paper. As the ice-cream melted upon his tongue, a look of almost dreamful exultancy dissolved his face; then he sent his pen dashing. “Sorry. Really, I am awfully busy, gentlemen, Mr. Poe, Mr. Bierce. I have so many letters to write.” […] The writing man tried another delicate spoonful of the cold treasure. There were six empty vanilla ice-cream boxes piled neatly on the hearth from this day’s feasting. And the ice-box, in the quick flash they had seen of its interior, contained a good dozen quarts more.

More notes on the Sully letters

12 Friday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Odd scratchings, Picture postals

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More notes on the Sully letters, letters from Lovecraft which are to be found in Letters to Wilfred B. Talman, and Helen V. and Genevieve Sully.

The notes open in November 1933.

Page 327. “… decadence is manifest in one form or another over nearly all the Western World [… yet] It is not too late to hope that revivals of spirit may yet take place here and there — each in accordance with the particular national temper of the group concerned. I have my eye on Sir Oswald Mosley & the element of British fascists.”

Page 330. “… remember that to 1908’s crop of intellectuals softness is the supreme vice”.

Pages 331-32. A long and important explication of Lovecraft’s idea of time, and of his techniques of “time-defying” mental time-travel.

Page 330. [In New York City of 1933] “I feel like an explorer among a queer [primitive tribe …] Some of Loveman’s group — persons interested in the theatre & the dance — impress me more in this way than do even Wandrei’s literary-artistic coterie.”

Page 341. Lovecraft had noticed a… “whole cycle of comment having grown up around the alleged denizen of Loch Ness” in Scotland.

Page 343. April 1934. “New England has been through the worst winter within the memory of living man […] which shattered all records since the establishment of the weather bureau.” Page 403. “… the wasting of the greater part of the year [living] in bleak barrenness & shivers seems doubly criminal as one grows old”.

Page 367. “The real raison d’être of [“weird art”] is to give one a temporary illusion of emancipation from the galling & intolerable tyranny of time, space, change, & natural law. If we can give ourselves even for a brief moment the illusory sensation that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been — or could be — suspended or defeated, we acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion. Indeed, religion itself is merely a pompous formalisation of fantastic art. Its disadvantage is that it demands an intellectual belief in the impossible, which fantastic art does not.”

Page 377. At the newly opened Poe house [1842-44] in Philadelphia… “I saw copies of nearly all the magazines containing the first publication of various tales and poems” by E.A. Poe.

Page 379. Mentions that his young friend Barlow has a new 5″ x 7″ camera, and with it had made portraits of Lovecraft in Florida. Barlow also anticipated becoming an expert on trick photography, multi-exposure pictures etc, to “create weird synthetic monsters & landscapes”.

Page 384. A note says that Barlow’s Caneviniana was cut in stencil [duplicator] form but not printed, and was later circulated “through FAPA in the early 1940s”. So, do copies thus exist somewhere today? But possibly (my guess) the FAPA release was not the planned edition of Whitehead’s letters of the same name, but rather just Barlow’s Whitehead bibliography and some biographical notes?

Page 385. When in Nantucket, Lovecraft stayed at The Overlook, which was ‘Veranda House’ until 1930.

The view from the Overlook.

Page 393. “We must save all that we can, lest we find ourselves adrift in an alien world with no memories or guideposts or points of reference […] Hence the natural function and social value of the antiquarian & cherisher of elder things. To them we owe much of our sense of comfortable continuity & appropriate placement.”

Page 395-96. “… the architectural modernists who so painfully ‘strive to express our current machine civilisation’ by means of absently ugly concoctions of rootless steel and glass construction. These fellows think they are representing the present […] but if they would stop to think they would realise that Ictinus [co-designer of the Parthenon] and Wren [1632-1723, London] achieved their effects not by grimly resolving to ‘express their periods’, but merely by creating such forms as appealed to them, without any thought of time or place. Moreover, Ictinus and Wren did not exclude elements from the past. Instead they built upon and modified the main streams of art which they inherited. Hence to my mind all these anti-traditional radicals are up a blind alley. Their products are not art, because they come from theory instead of from feeling. And they do not represent this age, because they do not embody those attributes of the European main stream which this age has inherited.”

Page 405. “My own opinion is that an obviously sterile age like the present ought not to try to create anything new. Conditions are not favourable for the expression of the momentary environment — the environment has nothing crystallised enough or certain enough to be expressible.”

Page 407. Lovecraft took the night train to Quebec, both there and back, and thus was not able to appreciate the scenery from the train windows.

Page 419. In Newport in summer 1935 he visited the home of the philosopher Berkeley, then open to the public. And he also went… “down the 40 steps [and] while down on the rocks there I slipped up & got rather soaked in looking for a sea-cave”. Lovecraft seeking a sea-cave below Newport’s cliffs… a point on which Mythos writers may wish to hang a plot or RPG adventure?

Page 429. August 1935. “Every aptitude which I wish I had, I lack. Everything which I wish I could to formulate and express, I have failed to formulate and express. Everything which I value, I have either lost or am likely to lose. Within a decade, unless I can find some job paying at least $10 per week, I shall have to take the cyanide route through inability to keep around me the books, pictures, furniture, and other familiar objects which constitute my only remaining reason for keeping alive. And so far as solitude is concerned, I probably capture all medals. […] even among my correspondents there are fewer and fewer who coincide with me. […] The newer generation has grown away from me […] in everything — philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and interpretation of the sciences — [and] I find myself more and more alone on an island, with an atmosphere almost of hostility gathering around me. With youth and all the possibilities of glamour and adventurous expectancy, departed — leaving me stranded, with nothing to look forward to.”

Page 439. September 1935. On visiting Wilbraham (“Dunwich Horror” and Mrs Miniter country) one last time to scatter the ashes of Miniter’s mother… “The mountain scenery — with endless outspread miles of purple hills beyond hills, and glimpses of distant villages with white steeples piercing the autumn-touched greenery, is ineffably fascinating and imagination stirring.” New England and Mass. in the 1920s and 30s were far less forest-blanketed than today, and the views would likely have been more open.

Wilbraham’s hills, possibly the 1960s or 70s?

Page 441. December 1935. “The autumn in New England has been phenomenally warm” this year. In October he visited Yale and among others sights he enjoyed the Marsh and Farnam botanic gardens. These are not however vast steampunk Victorian ironwork and steam-heat glass-houses, but rather two low and ordinary greenhouses set in outdoor landscaped botanical gardens.

Page 453. Lovecraft outlines his plans to hoax his friend and geologist Morton, then curator at the Paterson Museum. He hopes to send a “millennially palaeogaean” rock sculpture by Clark Ashton Smith, in the hope of causing some “perplexed head-scratching” about its possible origin in a “pre-human school” of art.

Page 453. He recalls ‘Monk’, a boyhood compatriot and schoolyard mucker… “a huge youth from a distant and seedy region who boasted 17 years as opposed to our 11 or 12, & whose voice had changed. […] I can still see ‘Monk’ McCurdy as he lorded it over his chronological inferiors (but scholastic equals) & over-awed them with his gorilla-like physiognomy.” A little later on page 454 he recalls that the ‘Monk’ swore “resounding oaths”. Sounds like a distant model for Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror”?

A view of “the town in 1762”

05 Friday Jul 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Picture postals

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This week’s ‘Picture Postal’, from the Providence Magazine, the local Board of Trade magazine in 1915. This was the ‘early view’ Lovecraft was referring to in a letter written after he visited the Shepley Library in Providence in 1923. I thank Ken Faig Jr. for the identification.

there is one monstrous fine drawing of the town in 1762 […] precisely what I had long wish’d to see

Thus the Curator was not being snide or fobbing off Lovecraft, when he suggested that he could have a copy… if another was found to exist in the archives. It was not an antiquity, and the archives might indeed have a duplicate copy of a liberally-dispensed magazine from less than a decade ago. Or there might be duplicate prints of such a modern item.

It’s possible Lovecraft may have seen the more expansive un-cropped version, and in a less harsh contrast…

His use of the word “monstrous” perhaps even indicates he saw the original large sheets, meant to be transferred by tracing to a stage backdrop.

The Club on College Street

28 Friday Jun 2024

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This week in my regular ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’ slot, a picture via the archives of the Rhode Island School of Design. A side-on look at College Street on College Hill in Providence, as Lovecraft knew it in spring 1936 when he lived a little further up the hill.

Illustrator and Club member Helen M. Grose offers a postcard view across the street toward the Handicraft Club. This was a place well known to Lovecraft’s aunt and her friends. Lovecraft’s aunt lived here in 1927, and he sometimes harked back to its earlier days in letters and called it “the old Truman Beckwith house”. He enjoyed its “old-fashion’d terraced garden” and we know he took his friend Morton round it when he visited. Probably other visitors too, if he felt they would appreciate it. At Christmas 1933 Lovecraft was even to be found cheerily listening to carols sung in the Club’s courtyard…

… a stroll half-way down the hill to hear the carol-singing at the old Truman Beckwith mansion.

This 1936 drawing seems to confirm that (by mutual agreement and common sense) the university students traditionally used only one side of the street, while the residents had the other. Note also the upper ‘monitor’ roof section with small windows, looking similar to the one on Lovecraft’s last home at the top of the hill (he had access to it, and Brobst managed to work out how to open its door to the outside roof/railing).

The Club was one of thousands of examples of the tradition of free association, in what some have called the ‘little platoons’ of civic society. No permission from the state / church was required to establish or run a group of like-minded people of proven interests and skill. Nor did the state regulate who could or could not be admitted to membership, or require onerous and disfiguring accommodations to ‘the legal regulations’ etc. Not did the state send secret police to monitor the Club’s exhibitions for political correctness. Things were very different elsewhere in the world in 1936, where many people found themselves hurrying quickly through the murderous springtimes of the new political religion of Soviet Socialism or its heresy National Socialism.

Lovecraft at war (or not)

21 Friday Jun 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Astronomy, Maps, Picture postals

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The U.S. appears to have just passed the legislation to re-introduce ‘the draft’ (military conscription), so far as I can tell without an in-depth dive into American politics (snore…). Though, rather curiously in this age of supposed gender-equality everywhere, it’s reported to be only for men aged 18-26. But no doubt young women are at this moment clamouring for equality here, as elsewhere (sound of crickets chirping). There is no actual draft or registration currently in place, I should add, lest I be accused of ‘misinformation’.

This news, and a recent mini-debate here in the UK about the need for conscription into and rapid training of a “Citizen’s Army” in the event of real hostilities (due to a run-down of the military over many decades), made me think about Lovecraft’s attempts at enlistment in the armed forces during wartime…

I presented myself at the recruiting station of the R.I. National Guard & applied for entry into whichever unit should first proceed to the front [i.e. the front-line of battle, in France]. On account of my lack of technical or special training, I was told that I could not enter the Field Artillery, which leaves first; but was given a blank of application for the Coast Artillery [Corps], which will go after a short preliminary period of defence service at one of the forts of Narragansett Bay.

Thus Lovecraft would have been initially defending against German submarine and (via cliff-top / island patrols) spy/saboteur encroachment on the American coastline. In principle, the type of large emplacement gun seems not altogether unlike a telescope, and perhaps involving some of the same maths and aiming. Possibly his astronomical training at the Ladd Observatory would actually have come in useful?

He made several attempts, I recall. To the extent that, whenever he left the house, his mother was fearful he would try to enlist. But it was not to be, and he was rejected.

Had not my mother disturbed my ambitious effort of last May [1917], in which I utilised my absurdly robust-looking exterior as a passport to martial glory […] I should now be digging trenches, drilling, & pounding a typewriter at Fort Standish in Boston Harbour, where the 9th Co. R.I. Coast Artillery is placed at present.” (Lovecraft, in Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner).

This was on an island, which has a 1914/1921 war-map which may interest those looking for fresh 1920s RPG material / settings relating to Lovecraft. One might devise a “what if” scenario in which a successfully enlisted Lovecraft encounters mysterious and maddening Mythos doings in Boston harbour. He might even get to blast the heck out of the monster with a BIG gun, before going mad… thus especially pleasing the ‘blast Cthulhu with a machine-gun’ RPG crowd.

Return to the Boat House

14 Friday Jun 2024

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, two new pictures of the boat house on the Seekonk. This was near to Lovecraft’s then home (from his roof “One can see the glint of the Seekonk through the foliage of Blackstone Park”) in Providence. The boat house is the most likely point at which the young teenage Lovecraft would have hired a rowing-boat for an afternoon. Yes, Lovecraft in a boat! He would at times land on the river’s Twin Islands, which are not on all maps but are on some.

I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands — for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” — Lovecraft in a letter to Rimel, April 1934.

This newly found-on-eBay view shows the Boat Club side-on, and is a view of it I’ve not seen before. Regrettably I can’t get the picture at a larger size.

And here is a very tiny view from the year of Lovecraft’s death, in which we see the jetty from the water as if Lovecraft were rowing away from it.

Compare with the first appearance of “Dagon” with a similar rowing-boat…

It is possible sails were provided with the rowing-boats in Lovecraft’s time, as the Seekonk could be a dangerous river.

Another newly-found image of the boat house is this engraving, possibly done ‘on the spot’ by the look of it, showing the approach to the building along the Blackstone Park shoreline road in winter. The artist is Robert H. Nisbet, who taught at RISD in Providence.

And here we see the same approach in winter with photographic detail, which being somewhat elevated shows the tidal nature of the river.

The Seekonk’s occasional flood-surge was liable to spill over the road, as seen here, and Lovecraft tells us the water was still “salty” that close to the sea. Indeed at one point in the letters he states that the Seekonk was really a bay or inlet, rather than a river at that point. He had nightmares about the draining of the Seekonk here (“the river-bed was fully exposed — only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus”).

Just a little on and around the corner was and still is York Pond, where in summer Lovecraft liked to sit and write on the wooded bluff above the pond.

1925 NYC map

07 Friday Jun 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Maps, Picture postals

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, another map and also a departure from the Providence theme. New York City’s subway and ‘elevated’ railway system in 1925, drawn by E.R. Trott and given away to customers by a large hotel. In Red Hook Lovecraft was living in the bottom-right corner of the map. See “CLINTON” written in capitals at an angle, and then find “Atlantic” and intersect the two… and you’re about there.

2988 pixels on the longest side, and thus readable if downloaded at full size. A very useful map if reading Lovecraft’s 1925 Diary and letters from New York, since it also has many of the street names, parks, ferry lines, museums, libraries, and even the dock numbers. All for 1925.

And to bring the map somewhat to life, here we glimpse a typical subway entrance with news-stand, at Columbus Circle in October 1925. On one of the southern corners of Central Park…

Note the news vendor’s baseball bat, ready to hand. Hoodlums got what was coming to them, in those days!

Modernist horror

31 Friday May 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Maps, Picture postals

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College Hill, Providence, as it might have looked had the 1960s planners had their way…

The same City planning document also has a useful early map showing and pinpointing many names that readers of Lovecraft’s letters will be familiar with…

The Great Race

17 Friday May 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in AI, Lovecraftian arts, Picture postals

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This week on my regular ‘Picture Postals’, a change from the usual (though, in a way, following on from the recent ‘comic-strip’ themed post). I’ve used Photoshop to isolate Lovecraft’s own sketch drawing of The Great Race (“The Shadow out of Time”) from its surrounding notes and also from the blue lined paper on which it was drawn.

Original

Extracted and cleaned, as a 2196-pixel .PNG file. Still a bit mucky down at the base, but I reckon a mollusc is ‘gonna get gloopy’ down there.

Feel free to try to use this as a Controlnet guide input for an AI image generation. Though, good luck in writing the prompt description.

Providence Harbour

10 Friday May 2024

Posted by asdjfdlkf in Maps, Picture postals, Scholarly works

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, my hand-tinted version of a nautical map of Providence Harbour and the lower Seekonk in 1896. In the Seekonk (here the ‘Pawtucket River’) we see the ‘Twin Islands’ on which the youthful Lovecraft used to land in his rowing-boat. High-res at 4600px and 300dpi.

Brown University at the top, Starvegoat Island at the bottom. This map seems to have some RPG potential, as at that time a lot of infilling had not yet occurred. Lots of coves and marshes and eel-grass meadows in which Things Might Lurk.

And here’s a more poetic surface view, though also work-a-day since there were still tall-masted ships working the harbour in Lovecraft’s early youth…

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