03 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in New books
Due in a week or so from Wermod and Wermod, a new hardback of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, annotated by the right-wing intellectual and novelist Alex Kurtagic. The UK Amazon listing states…
“This annotated edition comes extensively footnoted, with the text in a big readable font [does he meant the footnotes or Lovecraft’s text?], plus a comprehensive index, a bibliography of all the works cited by Lovecraft, and attractive cover artwork and design.”
03 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in Historical context
A rare quality photograph of the interior of an art studio at the Fleur-de-Lys Studios (1885) in Providence, which features in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Big sharp version here, and some more pictures here.
Wilfred Israel Duphiney painting Commodore John Barry. You just know someone’s going to Photoshop Lovecraft’s face on the portrait in this picture… 🙂
The place housed artists’ studios for masters — many of whom were associated with the Rhode Island School of Design. It or adjacent buildings seem to have also served as a rooming house for students of a creative bent. The complex seems to have been what would now be termed a ‘live-work creative hub’?
It is sometimes also called Fleur-de-Lis is the art history literature. Designed by Charles Walter Stetson and Sydney Richmond Burleigh in collaboration with architects Stone, Carpenter, and Willson (who also built the Providence Public Library).
Incidentally, there’s a 2009 book “Infinite Radius”: Founding Rhode Island School of Design
* rare archival photographs
* previously unpublished manuscripts
* Elsie Bronson’s unpublished chronicle of RISD’s first 50 years
* transcriptions of archival letters
* facsimiles of course & museum catalogues from 1877–1900
03 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
Hippocamus has dated and priced an interesting sounding bit of book-length Lovecraft geographia. David Goudsward’s book H.P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley. It ship out in July at $15. The book looks at a…
“fascinating aspect of Lovecraft’s life which has been explored only lightly in the past—his association with the Merrimack Valley and fellow amateur journalists Charles W. “Tryout” Smith (1852–1948), Myrta Alice (Little) Davies (1888–1967), and Edgar J. Davis (1908–1949), who lived there or nearby for most of their lives.”
Don Gorvett, “Mill on the Merrimack”.
“by the 1930s […] entire regions like north-eastern Connecticut and the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire and Massachusetts appeared to be left behind by history, and the sight of abandoned factories was as common as that of deserted farms” […] “the rural hinterlands seemed to be largely populated with inbred, degenerated retards” [and newspapers pictured] “them as a bunch of mutated dwarfs, giants, and idiots.” (Bernd Steiner, “The Decline of a Region”, H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of the Fantastic, 2007, p.33).
03 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in Scholarly works
A huge new 8,000 word interview with S.T. Joshi on his life and work methods and his library, even including a pic of his gorgeous cat!
02 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Historical context, New discoveries
The collaborative story “Poetry and the Gods”, by Anna Helen Crofts and H.P. Lovecraft, appeared The United Amateur in September 1920. An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia states nothing is known about Croft other than her address at 343 West Main St., North Adams, Mass. and that she “appeared sporadically in the amateur press”. However Crofts was traced through the Adams city directories in The Fossil #341, July 2009, in Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s “The strange story of “Poetry and the Gods” by Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe”. Other details were also found. An obituary and further details were later unearthed and published in The Fossil #344, April 2010. Donovan K. Loucks in 2010 photographed her house and grave which shows her as Anna Helen Crofts McCuen (1889-1975), who married Joseph B. McCuen (1879-1963).
Given the biographical materials so far discovered on Crofts, Lovecraft presumably collaborated on “Poetry and the Gods” in the summer before Crofts took up a new salaried job in teaching. I have dug up the press notice of her appointment and salary, in the North Adams Transcript of 9th June 1920, with her appointment presumably being for the September 1920 term…
This appears to have been her first substantial teaching post, judging from the dates in the obituary. I have also found that Crofts published several articles in Vocational guidance magazine (organ of the National Vocational Guidance Association). One of her articles was titled “Guidance versus Knights of the Road” (1932).
More interestingly I have also found some of the titles of her other fiction or poetry, as listed in The FictionMags Index…
“Le Silent”, (short story), The Tryout Feb 1918.
“To Autumn”, (poem), The Vagrant Jun 1918.
“War Literature”, (article), The Tryout Apr 1919.
I’ve encountered no mention of her story “Le Silent” online, but the title makes it sound as if it might have been of interest to Lovecraft. Faig wonders why Lovecraft collaborated with her, and suggests i) her election as an officer of the United amateur movement in July 1920 and ii) the striking blank verse extracts she borrowed (uncredited) from Elizabeth J. Coatsworth to adorn “Poetry and the Gods”. Lovecraft had two poems (“A Winter Wish” and “Laeta: A Lament”) in the same Feb 1918 Tryout issue, and so (if The FictionMags Index is correct, and they haven’t mis-labelled a poem as a story), he would have seen her earlier work. Perhaps “Le Silent” is why he collaborated with her? The story “Le Silent” doesn’t appear to be online, nor is it collected anywhere that I can find details for.
The article by Faig in The Fossil #341 reports one other story by her, but it is not “Le Silent”…
“S.T. Joshi credits Miss Crofts with at least one further story in the amateur press, “Life” (United Amateur, June 1921)”.
I cannot find online details of that story either, and neither “Life” nor “Le Silent” appears to be available online or collected. Nor can I find any trace of them being described or dismissed by Lovecraftians.
I can add just a little more to the work on Crofts published in The Fossil, in the form of this school art worksheet by her, in The School Arts Magazine, Vol.20, Sept 1920 to June 1921…
02 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Table of contents for the new book of essays H.P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction
The book argues against the myths that Lovecraft: i) shunned the depiction of females and female sexuality; ii) did not use the usual hackneyed and time-worn gothic and supernatural beings in his fiction; iii) preferred the cosmic and the utterly-alien to the mundane; iv) that his ideas became those of a left-leaning socialist as he grew older. Also has some interesting-sounding looks at Lovecraft’s engagements with classical antiquity.
01 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted in Historical context, Podcasts etc.
A couple of high-quality one-hour podcasts on American history from BackStory public radio, that may interest…
American Spirits: a history of the supernatural (warning: some spiritualist apologia).
States of Mind: mental illness in America (broadcast 31st May, .mp3 not yet online but should be soon).
31 Friday May 2013
Posted in Historical context, Odd scratchings
If the young Lovecraft was given the over-the-counter medicine of the time, to help his sleep and his nerves, then no wonder he had vivid nightmares…
31 Friday May 2013
Posted in Astronomy, Historical context
Geography of The Heavens, and class book of astronomy, accompanied by a celestial atlas, rev. and corr. by O.M. Mitchel (1849, digital facsimile link), was one of a collection inherited from Lovecraft’s maternal grandmother who had been trained as an astronomer. It was the key which unlocked an interest in astronomy in the young Lovecraft. According to S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraft’s Library, Lovecraft owned the 1853 reprint edition of it. Writing to Moe in 1915 he called it… “the most prized volume in my library”. In a letter of 1926 he refers to it as… “Grandma’s copy of Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens“.
It also covers some history and recounts that comets were once posited as vehicles of eternal punishment, inside which the wicked were slowly frozen and then roasted over the aeons.
Lovecraft also owned the more sumptuously illustrated Atlas Designed to Illustrate the Geography of the Heavens (1856), which was a supplement to the above book. This was lost by him, I think in a house move, but he later acquired a replacement.
Here are some of the interior decorated and illustrated pages which the young Lovecraft would have scrutinised…
The latter two images were only present in Lovecraft’s 1856 edition.
31 Friday May 2013
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Hippocampus has announced the new S.T. Joshi novel starring H.P. Lovecraft, in an imagined plot set in 1914. The Assaults of Chaos: a novel about H.P. Lovecraft is initially in a limited edition of only 500 in hardcover. Let’s hope there’s a later paperback, and even a affordable Kindle edition, to keep it available.
30 Thursday May 2013
Posted in Scholarly works
Pulp Studies, new website of The Pulp Studies Area of the U.S. Popular Culture Association.
30 Thursday May 2013
Posted in Scholarly works
A single page Inventory of the H.P. Lovecraft Collection, on the website of the Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. Very usefully annotated, and easily searchable by keyword.
HPL has discovered that he is descended from the Elizabethan astronomer John Field. “For one who has always had an eye for the heavens himself, this sure is quite a find!” [Lovecraft to Robert H. Barlow, 14th May 1936]