I Am Providence: The H.P. Lovecraft Thread 3 3

[OtherEric]

On 3/21/2022 at 2:46 PM, Hap Hazard said:

Recent upgrade for me of the June 1936 Astounding Stories with Lovecraft's The Shadow out of Time.

This is still one of my all-time favorite pulp covers.  Inhuman mythos creatures who are also librarians.  Glorious!

[OtherEric]

Today's topic for discussion:  is the September 1952 Weird Tales a Lovecraft cover we've been ignoring for ages?  It's the more prominent of two pieces mentioned on the cover, somewhat unusually for a poem.  The cover and illustration for the poem are both by Finlay, and the cover seems to be a reasonable match to the poem. "And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,/ Sprung out of the tomb's black maw/ To shake all the world with awe."

Disclosure:  I've got a copy on the way, so I may be biased at this point.  The images are taken from online, not my scans:

[Surfing Alien]

On 3/21/2022 at 7:27 PM, OtherEric said:

Today's topic for discussion:  is the September 1952 Weird Tales a Lovecraft cover we've been ignoring for ages?  It's the more prominent of two pieces mentioned on the cover, somewhat unusually for a poem.  The cover and illustration for the poem are both by Finlay, and the cover seems to be a reasonable match to the poem. "And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,/ Sprung out of the tomb's black maw/ To shake all the world with awe."

Disclosure:  I've got a copy on the way, so I may be biased at this point.  The images are taken from online, not my scans:

I think it highly likely, unless the St. Clair story has some obvious connection. (I have a copy too but it's buried pretty deep right now or i'd look)

[OtherEric]

On 3/21/2022 at 7:12 PM, Surfing Alien said:

I think it highly likely, unless the St. Clair story has some obvious connection. (I have a copy too but it's buried pretty deep right now or i'd look)

https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v44n06_1952-09

Issue is here if somebody wants to dig in and see if the cover obviously goes to a different story, my quick skim suggests it doesn't belong to either the St. Clair story (mentioned on the cover) or the Derleth story (the other interior piece with a Finlay illo.)

[Pulpvault]

The original painting.

 

[Bookery]

On 3/22/2022 at 2:32 AM, OtherEric said:

https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v44n06_1952-09

Issue is here if somebody wants to dig in and see if the cover obviously goes to a different story, my quick skim suggests it doesn't belong to either the St. Clair story (mentioned on the cover) or the Derleth story (the other interior piece with a Finlay illo.)

I haven't read enough WT content to know, so it's all speculation... but were the covers always tied to a story at this point, or were they just commissioning generic fantasy covers for some issues?  WT didn't see Lovecraft as one of their top authors while he was alive, and he never achieved cover-art status at the time.  But by 1952, Arkham House had been publishing for over a decade, so it's possible HPL had built enough of a following by then that WT would give him a cover.  But it's also possible Finlay already had the piece lying around and sold it to WT.  The magazine was dying out by then, and I suspect payment rates were dropping, so there may have been limits to how much time an artist was willing to devote to devising paintings to fit a specific story.

[OtherEric]

On 3/24/2022 at 5:37 AM, Bookery said:

I haven't read enough WT content to know, so it's all speculation... but were the covers always tied to a story at this point, or were they just commissioning generic fantasy covers for some issues?  WT didn't see Lovecraft as one of their top authors while he was alive, and he never achieved cover-art status at the time.  But by 1952, Arkham House had been publishing for over a decade, so it's possible HPL had built enough of a following by then that WT would give him a cover.  But it's also possible Finlay already had the piece lying around and sold it to WT.  The magazine was dying out by then, and I suspect payment rates were dropping, so there may have been limits to how much time an artist was willing to devote to devising paintings to fit a specific story.

While I don't think the WT covers of the time necessarily tied to the stories 100% of the time, I think they did more often than not still, particularly if they named a specific story on the cover.  One thing they changed with this specific issue (and then continued with going forward) was listing the verse in the table of contents mixed in with the stories, rather than listing the verse at the end of the ToC.  So "Hallowe'en in a Suburb" was at the top of the contents, not the bottom where it would have been in the previous issue.  For that matter, having a poem as the lead item wasn't typical either, although it wasn't unknown through the magazine's history either.

A quick check of tables of contents suggests that putting verse at the bottom of the ToC started in 1941, so they changed a pattern of over a decade standing here.

[RedFury]

On 3/21/2022 at 7:27 PM, OtherEric said:

Today's topic for discussion:  is the September 1952 Weird Tales a Lovecraft cover we've been ignoring for ages?  It's the more prominent of two pieces mentioned on the cover, somewhat unusually for a poem.  The cover and illustration for the poem are both by Finlay, and the cover seems to be a reasonable match to the poem. "And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,/ Sprung out of the tomb's black maw/ To shake all the world with awe."

Disclosure:  I've got a copy on the way, so I may be biased at this point.  The images are taken from online, not my scans:

I've looked at this before and wondered the same.  Before I thought it was inconclusive, but now I think the cover could be illustrating the third stanza.

And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail

[OtherEric]

At this point I'm prepared to say that it is a Lovecraft cover, unless somebody can present a counterargument:

1) The Lovecraft poem is the most prominently named piece on the cover.

2) Both the cover and the interior illustration are by the same artist, in this case Finlay.

3) There are at least two passages in the poem that could have inspired the cover.

4) The cover does not appear to illustrate another piece in the issue, and Weird Tales covers at this point were based on contents more often than not.

5) They changed how they handled verse in the Table of Contents in this issue from the system they had been using for over a decade, to allow the poem to be at the top of the ToC.

None of the points are conclusive in themselves, but they add up to a pretty solid case, I think.  The only real argument I can find against so far is that it hasn't been recognized as a Lovecraft cover for 70 years, and I'm prepared to put that down to it being a poem, not a story, so people didn't look at it as closely.

[Surfing Alien]

On 3/24/2022 at 3:19 PM, RedFury said:

And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail

^ This reads to me more like like the setting of the scene

On 3/21/2022 at 7:27 PM, OtherEric said:

"And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,/ Sprung out of the tomb's black maw/ To shake all the world with awe."

^ And this one the actual action of the cover because it sure looks like some dead sprung out of a tomb, leapin' and shakin' in the pallid ray of the moon to me...

And I re-read the St. Clair story - definitely not it (although an odd and fun little tale...)       my

 

[OtherEric]

Found at a local store today; the last volume (III) I needed.  First printing, even!

Now I need to decide if I want to go back next paycheck and grab the 1st printing of II; my copy of that is a 2nd.

[Surfing Alien]

On 4/23/2022 at 4:18 PM, OtherEric said:

Now I need to decide if I want to go back next paycheck and grab the 1st printing of II; my copy of that is a 2nd.

Congrats on completing those. I've watched you pick them up here and there. I would go for the first and sell the 2nd to defray the cost.

[IngelsFan]

No action since April for this thread!?! That just isn’t right…Here’s my latest pickup, and while it does have a poem by HPL, it is significant for a bigger contribution to the mythos. This is the first use of Unaussprechlichen Kulten by von Junzt in Robert E. Howard’s “The Children of the Night”.

[IngelsFan]

I realize this isn’t a pulp and will gladly take it down if y’all feel it doesn’t fit here, but this was the first mention of The Necronomicon in comics.

[RedFury]

I bought one of H.P. Lovecraft's letters at PulpFest and thought I'd share it here.  It was written to Clark Ashton Smith on November 4, 1925, is three pages long, and the original envelope was included.

There's a lot of great content in here, including specific mention of nearly a dozen of Lovecraft's stories accepted or rejected by Weird Tales, praise of Clark Ashton Smith's new poetry collection, Sandalwood, and mention of Frank Belknap Long possibly publishing a book of poetry, what would become A Man From Genoa.

But there's one cryptic allusion to story Lovecraft was about to begin work on, a "tale of a sunken continent". This, of course, is The Call of Cthulhu, which he had outlined in August 1925. From this letter is appears he planned to write the story the week of November 8, but in fact did not write it until nine months later, in August 1926. It was then rejected by Weird Tales in October 1926, and finally published there in the February 1928 issue.

Full text of the letter from as reprinted in Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill in photos.

[Cat-Man_America]

My two pulps with Lovecraft stories ...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away pulps in grade could actually be found on eBay!

[Sarg]

On 8/18/2022 at 6:32 PM, RedFury said:

I bought one of H.P. Lovecraft's letters at PulpFest and thought I'd share it here.  It was written to Clark Ashton Smith on November 4, 1925, is three pages long, and the original envelope was included.

There's a lot of great content in here, including specific mention of nearly a dozen of Lovecraft's stories accepted or rejected by Weird Tales, praise of Clark Ashton Smith's new poetry collection, Sandalwood, and mention of Frank Belknap Long possibly publishing a book of poetry, what would become A Man From Genoa.

But there's one cryptic allusion to story Lovecraft was about to begin work on, a "tale of a sunken continent". This, of course, is The Call of Cthulhu, which he had outlined in August 1925. From this letter is appears he planned to write the story the week of November 8, but in fact did not write it until nine months later, in August 1926. It was then rejected by Weird Tales in October 1926, and finally published there in the February 1928 issue.

Full text of the letter from as reprinted in Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill in photos.

I seem to recall S.T. Joshi, in his HPL bio, stating that his move back to Providence was so inspiring that he began writing great stuff like "Cthulhu." But this letter suggests he was writing one section of it while still in Brooklyn. 

[plady69]

My head spins when I get on the pulp chat board! Thanks for keeping them alive y’all!

[RedFury]

On 8/19/2022 at 8:20 PM, Sarg said:

I seem to recall S.T. Joshi, in his HPL bio, stating that his move back to Providence was so inspiring that he began writing great stuff like "Cthulhu." But this letter suggests he was writing one section of it while still in Brooklyn. 

I think he wrote the outline in Brooklyn, and then a year later wrote the story at 10 Barnes St in Providence.

[IngelsFan]

One of my favorite non-mythos short stories of HPL’s is “The Picture in the House”. I recently acquired the page that the narrator describes in the story. From Regnum Congo, this page is from the second German printing in 1609 with the illustration by Theodor de Bry. The speculation is that Lovecraft didn’t read the original, but rather the picture and description of it in Thomas Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. Either way, the illustration of the “cannibal market” is pretty graphic.

Edited October 15, 2022 by IngelsFan