Morton’s glow-in-the-dark collection

01 Saturday May 2021

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New on Archive.org, a note from Rocks and Minerals (July 1946) concerning Lovecraft’s friend Morton and his appearance in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”…

This led me to the mentioned “Passing of a noted mineralogist” obituary for Morton, in the October 1941 issue of the same monthly journal…

Lovecraftians will note here that Morton was keen on collecting the fluorescent (i.e. glow-in-the-dark) minerals, which is something about him that I had not heard before. Indeed, he made a “finest in the world” collection of such. The American Mineralogist obituary makes no mention of these, but the writer does not appear to have personally seen the Paterson collection.

And is this a possible photo of Morton in his prime? It seemed to me unlikely that the writer (the editor and publisher, Peter Zodac) would be so crass as to have his own picture on an obituary of a colleague. Although the large signature hinted otherwise. Could it be Morton with his waved hair shaved down, no moustache and wearing glasses? I then quickly rescued the picture from the microfilm, as far as is possible, to get a better look. Though I did not colourise it as I was not convinced they had the right file-photo. It could also be a picture of Zodac, the editor.

I then found a comparative picture of Zodac. Though he was turned, picking through a rock-pile in the late 1950s…

Yes, on looking at that and another picture I’m now certain that the editor really did slap his own picture on Morton’s obituary. Oh well, so… it’s not a new picture of Morton all spruced up with a haircut and shave and ready for his museum job. Maybe Zodac was rushing for a printer’s deadline, and had left space but at the last minute found he still had no picture of Morton? Such are the tough decisions of an editor with a deadline to meet.

But at least he reveals to the world Morton’s “glow in the dark” minerals collection. One wonders where this world-class part of the collection is now, and if it still glows?

Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Keith’s Theatre

30 Friday Apr 2021

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This week, a little more on the Providence theatres of Lovecraft’s youth. In the form of an evocative 1905 programme cover showing the frontage…

Keith’s Theatre (it used the British spelling) was where Lovecraft later recalled having seen Houdini…

it happens that I saw him at the old Keith’s Theatre here nearly a quarter of a century ago

Though for some unknown reason he elsewhere stated he had never seen an entire Houdini stage show. It seems unlikely he was late for the show, since he would not have been admitted after the show had begun. Possibly he left before the finale, for some reason? It’s difficult to imagine that he fell asleep and missed part of the show that way. We might then consider the faint but amusing possibility that he was the audience member invited up onto the stage, to step inside the magician’s ‘vanishing’ cabinet — and thus in that way he missed part of the show. But in that case we would surely have read about it in the Letters, so the amusing notion can only be a possible plot point for someone’s future Mythos story.

In the 1930s Lovecraft recalled memories from his youth that seem to associate him with further this place. In 1900, aged five, hearing the…

quartette at Keith’s Continuous Vaudeville — ‘When the Harvest Moon is Shining on the River’

At this time one “Charles Lovenberg” was the Providence manager, which may have amused the boy Lovecraft due to the similarity to his own name. Lovenberg “saved the publicity about Providence vaudeville from area newspapers” in extensive scrapbooks, along with the theatre’s own publications. These books and papers survive and are now part of the archival Keith Albee Collection located in Iowa City.

The Christmas line-up at Keith’s, 1907.

Lovecraft also recalled how the theatre’s management used the (presumably very dull)…

new Biograph travel films to chase the [vaudeville] audiences out of Keith’s at six-o’clock

These were short documentary cinema films made by the American Mutoscope & Biograph company, as it was named until 1909.

The interiors of the Keith’s theatres were palatial, if the rest of the chain is anything to judge by. The Providence venue apparently became the Victory in 1924, being renovated and renamed while Lovecraft was in New York City.

Incidentally, here is a possibly useful tip for Archive.org searchers. There is no partial search, and thus “Keith” will not find “Keith’s”.

New on Archive.org

28 Wednesday Apr 2021

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A few snippets from items newly arrived on Archive.org…

1. Lovecraft, as understood by a book reviewer for a journal for high school English teachers, January 1946. He reviews the then-new HPL by Derleth, and Supernatural Literature. This is not to be found in the collection of early Lovecraft criticism, A Weird Writer In Our Midst. The reviewer makes the interesting observation that it was only with a long radio dramatization of “The Dunwich Horror” that Lovecraft really “arrived” in the national consciousness.

Henry I. Christ was, incidentally, a real person and not Derleth using an especially grandiose pen-name.

2. Also new is Venus on the half-shell and others, collecting various pseudonymous and pen-name tales by Philip Jose Farmer. The introduction briefly itemizes a few of his planned stories in this vein that were never written or completed by Farmer. His interminable Riverworld series managed to put me off him for life, after a few books… but I wouldn’t have minded reading his take on “The Feaster from The Stars”. “Unfinished” suggests it exists somewhere as a draft and/or notes.

“I have frequently reread those phantasmagoria of exotic colour”

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

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I’ve found a new source for the colour in “The Colour out of Space”, on which more in my forthcoming review of Lovecraft Annual 2020. In the meanwhile, those fascinated with the histories of colour may be interested in the latest shelf-trembler from Bloomsbury. The mammoth A Cultural History of Color runs to six handsome volumes, and costs £395. Which I think is roughly about $500.

A pity, perhaps, that there wasn’t also a pre-history volume surveying and summarising what we now know about colour in the deep past. Although, admittedly, the emphasis might have been largely on the various shades of ochre and umber.

“Favourite dinners … Hungarian goulash”

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

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H.P. Lovecraft, suddenly popular in Hungary with a string of new pocket-book editions with fine translations.

Here’s a loose summary-translation of the review-article, trying to get some sense out of Google’s goulash of a translation…

… rumour has it that these two H.P. Lovecraft collections are among the most successful in Helikon’s impressively designed pocketbook series. Their success perhaps offers an insight into the current nervous state of the Hungarian people … [One little-remarked] characteristic is that Lovecraft’s work is that it is hardly inseparable from the works of those he felt to be his fellow warriors. One could muse at length on the intricate spread of effects and repercussions among his circle, and at times I feel that this literary program was emphatically, though never declared as such, movement-like. [When one considers his stances and his almost gnostic understanding of the world/cosmos] the tricky question is whether Lovecraft should be considered “reactionary” or just “progressive” from the point of view of the history-of-ideas. [Of course, many mis-read him, but his cult is guarded by] aesthetic priests who are the Jesuits of pop culture: their reputation may be fearsome, but whoever gets to know their views more thoroughly inevitably comes to understand them. For instance the Hungarian Lovecraft Society [is doing fine work nationally … but even they may not fully penetrate the] remarkable “local history” aspect to his reflexively “cosmic” works — perhaps then it is permissible for this zealous but distant deacon, interested in deliberate misreadings, to commit a dark hermeneutics. On Lovecraft’s gravestone not “I Am Providence”, but “I am the Providence.

The Dark Man at Christmas

26 Monday Apr 2021

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Well, well… an issue of The Dark Man, journal of Robert E. Howard Studies, snuck-out the door at Christmas 2020 (Vol. 11, No. 2). It’s news to me, and perhaps to you. Looking at the TOCs it seems like it’s worth my getting a copy this time around, as all items sound at least interesting. Though at present it’s not yet in ebook.

The Dark Man, Volume 11, Number 2, 102 pages.

Articles:

* “Harsh Sentences: H.P. Lovecraft vs. Ernest Hemingway” by Bobby Derie.
* “A Publication History of The Dark Man” by Luke E. Dodd.
* “Illustrated Auguries: Images Out of Time” by Phil Emery.
* “Deviations from Realism in High and Low Literature” by Jason Ray Carney.
* “Cosmic Horror: Lost in Translation” by Jacob Lindner.
* “A Brief Analysis of the Aesthetic of Weird Tales” by Mara Tharp.

Reviews:

* Book: The Howard Companion, by Richard Toogood. Reviewed by Gary Romeo.
* Book: Fantastic Paintings of Frazetta, by J. David Spurlock. Reviewed by Dierk Gunther.

“In that cabin a printing-press was set up; & there we prepared…”

25 Sunday Apr 2021

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S. T. Joshi’s Blog has updated, and heralds a host of forthcoming books: a new third volume of Robert H. Waugh essays on Lovecraft; Ken Faig Jr.’s Lovecraftian People; a book of essays by Matt Cardin “on weird fiction and philosophy”; Joshi’s own The Recognition of H.P. Lovecraft; and Lovecraft’s Letters to E. Hoffmann Price and Richard F. Searight. For the latter Joshi adds that this will be the “first complete publication of the letters to Price”.

Rhode Island History, 1942-2011

25 Sunday Apr 2021

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Now arriving on Archive.org from microfilm, the last of a run of the local history journal Rhode Island History 1942-2011 with indexes. They were previously only online to 2008, and only at the Historical Society website — for which the old Web link now yields only the bare warning “Forbidden”.

Lovecraft appears to be unmentionable in the journal after 1954, but one early and fair assessment is found in Randall Stewart’s survey article on “Rhode Island Literature” (January 1954)…

The journal has occasional pictures, but these have not been treated kindly by the microfilming process.

Dreams and Fancies

25 Sunday Apr 2021

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The now very collectable book Dreams and Fancies (Arkham House, 1962) opens with the title section, consisting of Derleth’s pick of…

Fifty-nine pages of Lovecraft’s letters describing his dreams.

I was interested to learn about this. Since I have the H.P. Lovecraft Dream Book from 1994, but on flicking through it I see it only ran to 35 pages of actual dreams.

Whence came the additional pages? Was Derleth perhaps including dream-fragments such as “The Book”, which would make this Dreams and Fancies section longer? But that can’t be the case with “The Evil Clergyman”, at least, since an eBay picture shows that fragment appearing later in the book.