I’ve encountered an interesting item which perhaps throws a small sidelight on the use of the telephone in Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). You’ll recall that a telephone is taken on the descent…

I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move — you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the center of the earth and back!”

The telephone might sound like an unlikely thing to take down below. But wired long-distance field telephones were a known ‘thing’ at that time, not least because of their use in the war. A modified long-distance field telephone was also used in the very deep explorations of the pioneering explorer of underground rivers and lakes, E.A. Martel (1859-1938), then world famous.

Though Martel had quit the more arduous forms of exploring by the time Lovecraft was writing “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, back in 1912 Martel visited America for a celebrity tour of the caves and… “spent three days exploring in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky”. Mammoth Cave, you’ll recall, being a favourite location of interest to H.P. Lovecraft.

Here is Martel, mistakenly called “Hartel” by the American editor, dramatically profiled in a popular magazine article of 1923. The article details the use of his special telephone in circumstances not unlike that of Lovecraft’s story…

The article’s artist also shows the chest-mounted speaking-horn for the underground telephone. Presumably the backpack held the the coiled cable, ready to be spooled out, and the batteries.

Incidentally I see that there’s now a 2013 DVD documentary on Martel in German and French, being a substantial 1995 documentary film rescued from the archives. Note that… “In addition, a limited edition of the English version is currently available” for 19 Euros. The film won a number of awards at film festivals, and may interest some readers of Tentaclii. Martel also sounds like a prime subject for an as-yet unmade documentary graphic novel. France is quietly but strongly investing in its ‘soft power’ in the form of comics, partly to help reach the young ‘coming billions’ in French-speaking Africa, and it may be relatively easy to find French interest in such a project.

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Talking of unearthly voices, I see that Archive.org now has a new TTS “read aloud to me” button…

Among the Lovecraft circle, Rheinhart Kleiner had once edited a monthly New York paper called The Brooklynite…

Klei edits The Brooklynite now, & if he can surmount the difficulties of his task — the thankless task of recording social gossip — he will produce a paper worth a more careful reading than most Brooklynites. — Lovcraft, letter to Galpin, 1918.

This paper was read by Lovecraft during 1918, as Kleiner appears to have sent a copy of each issue. The magazine’s approach might have strongly shaped Lovecraft’s perception and awareness of Brooklyn, in terms of his later settling there.

The modern Brooklyn Magazine ran a short profile of the magazine in 2013. This found the magazine still lively and fresh, and revealed that the Brooklyn Historical Society only has…

“issues span the years 1926 through 1930.”

Little changes in some areas of human experience, it seems. One article in the magazine, it was noted…

recounts the existential crisis that one writer endured while he was waiting to have a phone placed in his apartment. Titled “Number Please,” the author writes, “To pass through the seemingly simple procedure of having a telephone installed is usually enough to hurry a normal person through the throes of dementia.”

We have some idea of it via Lovecraft’s noting of its poetry in his critical columns…

The general frivolity of The Brooklynite is doubtless due to the fact that this publication is designed primarily as a relaxation for persons engaged in other and more serious activities.

Elsewhere, a rare copy for sale terms it the “Official Organ of the Blue Pencil Club”, and The Fossil for 2017 confirms…

Brooklyn’s Blue Pencil Club held regular meetings and sponsored The Brooklynite through many decades.

Lovecraft not only read it, but was published in it, though perhaps not under Kleiner — it appears the history of the editorship remains to be written. Lovecraft’s long poetic celebration of “Providence” saw print in The Brooklynite for November 1924, for instance. Later, a comic poem Lovecraft had written for a Blue Pencil Club meeting was published in The Brooklynite for January 1926. One wonders if the publication may have also served as some sort of inspiration for the later commercial and even spicier Home Brew thus, by a sideways shift, giving Lovecraft another publication in which to publish fiction?

Back in 2013 I noted here that the archives of Vassar College has a good run of this publication…

1917-1918, 1921, 1923-1944.

… but it appears that these have still not been digitised or inspected by Lovecraftians or the historians of Brooklyn. Possibly The Fossil might run an article surveying the history and phases of the publication, and thus encourage a public scanning and digitisation of the Vassar College run, perhaps combined with that of the Brooklyn Historical Society?