The Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art has just completed extensive renovations of the Eliza G. Radeke Building, costing around $8.4m.

H.P. Lovecraft attended the grand opening in late April 1926. Probably on Sunday 25th April, the day after the official dedication ceremonies of what was then known as the Eliza G. Radeke Museum of Art. Lovecraft also found that he shared his Barnes St. house with… “an official of the School of Design Museum” (Letters from New York, p.312). This calm new museum must surely have been a Lovecraft haunt in the years after his return from New York. Lovecraft already knew well the RISD Museum’s neighbouring…

This essay has been replaced by the essay in my new book of revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays, Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.

The Brooklyn Public Library now has a complete scanned run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle online for free, including the years that Lovecraft was in Brooklyn.

Lovecraft’s marriage announced, 2nd April 1924…

The piano sale ad, 20th April 1924…

Evidently the $500 for the piano was not found from a private buyer. It was later sold for $350 in September 1924.

140 years of Popular Science magazine, online for free and keyword searchable.

New ending for my short topographical note of September 2013, titled “The location of “Juan Romero”: Area 52″. Scratch the couple of sentences speculating on how Lovecraft might have learned of the area, and replace with…

How did Lovecraft come to know of the area? He appears to have been inspired in his choice of a desert setting by reading an amateur journalism author he named in a letter as ‘Phil Mac’ (Prof. Philip B. McDonald), who had apparently used a similar desert / mining setting, but for a “commonplace adventure yarn” (Lord of a Visible World, p.69). It seems Lovecraft had copied out a “dull” and “commonplace adventure yarn” sent to him by McDonald, intending to send the copy to his correspondence circle with a detailed critique of his own. But then he decided to just spend a day writing his own story based on the same or similar setting, and he then sent out both… “Youze gazinks have seen both Mac’s and my yarns.”

Philip B. McDonald graduated M.E. (Master of Engineering) from Michigan College of Mines. In Lovecraft’s The Conservative, McDonald was stated to be “Assistant Professor of Engineering English, University of Colorado” in July 1918, though he later moved to New York to become assistant professor of English, New York University. It appears he was the husband of the noted amateur journalist Edna Hyde McDonald (“Vondy”). McDonald’s desert story was not used in Lovecraft’s The Conservative and seems not to exist today, nor any of his fiction. So we don’t know how closely Lovecraft used, or not, what he called “the richly significant setting” of McDonald’s “dull yarn”.