New Book: Double-bill Terrors

30 Saturday Mar 2019

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A new book from McFarland, just published, is “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!” Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955–1974. The cover is too violent for a free blog on WordPress.com, but the Contents show that it’s a comprehensive survey that steps through the double-bills in chronological order. A sample from 1967…

1967

Prehistoric Women & The Devil’s Own
The Projected Man & Island of Terror
Frankenstein Created Woman & The Mummy’s Shroud
Bloody Pit of Horror & Terror-Creatures from the Grave
They Came from Beyond Space & The Terrornauts
It! & The Frozen Dead

$60 takes you on the guided tour through the schlock. I’m guessing that after the 1940s about six or seven of them have to be worth seeing.

Friday picture postals from Lovecraft: Schulte’s Book Store

29 Friday Mar 2019

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Schulte’s Book Store was at 80 – 82 Fourth Avenue on ‘Booksellers’ Row’ in New York City. Here is Lovecraft writing home, about being unable to resist bagging a 10 cent collection from the store, despite his growing poverty…

“[…] Here I’ll have to admit a fall from grace so far as non-purchasing is concern’d, for a great volume of Bulwer-Lytton, with most of the weird novels complete — Zanoni, A Strange Story, and The House and the Brain — for only ten cents, proved a fatal bait; and I departed from the Schulte Emporium with less in my pocket and more in my hand. But only a dime, remember!” — from a Lovecraft letter of 20th May 1925.

The store was on a ‘Booksellers’ Row’ in the city. That name was first applied to the old Bookseller’s Row, near “St. Clement’s Dane Church in the Strand”, reportedly pulled down in 1903 at which time the New York Observer report it… “is now a mass of fallen and misshapen walls in process of removal, the lime-laden dust pervading the historic atmosphere.” Fourth Avenue then appears to have become the new ‘Booksellers’ Row’ perhaps circa 1911 and was a New York fixture until the 1960s, with a few stores hanging on into the 1970s. Ephemeral New York has a good short article on “Fourth Avenue’s Book Row”.

Schulte’s is seen at the lower end of the above map and was run by Theo Schulte, and from 1925 also by his new business partner Philip Pesky. They had a crowd of bookish boy assistants, and shipping packers in the packing room, all eager to learn the trade. It was the sort of place where Binkin, later to buy a huge Lovecraft collection and hence recall that Lovecraft had once patronised his book store, might have started off in the trade — and thus seen Lovecraft’s face on a regular basis in the 1920s.

By 1938 the store’s magazine adverts had it that the store… “invites you to browse among their interesting stock of over 500,000 used books.” (Saturday Review of Literature). A 1939 Harper’s Bazaar profile had it that the store was located “in about the most Victorian section of New York”. It was also well known that Schulte was always willing to buy good books that one had finished with.

There’s no interior photography that I can find online, but there are two evocative passages that describe the interior experience of the store as it would have been had by Lovecraft and his circle…

“Schulte was the eminence grise of the book trade … His shop at 80 [and 82] Fourth Avenue was legendary. Like the other bookstores, it had a large sidewalk stock out front, where you can choose for your pennies, tomes in old—fashioned binding and printing. But inside, behind front windows that proclaimed it LARGEST SECOND HAND BOOKSTORE IN NY, it was uniquely impressive with a huge main floor, tall balconies, and a cavernous basement. It was also well stocked. “Inside,” according to Guido Bruno’s Adventures, “are shelves laden with books in delightful disorder left by the book-hunter who looked through them before you. So large was the place that the staff could not keep up with all the action: shoppers were responsible for switching on and off the bare bulbs that lighted the alcoves and labyrinthine paths of the store.” (from Thieves of Book Row: New York’s Most Notorious Rare Book Ring).

By the 1960s it had less books than the 500,000 of its heyday, and Mr. Schulte had passed on in 1950…

“Surveying its barn-like main floor, its basement and three-sided balcony, an awestruck customer called Schulte’s “a great amphitheater” in which there seemed to sit “arranged all the books that were ever penned.” When I visited it, every stair step and nearly every floor board in the place creaked with nearly every footfall, but there were 140,000 books on its shelves, and, if a person could not find what he wanted, there were these lines to reassure him: “The Mounties always get their crook! And Schulte’s always get their book,” in proud, if flawed, poesy. If there wasn’t enough on the main floor, it was upstairs to Asia, Africa and Religion, two land masses leading on to infinity — up there amid pipes and low-hanging bare light bulbs, which customers turned on and off as they moved from section to section. Tables were heaped with books in stacks running thirty high and, if you saw a title that looked tempting near the base of a stack, it was quite a trick to slip it out without spilling a tower of books.” (from McCandlish Phillips, City Notebook).

Incidentally, amazingly it was Lovecraft who in 1922 had introduced the New York native Frank Belknap Long to the second-hand bookshops of New York. Not the other way around.

Lovecraft at the Waldorf

28 Thursday Mar 2019

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To be published at the start of April, the new 144-page local history book Lost Restaurants of Providence…

Not all of the eateries are from the Lovecraft period, but the book’s back cover blurb claims that…

“Harry Houdini supped at midnight with H.P. Lovecraft at the Waldorf Lunch”.

The new book has apparently been written by an assiduous expert on this aspect of Providence’s local history. The Waldorf Lunch chain gets two pages.

Lovecraft certainly mentioned the Waldorf Lunch a couple of times, once locally as a feed station on coming back from Pawtucket in the 1920s. Cook mentioned that when Lovecraft came back half-dead from Quebec in 1932, Cook immediately took him to a local Waldorf for an emergency meal. Despite the ‘Lunch’ name the chain’s restaurants were open 24 hours a day. Lovecraft later comments on the chain opening their first branch in New York circa 1933, although the business histories suggest they were there a few years earlier.

A Waldorf Lunch in Providence.

The photo seen above is likely to be a Westminster Street branch of the Waldorf Lunch Co. (because the 1915 Providence House Directory has an ad for the Robert L. Walker Co. in real estate etc at 171 Westminster Street, Providence. The New National Real Estate Journal has Walker still at that address in 1944).

It seems there were however multiple Waldorf Lunch branches on the long Westminster Street, possibly four according to a 1917 city inspection report. These Westminster Street branches were only a short walk from the Providence Opera House (115 Dorrance Street at Pine Street) where Houdini performed, so the branch shown above (or a very similar branch) was likely the one recalled by Eddy’s wife in her rather unreliable memoir The Gentleman From Angell Street. Here she recalls Lovecraft and Houdini at a Providence Waldorf…

“when Houdini played Providence for the last time Lovecraft went with her and her husband, making up a little “theatre party.” After the show Houdini took the group “to lunch at a Waldorf restaurant” around midnight. Beatrice, the wife of the famed performer, sat at table with her pet parrot, Lori, “perched demurely on her shoulder.” Mrs. Eddy writes that HPL “got quite a kick” watching the bird “sip tea from a spoon and nibble daintily at toast held” by Beatrice. She adds that Lovecraft “ordered half a cantaloupe filled with vanilla ice cream, and a cup of coffee.” “He [Lovecraft] was in great spirits and bubbled over with good humor, talking a blue streak about everything under the sun.” All this, Mrs. Eddy writes, while “Harry Houdini gazed at him admiringly.” (from Lovecraft at 125)

Chris Perridas dates this to 20th September 1925 and lightly grills the memories in “Testimony of Muriel Eddy (1961) Part 5”, but finds no reason to doubt the various core facts. The ‘midnight’ is not a disqualifier, as they were open 24 hours.

As one can see below, the local newspaper also has Houdini in Providence in late November of 1925? A return loop on the Fall 1925 tour? But the newspaper ad clearly states “Only appearance in Providence this year”?

The New Houdini Timeline also has him playing Providence in “Sept. ? 1924” and 4th-10th October 1926, though only part of the Timeline is online. Joshi also says October, and that Houdini then commissioned a ‘rush’ article on astrology from Lovecraft. One presumes they must have met in person in Providence for that.

Perhaps Muriel Eddy’s memory that the Waldorf after-show party was when Houdini “played Providence for the last time” means that the event was actually after the first-night opening, the 4th October 1926? Not 1925? Presumably the Houdini scholars have the tour dates and detailed biographies that could sort this tangle out (Sept 1925 or Oct 1926? / Sept 1925 or Nov 1925?), but I don’t have access to the relevant materials.

One wonders if the Lost Restaurants of Providence book will also have any names of the cheaper backstreet cafes that Lovecraft might have frequented in his growing poverty in the 1930s? The letters to Morton names two of these to which visiting friends could be taken, “Al’s lunch”, and “Jake’s” (Jacques according to Ken Faig, who has discovered it was on the riverfront). Jake or Jacques had been discovered by Lovecraft in 1926, but by 1933 was allowing “extremes in the matter of clientele” according to Lovecraft. This change pushed Lovecraft over to patronise Al’s instead. This which was “Al’s Lunch (Alphonse Scatto) 99 N Main, Providence”. Judging by its location Al’s was likely a cheap student cafe serving the RISD students at the height of the Great Depression. There would also have been cafes unfit to take visitors to, where Lovecraft would have had a meal alone, most likely down on the docks for sailors and near the long-distance passenger ferry terminals. His aunt once complained to a friend that he ate ‘all over’ the city, and at all hours of the day and night.

From Howard to Barlow

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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Yesterday Antiques & The Arts Weekly perused the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair 2019, and noted…

“Richard Meli, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., dealer […] Here was a typed manuscript by Conan creator Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) [for sale…] inscribed “To R.H. Barlow with the best wishes of Robert E. Howard.”

Lovecraft and Fritz Lang’s Siegfried

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

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On Archive.org, the Lovecraft rave-fave movie Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1924 Germany, 1925 USA), released in America in New York on 23rd August 1925. Kirk’s Diary confirms it was playing at the Century.

Lovecraft wrote in a letter dated 12th September 1925 that he had seen this epic new movie and that it was for him…

“a stupendous spectacle [of] the scattered myths of the Nibelung ring from the early Volsung Saga to the Wagnerian […] it was an ecstasy & a delight to be remembered forever!”

Though far from being any great appreciator of the type of music involved, Lovecraft felt emotionally and creatively stirred by the bass, writing that…

“The musick, too, was of ineffable inspiration. […] Nothing had so inspired me in weeks, & I believe a masterful daemon-tale[1] could be founded upon the sinister bass musick from “Reingold” (played when Siegfried overpowers the King of the Niebelungs & seizes their treasure) alone.”

According to the historians the main (perhaps only) New York cinema showing Siegfried had apparently specially equipped itself with advanced audio equipment, so as to project the fine subtleties of the music. Thus Lovecraft may have been physically as well as emotionally stirred by the bass notes.

Curiously, Siegfried does not appear to be mentioned in the Letters from New York volume during the letters for the fall/autumn of 1925. Nor is it in the index. Instead we only learn there that Lovecraft saw the new movie of The Phantom of the Opera during that month. This rather significant omission is interesting in itself, as it seems to confirm that Letters from New York is not to be understood to be the definitive autobiographical account from Lovecraft of his New York years.

The de Camp Lovecraft biography has it that… “Arthur Leeds treated Lovecraft to a showing of the silent German motion picture Siegfried”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the impoverished Leeds was flush with cash at this point, as his long-standing movie industry connections (12 years before he had been Editor of Scripts at the major Edison studio, located in the Bronx) may have gained him free tickets in exchange for a trade press review. He was also a great appreciator of recorded music and had been a columnist on The Music Trades magazine in the early 1920s, and may have continued in this line into the mid 1920s.

Or perhaps Leeds had just cashed the payment from Farnsworth Wright for his story “Return of the Undead” (Weird Tales, November 1925). The letter writers of ‘The Eyrie’ later stated… “I nominate it as the weirdest of weird tales” and it was “closely pressed for first honors” [in that issue], so he might have been feeling quite pleased at his future prospects. Thus Leeds might have felt he was ‘in’ with Weird Tales, and that income might soon be flowing from there.

Thus, either way, the tickets. Lucky Lovecraft.

de Camp also offers a quote from Lovecraft’s 12th September 1925 letter on Siegfried, in which Lovecraft does seem to imply that Wagner’s music gave him some genuine inkling of the emotional texture of the ancient Northern spirit…

“It was the very inmost soul of the immortal & unconquerable blond Nordic, embodied in the shining warrior of light, great Siegfried, slayer of monsters and enslaver of kings…. The musick, too, was of ineffable inspiration. Insensible as I am to musick in general, I cannot escape the magic of Wagner, whose genius caught the deepest spirit of those ancestral yellow-bearded gods of war & dominion before whom my own soul bows as before no others — Wooden, Thor, Freyr, & the vast Alfadur — frosty blue-eyed giants worthy of the adoration of a conquering people!”

Piecing together fragments of movie history available on Google Books, one can determine that the 1925 USA version of the movie was “shortened for export”[2] at “about 9,000 feet” from 10,500 feet.[3]. Which might equate to perhaps 12 to 15 minutes of cuts, assuming a highly professional New York hand-cranking projectionist who didn’t just ‘crank it through’ at 1.5x speed. One assumes the requirements of the music speed restrained his hand from fast-cranking. Some “scenes unflattering to the hero” were apparently cut. Possibly of drunkenness, re: prohibition in the USA. There’s no mention that the German inter-titles were translated to English for the USA version, or that some sort of voice-over or live stage speaker read out the inter-titles in English.

There were two movies, the first being Siegfried. The later one doesn’t seem to have had any substantial release in the USA in the 1920s or 30s. It had one gala screening in New York, it seems, and then it went onto what the history books vaguely call the ‘Art House’ circuit for a limited run. Lovecraft was back in Providence at that point, and so far as I know there was no ‘Art House’ cinema in Providence in the 1930s. Perhaps there was one in rarefied Boston? Or possibly he might have seen it on one of his summer travels to other cities, but at that time he most likely lacked the cash to see such a long and niche movie. And if he had seen ‘part two’, then he would surely have mentioned it in a letter.

An HD restoration of Siegfried was released as Die Nibelungen on Blu-ray and DVD in 2012, presumably with the footage missing from the American release that Lovecraft saw. It has the first and second movie and also includes a 70 minute “The Legacy of Die Nibelungen” documentary on the restoration work, and English subtitles for the German inter-titles. I don’t like the digitally-applied heavy gold tinting throughout, and you may want to use a video player that can apply a greyscale or partial-desaturation filter in real-time.

Siegfried is also of interest because J.R.R. Tolkien is somewhat likely to have seen it. While his imagination was already well infused with such Northern materials in their most potent linguistic forms, in the early years of his professional career he might have taken the time to travel from Leeds to view a major work such as Siegfried. Perhaps even taken his students to see it. It appears to have played the UK in the spring and summer of 1924.

Footnotes

1. [↑] A possible inspiration ‘seed’ for the penetrating dream-sonics in the first part of “The Call of Cthulhu”? Although Lovecraft had written out the basic plot for “The Call of Cthulhu” a month earlier (“a new story plot — perhaps a short novel”). But we don’t know when the idea of the dream-sonics arose, which in the published story appear in passages such as… “from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound … a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts”. That reads kind of like what opera sounds like, to me.

2. [↑] A Companion to Fritz Lang.

3. [↑] Distributing Silent Film Serials: Local Practices, Changing Forms.

Weird Tales magazine for 1923

26 Tuesday Mar 2019

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Now flowing onto Archive.org, Weird Tales magazine for 1923 in good scans.

Weird Tales, March 1923.

Weird Tales, April 1923.

Weird Tales, May 1923.

Weird Tales, June 1923.

Weird Tales, July-August 1923.

Weird Tales, September 1923. (Table of contents at back)

Weird Tales, October 1923. (“Dagon” by H.P. Lovecraft)

Weird Tales, November 1923. (“) (“The Invisible Monster”, Sonia H. Greene with Lovecraft revising)

Weird Tales, December 1923 – January 1924. (“) (“Picture in the House”, by Lovecraft).

In the last, Lovecraft is also to be found in “The Eyrie”…

He is pleased at the pen illustration he had for “Dagon”, in the October issue…

New book: Cthulhu rocks!

25 Monday Mar 2019

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Newly listed for June publication, Sebastien Baert’s Cthulhu : L’Influence du Mythe sur le Metal. A French language book on Lovecraft’s influence on heavy metal rock music. 432 pages, and it appears to be part musicological/historical study and part anthology of (new?) translations of the key stories…

Cthulhu: The Influence of Myth on Metal is for Lovecraft fans as well as metalheads who want to know more about the influences of their favorite bands. The work of the Master is approached in its entirety and compared to a multitude of musical compositions that inspired.

Seven of the founding Lovecraft stories are reproduced in their entirety …

This book includes a portfolio of eight pages of illustrations of albums selected by the author and representative of the link between the myth and the Metal.

Preface by The Great Old Ones, guest band at HellFest this year.

New Book: Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others

24 Sunday Mar 2019

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A new book from Bobby Derie, Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others, on pre-order now. Hippocampus has the full contents list. Lots of fascinating new essays, many from Bobby’s excellent blog, on R.E. Howard and also the wider Lovecraft Circle. Also deeper historical context such as an essay on “Fan Mail: Prohibition in ‘The Souk'”. Prohibition was the worthy but impractical and thus ill-fated U.S. ban on liquor (a ban Lovecraft approved of), and ‘The Souk’ was the letters page of the Weird Tales ‘clone’ magazine Oriental Stories, also edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Lovecraft, away with the fairies

23 Saturday Mar 2019

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New on Archive.org, Mirages fanzine for Summer 1966. This has “Some Backgrounds to Fairyland” (1932) by one H.P. Lovecraft. So far as I can tell this essay is otherwise not online and is only available in print in either Collected Essays, Volume 3: Science or Marginalia (1944). The same fanzine issue also has a 12-page “Chronology” for the life/work of Clark Ashton Smith, though I expect this has probably been superseded since the late 1960s.

Never intended as an article or for publication, Joshi has it in Collected Essays that Lovecraft’s “Some Backgrounds to Fairyland” was… “Presumably an extract of a letter to Wilfred B. Talman, dated 23rd September 1932”, with the original of this letter apparently being no longer available for scholars to consult. Thus the unstated implication is that we can’t be sure that Derleth didn’t tweak or abridge it for publication in Marginalia (1944).

It runs to 2,800 words. In the first third Lovecraft surveys mythic beliefs with more or less scholarly accuracy, and then steps onto far shakier ground as he briskly summarises a handful of historical theories which have since been swept away by the archaeology, genetics and linguistics. But these are nevertheless interesting for presenting a clear view of what competing historical-ethnographic theories might be seriously entertained by a highly self-educated layman of the late 1920s. As such they seem to illuminate the roots of Tolkien, re: hobbits and dwarves, Tolkien having just started his professional career at Leeds at that time. Lovecraft, for instance, has it that…

“A third theory […] postulate some hitherto unknown race of dwarfs (either Mongoloid or otherwise) which populated wide areas of Europe at a very remote though not palaeolithic period. This theory has considerable vogue at the present time [my emphasis], and is upheld by the existence of certain prehistoric excavations in Southern Austria which seem to have been made by men of less than normal stature. […] Recent discoveries of large numbers of Erdstalle in Austria make it likely that the Danube region was at least a leading seat of the prehistoric dwarf-Aryan conflict. These artificial caverns, plainly constructed by a race not over five feet tall, and holding artifacts indicating a late stone, copper, and early bronze-age date, are occasionally of great elaborateness; some apparently being temples, while others are clearly refuges (like the burrows of small animals) from enemies of larger physique. About 700 of them are known…”

In such apparently widespread musings of the late 1920s (I assume Lovecraft was a few years behind the times on this, in 1932) one might glimpse the deep refuges of Helm’s Deep and the hobbit-holes of the Shire.

The Erdstalle are as Lovecraft described them and they appear to baffle both the scientists and the historians to this day. The “artifacts” Lovecraft mentions don’t appear in the current writings on them that I can swiftly find, and the earliest they can be reliably dated by modern means is A.D. 950, via coal found inside one — but they could be far older. There are now known to be far more than “700”, so they were a widespread phenomenon of central Europe. Who or what inhabited them is now unknown.