I’ve been pleased to discover a new and previously unknown story by Lovecraft’s friend and fellow writer Everett McNeil. I wrote the book on McNeil and his career in fiction and movie writing, and I never found a hint of “A Descendant of the Vikings” (written circa 1906, as it was announced then, and published 12th December 1907 in The Youth’s Companion).

It’s a boy’s hunting tale in one large broadsheet page, in which Norwegian boy Thor hunts a killer grizzly bear for a 200 dollar reward.

McNeil had grown up in Dunkirk, a small Wisconsin town of 2,000 New Englanders and Norwegians — so he would have known many lads like this.

Also new on Archive.org, the trade-journal The Writer for October 1924 announced that McNeil was one of the Triple-X prize winners. Winning a $100 prize for another unknown story titled “The Lost Dutchman”. The $5,000-total open contest appears to have been to launch the successful Triple-X men’s action-adventure fiction magazine from Fawcett.

I’d suspect this tale related to The Lost Dutchman mine, and that on publication it became the snappier titled “The Lost Gold of Mad Wolf Gulch”. It appeared as a two-parter published in Triple-X magazine for January 1925 and February 1925. I had known about this one from listings, and it sounds like a western with a mining element. He was also keen on real wolf attacks (his mother had often told her real-life tale of experiencing attack). So I wouldn’t be surprised if a starving wolf pack made an appearance in “The Lost Gold of Mad Wolf Gulch”. Assuming Fawcett paid the prize on publication, McNeil might have had the cheque cashed by March 1925, easing his worrisome financial situation a bit in time for springtime 1925. So the prize payment adds another small bit of data to the story of the Kalem Club during the years that Lovecraft was in New York.

Triple-X proved a useful market for McNeil, and he landed the following there. Thus showing ‘the gang’ that ‘the old fuddy-duddy’ could still hold his own in a substantial new action-adventure magazine…

* “Battle of the Stings”.
* “The Vale of Vengeance”.
* “The Lost Gold of Mad Wolf Gulch”.
* “California’s First Gold” (appears to have been his vivid six-page history of the earliest gold strike, later included in a 1928 schools reader).
* “The Duping of Scarnose” (posthumous).

The new Arthur Harris letters (found in the new revised/expanded edition of the Lovecraft-Kleiner letters) reveal the exact details of the British historical survey books which Lovecraft so enjoyed in the mid-1930s. He found four of this set at 10 cents each, while browsing for bargains before Christmas 1934 in the Providence branch of the Woolworth Store.

He reveals to Harris that the set was edited by one C.W. Airne, and published from Manchester by Sankey, Hudson & Co. They were thus not, as I had assumed by the description that Lovecraft gave to another correspondent, the wonderful Everyday Life / Everyday Things series by the Quennells.

With the editor’s name in hand one can thus discover that Airne edited the following series, with the overall title of “Our Empire’s Story, told in Pictures”:

1. The Story of Prehistoric & Roman Britain Told in Pictures.

2. The Story of Saxon and Norman Britain Told in Pictures.

3. Medieval Britain, Told in Pictures.

4. Tudor & Stuart, Hanoverian & Modern Britain, Told in Pictures.

5. Our Empire’s Story, Told in Pictures.

About 64 – 66 pages in each, containing “450 to 600 captioned illustrations”. Undated internally.

At Christmas 1934 Lovecraft only lacked the last in the series — “the Empire outside Britain” as he termed it — in his personal library. He tells Harris that he was striving to obtain that missing title for his set. Harris found the same set in his British Woolworth, on Lovecraft’s recommendation.

An Abe listing reveals there were also two later titles in the same series, one seemingly published during the war and thus after Lovecraft’s death:

6. Britain’s Story (to 1930’s).

7. Britain’s Story Revised (to 1943) (possibly issued 1944?).

Amazon appears to reveal a 1953 post-war addition:

8. Our Empire’s Story Told in Pictures (1953, revised)

Possibly 7. was a revised and expanded version of 6. And 8. was a post-war revision of 5.

Listed in the copy of Lovecraft’s Library I have, under “Airne” there is only Our Empire’s Story, told in Pictures, as if a single 64-page booklet. The series titles are not then sub-listed. Either Lovecraft had lent out the others in the series by 1937, or the initial cataloguer gave only the series title to save time and assumed a professional bookseller would figure out what the item was.

Variant covers on Abe and eBay show one edition with striking colour covers, possibly for the British gift market.

Though I suspect that the 10-cent Woolworths copies may well have been cheaper run-ons with lesser covers. Although it should be said that other seemingly-early-and-cheap variant covers can be found.

There is no publication-history of the series that I can find, only one blog post that hunts for racism… but the highlighted item is a page on the history of Rhodesia which fails to say anything bad about Cecil Rhodes (founder of Rhodesia).

Only one of the series is currently on Archive.org (linked above) and it seems to be quite an early edition of the first book in the series.

I see that Airne’s similar 66-page photographic Castles of Britain is also on Archive.org, and this would have delighted Lovecraft had he seen it. Though it very regrettably omits the central Midlands. I recall from my work on Mary Howitt that the central Midlands were effectively erased (for some unknown reason) from her publisher-led project Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain (1862), and the effect may have cascaded though later books. Certainly it seems strange that the Gawain scholars so thoroughly overlooked Alton for over a century.

Airne also produced at least one other in the ‘In Pictures’ series, Animals of the World Told in Pictures.

In the second volume of his Letters to Family, H.P. Lovecraft reveals more about the location of his favourite cafe haunt “John’s” in Brooklyn in the mid 1920s. Readers of Tentaclii will recall I took a look for this location in my April 2021 post “Lunch in New York: Spaghetti in Breuckelen”. After that post I had a blog comment from ‘SJM’ pointing out a John’s in the Brooklyn tax-photos at…

185 Willoughby Street, corner Navy Street

… but I left the comment unapproved as I was fairly sure it was not the John’s. 185 Willoughby was a cafe and small corner-store relatively far up Willoughby Street and not especially close to Fulton. There are two photos of 185, one obviously showing changes after a few years.

The latter is from 1940s.nyc and feels like it’s perhaps a few years on after remodelling and gentrification associated with the new high-rise that has gone up in the background.

But a problem arises in this apparent identification… because on page 937 of Letters to Family Lovecraft states…

All three now set out for dinner — at the old Bristol Dining Room in Willoughby Street near Fulton, next door to the now defunct John’s, which was my Brooklyn headquarters for spaghetti in the old days. (July 1931)

Next door.

“Bristol” was the long-established Bristol’s Dining Room, with Mr. J. E. Bristol proprietor. He had a small chain of eight such in New York City by 1920. Can it be found? Well, there is this postcard picture, which appears in a book dedicated to such from the 1905-07 period in Brooklyn…

Here is the old Bristol’s Dining Room seen in all its oyster-purveying glory. As one can see, there is no architectural or street-furniture comparison to be found between the suggested site at 185 Willoughby and the postcard of Bristol’s Dining Room. If, as Lovecraft states, his old John’s was next to the Bristol’s Dining Room then it would either have been in the next-door barbers’ shop (barbering pole, outside) seen up steps on the right of the postcard, or is off to the immediate left and out of range of the camera.

Nor is there, on the 185 Willoughby or its adjacent 1940s.nyc pictures, any glimpse of a possible Bristol’s Dining Room next door. The clincher is that in summer 1931 Lovecraft talks of the “defunct John’s”. Therefore it would not be seen on a late 1930s / early 1940s tax picture. Most likely another nearby cafe took the name in the 1930s, perhaps hoping to profit a little on the name-recognition.

What then was the exact address of the Bristol’s Dining Room in Brooklyn in the mid 1920s? Could it have moved since 1900? Was there more than one in Brooklyn by that time? Those are possibilities. But regrettably the address cannot be discovered on the Web in public records or books, though those with access to pay-walled genealogy records might find it. Nor is there any 1920s branch advertising-map or suchlike to be found.

Can the architecture seen on the card be found on a virtual trot down Willoughby Street? Not on 1940s.nyc, so far as I can see.

So, it’s still a mystery.

An article on special effects in movies, by Lovecraft’s friend and Kalem member Arthur Leeds. In the Writer’s Digest for July 1922, recently uploaded to Archive.org.

He had a number of practical and market-survey articles in Writer’s Digest from summer 1921 and into 1922, plus an interview-based article on George Allen England.

More notes on my reading of the second volume of H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to Family, here mostly relating to 1926-1928.

There is an interesting description, re: a possible inspiration for “The Colour Out of Space”, of a ground curiously mineralised and as-if “powdered with star-dust” (page 604). He finds this in September 1926 scattered around the 1707 birthplace of the early astronomer David Rittenhouse (1732-1796), a homestead that had been encountered by chance as Lovecraft was lost while exploring the Wissahickon Valley. “Colour” was written some six months later.

Lovecraft saw the grand historical-adventure movie Ben Hur (page 602). Later he remarks on his break from cinema-going, between Aug-Sept 1927 and May 1928.

He recalls the Old Corner Bookshop (page 612). Presumably Dana’s Old Corner Bookstore in Providence, as he had sold some of his mother’s books to them and later regretted parting with one such when he saw it on display in the window.

He remarks that, like himself, his friend Loveman also had many young proteges… “He had with him one of his numberless prodigy-proteges, a quiet blond youth whose accomplishments seem to be, so far, appreciative rather than creative” (page 632).

In April 1928 Loveman had noticed that the old rooming house, 169 Clinton St. on the edge of Red Hook, appeared abandoned and with some windows smashed. However, in May 1928 Lovecraft and Loveman went to bid it a final goodbye… only to find it revived (a fresh coat of paint and “marks of rehabilitation”) and thus presumably under new ownership (pages 634 and 661).

By April 1928 the Kalem meetings had “almost dissolved” (i.e. dwindled to just a few attendees) but were strongly revived while Lovecraft was again living in New York City.

On discovering that some museums would make a good affordable plaster-casts for private display, he remarks… “it was my original design in youth to have a private museum of Greek & Roman casts”.

He discovers an old Antarctic adventure novel he has not yet read, titled Revi-lona: a Romance of Love in A Marvelous Land (1879) by a journalist of the time. An explorer finds love with sex-starved women in a tropical shangri-la amid the ice. Apparently very floridly written and yet ultimately conveying the rather cynical and anti-utopian sentiments of an American newspaperman. The implication is that Lovecraft has read most such novels, but that this is a new find for him. Not on Archive.org under that title.

“The Spence book on Atlantis that I read so hurriedly just before departing for my trip” (page 637). There is no footnote for this book, and both “Spence” and “Atlantis” are curiously missing from the index. Lewis Spence wrote five books about Atlantis, and the most likely in spring 1928 was the relatively new The History of Atlantis (1927), though it might have been the earlier The Problem of Atlantis (1924) or Atlantis in America (1925).

Lovecraft read at least one non-fiction book by Lewis Mumford on architecture. This was prior to Mumford’s efflorescence of ideas on tools, technologies and civilisation.

He knew, read and kept the magazine published by the Hospital Trust in Providence. This produced the fine Netropian journal, with many local history articles and local drawings from the 1920s. Copies apparently languish in paper at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, un-scanned.

He mentions reading and being impressed by a volume of poetry by Gessler, friend of his best friend Belknap Long, titled Kanaka Moon (1927). Not on Archive.org.

He found Morton’s full library very impressive when he saw it fully assembled and shelved at Paterson, and thought it better even than that of Cook. “I’ve never seen so fine a private Library” (pages 657 and 658).

Lovecraft finds he has a family-tree line named “Fish” (page 663), and this is some years before the writing of “Innsmouth”.

There was a time when $5 would buy you a custom original plot-synopsis by H.P. Lovecraft. In the spring of 1928 he was writing many such plots for one “Reed”, at the jobbing rate of a dollar per page (page 668). We later learn this client to be a “Mrs Reed” (page 676), now of course known to be his revision client Zealia Brown Reed.

Lovecraft revised the first chapter of McNeil’s historical-adventure novel The Shores of Adventure (1929). In which the boy hero earns and acquires his father’s super-sword.

In summer 1928 he notes “a resumption of the Providence Line of New York boats”, meaning passenger services from Providence — New York City.

Lovecraft discovered an old unchanged working colonial farmstead, “in full sight of the distant towers of Manhattan” and with its inhabitants oblivious to modernity of New York City (page 678).

I’ve begun reading the second volume of the new Letters to Family. Here are my notes on Lovecraft’s letters home, until the point when he returns home to Providence and Barnes St.

There is an evocative passage on “vast unknown islands” in the Arctic (page 560) in which Lovecraft seems to anticipate some future unwritten tale. Not impossible, at least historically, when you look at the topography and know that sea-level used to be much lower in the last Ice Age…

He laments that intellectually stunted people then made up “almost a majority” of the population of the USA, and he presumably was basing this on some test-based research of the period. A little later he also implies that knows whereof he speaks, when he says he has given up his former “loafing about slum cafeterias” on the edge of Red Hook.

He appears to have read the memoirs of the illustrator and leading printmaker Joseph Pennell, presumably The Adventures of an Illustrator (1925). This would have given him an insight into the artistic/publishing life of London from the 1880s to the early 1900s, and then the illustration side of magazine publishing in the New York ‘slicks’. By 1921 Pennell was living in Brooklyn, and its not impossible that in 1925 their circles overlapped at the edges.

He had begun reading some of the ghost stories of M.R. James and was impressed, referring to James a new “idol of idols”.

Evidently there was a large and capacious family scrap book, “Grandma’s red scrap book”, which had been kept into the mid 1920s and was still being added to. One wonders what became of it.

Vaudeville at Fay’s Theatre in Lovecraft’s youth could include lectures. He saw there a lecture by Dr. Cook, the polar explorer. Presumably this included a show of ‘magic lantern’ slides.

He saw the movie The Tower of Lies (1925) with Lon Chaney. Now a lost movie.

He gives the dates of his severe boyhood illness of 1903, “late April and early May”.

Loveman’s poetry was both “polished” and (later) proofread by Lovecraft (pages 551-2).

The location of Peter’s restaurant was “on Joralemon St near the corner of Clinton” in NYC.

Lovecraft’s Providence barber was named Fernando King at 72 Westminster Street. His partner in trade was Eduoard Fontaine. I see that the Nightingale Papers archive holds a local press “clipping and program for party held in King’s honor, 1926”. In New York Lovecraft’s final haircut is at “the barbers at State and Court”.

Lovecraft read the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw” for the first time in February 1926, while working on his survey Supernatural Literature.

He makes a brief reference to the influenza of 1918, as a “scourge” (page 558). He later says that its symptomatic “effects are so far reaching” (page 576) suggesting he was still well aware of the unusual and devastating symptoms.

The plans for the giant Hope Reservoir were known to Lovecraft by February 1926. He talks about the plans, and what might replace it. We know from the Providence magazine that it was still not quite drained by early 1928, having begun draining in 1926. On return to Providence, he would live very near to it.

He saw the movie The Torrent, featuring Greta Garbo. This climaxes when “a huge storm hits the town, causing houses to flood, ceilings to cave in, and the dam to break bringing a torrent of rushing water”. A while later he saw an “impressive” costume-drama movie of the Jamestown Flood of 1889. Given that the giant, creaking and possibly dangerous (while the water level was being slowly lowered) Hope St. reservoir was almost directly behind his new home in Barnes St., these viewings seem well-timed.

He remarks that, at February 1926, he had never seen a decent display of the aurora (‘northern lights’).

He shops at the Clinton Delicatessen, presumably in Clinton St. Above it is the Taormina restaurant he and Sonia patronised in the 1925, but which had raised prices dramatically by 1926.

He recalls the Empire Book Shop in Providence, which he used to patronise, in Empire St. Another source gives the prop. as “H. D. Dana”, known later as a leading book dealer in Providence. By 1923 “new” at Weybosset St…

In the move to New York he lost the beautiful star-atlas booklet that accompanied the book Geography of the Heavens. The Library of Congress has it online now.

He talks of Eliphas Levi as “the best source of magical lore”, as translated by Waite (page 570). In March 1926 he is reading Constant’s History of Magick (page 585) but this again indicates Eliphas Levi — since Levi was Constant’s pseudonym. This must therefore have been the book The History Of Magic but Lovecraft’s epistolary whimsy has given the title an 18th century touch by using the spelling “Magick”.

He talks of enjoying “the subsidiary features” of movie-going, suggesting that he also sat through the cartoons, short travelogues, news-reels etc.

He states in the past he had read some “Hindoo” (Hindu) fables from India.

He disparages Freud and especially on dreams…”… his theory of dreams is perhaps the weakest link in his whole chain. Many of his hypotheses can be punctured quite readily…” (page 578)

Lovecraft reassures his aunt that, in his fragile mental state, he is not raving at immigrants in the streets… “don’t fancy that my nervous reaction against alien N.Y. types takes the form of conversation likely to offend any individual” and “don’t think I fail to appreciate the genius and good qualities of the entire assemblage” (by which he seems to mean ‘other groups, when considered in the round’). He also comments on the lack of leakage from the Kalems and his circle… “our group is not noted for faux pas‘s or inconsiderate repetition of opinion.”

He sees a re-run of the John Ford blockbuster movie “The Iron Horse” (1924) about the transcontinental railroad. Another movie that seems to foreshadow his return (by rail) to Providence.

Long patronises The Womrath Library, a library cum bookstore in New York, and sub-lends Lovecraft at least one book from it.

The family storage stables in Providence, at least at that point in time, are owned by a “Mrs Glazer”.

A favourite Italian joint in Providence was the Belvedere, “at the S.E. corner of Washington and Aborn”, and Lovecraft states he intends to make it a regular haunt when he returns.

He chanced to see the melodrama movie Stella Maris with Sonia, and recalled seeing the first half of the earlier Mary Pickford version in Providence in 1918. In 1918 he had to leave the cinema early due to health problems. This suggests the reason why he only saw half the Providence Houdini show.

He saw a foreign movie of Cyrando de Bergerac, possibly a French print of the Italian movie version of the time.

He saw the movie Don Juan, and enjoyed it all the more because the then-new Vitaphone technology sync’d the music perfectly.

He was impressed with the John Metcalfe (1891–1965) story “The Bad Lands”, in The Smoking Leg, and other stories (1925). This has not been collected in an anthology of ‘Lovecraft faves’ by Lovecraftians, presumably due to copyright. But note that the 1926 U.S. first edition should put it in the public domain in the USA in 2023. The story is now online, extracted from the British magazine publication of 1920. On reading, one immediately finds it a likely partial source of inspiration for “The Colour out of Space”, minus the colour and reservoir and meteor.

At £18 each can’t afford either of these antique stereo cards, but this is highly likely to be Lovecraft’s childhood ravine, adjacent to the road before the road grading. The photographer is from Providence.

Road and Seekonk.

And presumably the ravine adjacent to the same road.

A comparison with a winter picture from a lower elevation, known to show the results of the extensive and earth-moving and road-grading work that swept away much of Lovecraft’s favourite haunt of middle-childhood. As I wrote of this in my essay on the Seekonk site in Lovecraft in Historical Context #4…

The [Blackstone Park, Seekonk] shorefront road now runs as a barrier between the pond and the river, to join up the River Rd with Irving Avenue. Above is an undated photo of this corner, looking south-east, after the grading of the Irving Avenue extension and the connection of the two roads (possibly circa 1900). One can still see road surveying stakes in the foreground. My feeling is that the height of the bluffs on the north side of York Pond were lowered by earth-moving at this time.

I have the eBay pictures ready be posted as colourised up-res versions in due course. But some may want to own the original stereo card pictures.