My first try at colourising the scan of the Vrest Orton ‘milkmaid’ picture. It is September 1928, and HPL is again visiting Vrest Orton in the woods of Vermont, and is wearing a wooden yoke of the type traditionally used to carry milk-pails.

   “The change of plan began when a friend of mine — now resident in New York but spending the summer in his ancestral Vermont — fairly kidnapped me into a two weeks’ visit at a lonely farm he had hired in the exquisite countryside near Brattleboro. In this half-fabulous paradise of endless green hills and wild, brook-haunted glens, it is needless to say that my nerves recovered very substantially from the strain of New York. […] I now drank in to its fullest extent the miraculously preserved early-American life of the region.” — letter of 28th July 1928.

   “No more likeable, breezy, & magnetic person ever existed than he [Vrest Orton]. In person of smallish size; dark, slender, handsome, & dashing, he is clean-shaven of face & jauntily fastidious of dress … He confessed to 30 years, but does not look more than 22 or 23. His voice is mellow & pleasant … & his manner of delivery sprightly & masculine — the careless heartiness of a well-bred young man of the world. … A thorough Yankee to the bone, he hails from central Vermont, adores his native state and means to return thither in a year, & detests N.Y. as heartily as I do. His ancestry is uniformly aristocratic — old New England on his father’s side, & on his mother’s side New England, Knickerbocker Dutch, & French Huguenot.” — letter quoted in I Am Providence.

One can see, if one looks closely, that the “smallish” Vrest is standing on a slightly raised lawn, about four inches higher than HPL, in the picture. Thus they appear to be about the same height. Some tactful visual height compensation has obviously been neatly arranged by the photographer. He also likely has boot-heels that add another inch, whereas HPL appears to have flatter old walking shoes.

This picture was made at a time when he was helping Orton to dam a hillside stream and divert it to make a new pool, so it also reflects that labour.

Postcard sent by Lovecraft during his 1928 stay with Vrest…

50 Years (1969):

* Foundation of Panther in the UK and Ballantine in the USA, both publishers who did sterling work to bring H.P. Lovecraft, R.E. Howard, and the writers of the Lovecraft Circle, to the masses.

* Arkham publishes its two-volume Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, the first multi-author Mythos anthology book.

* French literary journal Le Cahier de l’Herne famously devotes its entire issue to Lovecraft.

80 Years (1939):

* Arkham House founded in 1939, and the first title published — The Outsider and Others.

100 years (1919):

* Lovecraft publishes the story “Dagon”.

(My thanks for Martin A. for correcting my ‘slip of the memory’ on “Dagon”. When first published the above post said the story was written in 1919. The story was, of course, published in 1919).

Found, a new biographical peice from Everett McNeil of the Lovecraft Circle. It was published in The Trestle Board, 1887. We might imagine that this anecdote of childhood tobacco poisoning was one that the Lovecraft Circle heard at least once, during their long coffee and tobacco-fuelled meetings in McNeil’s rooms in the mid 1920s. From it we can glean just a few more biographical details. We already knew his father was an accomplished prize-winning farmer, but here McNeil confirms that his father David McNeil grew significant amounts of tobacco, and that there was a hired farm-hand ‘living in’ with the family.

And another new article by McNeil is found in Moving Picture News in 1912. At this point he is still part of the movie industry (then still largely in New York City) where he works as a highly experienced scenarist (in modern terms, a screenwriter). 1912 was a couple of years before his move to the Edison studio to work under Arthur Leeds. Here he complains about cinemas that run the film ‘fast’, in order to put on extra showings, and hints at industry prosecutions of the exhibitors.

Again, one imagines that in the mid 1920s the Lovecraft Circle heard McNeil’s memories of encountering his own movies being shown at high-speed, back during his movie-making years. Possibly (with the bitterness erased by the years in between) such memories were recounted by him in a rather more comic manner than previously, focussing on the laughably speeded-up antics?

The above are in addition to my book on McNeil and his career, Good Old Mac.