At the foot of the Brown repository letter in which Eddy recalls a “Poe Street” encounter on a walk with Lovecraft (see this post for details) is Winfield Scott’s additional and almost indecipherable pencil note…

Dana – says HPL would buy pulps in [?] [?] then tore off the [?] sexy-lurid covers because [“under neath counter”?]

Dana’s was the local bookshop which took the remainder of Lovecraft’s Library shortly after his death. We have no evidence of the cover-tearing in Lovecraft’s extant set of Weird Tales, as I understand it. But perhaps Dana encountered runs of other pulps in his posthumous consignment of the less desirable items. As a more upmarket book-seller, unfamiliar with New York news-stand practices with pulps, he may not have realised what could have happened to these magazines.

News-stand sellers of pulps, and later the cheap paperbacks in the 1950s-70s, were supposed to send unsold copies back to the publishers to be pulped. But that was impractical. The actual practice was to mail sheafs of the ripped-off colour covers, as proof of the unsold and supposedly un-sellable copies. Thus would the magazines be ‘returned’ for credit.

Was this practice present in New York as far back as the 1930s? Perhaps a pulp history expert can fill me in on that. But in the meantime, here is a tantalising Google Books snippet from The New Yorker, Vol. 12 1936…

So it does seem that flea-market re-sale of coverless copies was going on, at least in New York City. And on a scale large enough to make it profitable for the junk-men to invent machines to rectify the magazines. The process for lesser pulps sounds like it would have been…

1. Covers returned for credit on the next order.
2. Coverless copies locally given away to junk-men as worthless ‘pulp’.
3. The junk-men quietly pass these into the New York flea-markets.
4. The magazines spend a few weeks on the stalls at ‘three for a nickel’.
5. The junk-men return to the stalls, take away the bundles of the unwanted dregs as pulp. They may even have become ballast on ships to England.

That could help explain why Lovecraft evidently had coverless pulps among the lesser parts of his collection, as disposed of to the Dana bookshop. He and his circle could have been acquiring them in this way in New York City.

This post follows on from yesterday’s post on the Voluminous podcast (a new partly-unpublished letter, in which Lovecraft visits the Italian quarter of Providence). Also from my recent ‘Picture Postals’ post (Lovecraft and the farmers market)

I see that the Online Review of Rhode Island History has a new first-hand memoir of “Growing Up Italian in Providence in the 1940s”, in which Dr. Ed Iannuccilli’s evokes his everyday experiences of the city as a boy. Especially the fish-man. Friday was then still a big traditional fish-eating day, and it was brought up from the harbour and sold on carts…

Streetlights were suspended from the middle of the poles, with circular, scalloped metal “hats” covering the bulbs. When the lights were lit, a yellow haze emanated and created dancing shadows on the street below. They were our summer-evening clocks. […] The Grocery Man might be making deliveries from his huge truck, a traveling store, followed closely by the fruit peddler. On Fridays, the Fish Man appeared, blasting his mouth horn with the message that his truck was filled with a new catch. […] He stopped his dark green panel truck in the middle of Wealth Avenue. Laden with dead fish covered in ice, it had open sides with canvas rolled to the top and tied with thick rope, a Fish Man’s knot, I guess. Firm fish of all kinds were on display, neatly arranged, right side up, eyes open, in wooden sections fitted to the bed of the truck, a roof above protecting the catch from the hot sun. Fillets, shellfish and lobsters were stacked separately. A scale, secured with a chain, hung from a hook screwed into the top rear “two by four.” There was dried blood along the sides of the truck. Melting ice water dripped from the tailgate. The tires were low, burdened with a packed catch. And there was the aroma, fishy the only way to describe it… musty, damp and salty also.

One then vaguely imagines that the fish-detesting Lovecraft might not have been out much on Fridays, if the streets of his own section also had fish-peddlars. Not even if these had a retinue of local cats pattering along behind.

Also, I wonder if Providence had a wholesale fish-market? I’ve never heard of one, but I imagine a growing sea-port city that size must have had one. And again, I imagine Lovecraft stayed well away from it. Which would give Lovecraftians a negative data point, in terms of ‘Lovecraft was unlikely to have gone there, or half a mile around it in summer’.

Anyway, I see that Dr. Ed Iannuccilli has a complete new book of such 1940s city memories. Which may interested those who want to learn more about the everyday patina of the city as it might have been encountered, more or less, in Lovecraft’s final decade of the 1930s.

Lovecraft’s Hope Street High School. Complete with a familiar-looking chap walking past. I’ve just dug this out of the hard-drive, having stashed it back in 2018.