This post is a small follow up to my recent post on Lovecraft’s Dictionary. Lovecraft used Webster’s in the form of Webster’s International, 1890, and continued to do so to the end of his life. But he wrote to Dwyer in 1927 that he had — as a boy — used Webster’s unabridged illustrated edition of 1864. There…

I became utterly infatuated with the pages of illustrations with the pages of illustrations of “Philosophic and Scientific Instruments” in the back of Webster’s unabridged of 1864.

Webster’s unabridged appears to have gone through numerous ever-expanding printings after 1864, all seemingly generally nodded to as “the 1864”. At each printing the illustrations at the back were often varied, being incrementally improved. For instance the pages on the 1880/86 edition of “the 1864” lack the appeal of the same pages in the 1890s editions…

This suggests Lovecraft’s family had an 1890s edition of “the 1864”. I say “1890s” because one can find eBay and Archive.org examples of the International which have title page dates from 1888 through 1895, and it appears it would probably be the work of a small thesis to work out the tangled printing history. But S.T. Joshi has “1891” in Lovecraft’s Library. Thus it appears on the face of it that what Lovecraft calls “the 1864” in his letter to Dwyer is in fact the the 1890 edition of “the 1864”. And that what in the 1930s he called the “1890” actually saw its second and final volume appear in 1891. To confuse matters further, there was evidently also an 1895 edition, which is the one most people now consult from that period on Archive.org.

If all this is correct then Lovecraft was likely “utterly infatuated” with the illustrations collected at the end of the second volume which appeared in 1891, these being presumably the same as the following 1895 edition illustrations…

In part then, this central illustration of a telescope may be what started Lovecraft on his cosmic journey, as he revisited the illustrations after he had finished with his chemistry obsession…

Further on in this rear illustrated section of the 1895 printing one can find all manner of curious ocean life and fungi.

Incidentally, in the same 1927 letter to Dwyer he remarks on a possible sequel or continuation to his recent “The Call of Cthulhu”. In response to Dwyer’s tabulation of the approaches so-far used at the more cosmic end of fiction, Lovecraft muses briefly on a future cosmic story he might write and remarks…

I think I shall write about the place that Cthulhu came from.

One wonders if this might have been somehow entangled with the other story he tells Dwyer he wants to write, in which his Red Hook lodging-house was to be depicted as some sort of malign sentient entity.