“A Glimpse of H. P. L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana

Sensible of the slowness with which the Old Corner turns over its stock, (they still have a 2-volume Gay’s Poems which they had years ago on Empire St.!) I cashed your money order & sailed confidently in—but lo! The daemon-book had performed an incantation on itself, & evaporated like a puff of smoke into the sinister & tenebrous aether! In other words, it wasn’t there—& just as I was looking forward to a free reading of it before mailing it on to you! Damn sorry—but Fate is Fate. And to think that it still remained on shelves till only a little while ago! Well—one may only shrug one’s shoulders philosphically & make the best of it. Here’s the $3.25.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, 28 Sep 1926, Letters to Wilfred B. Talman 44

The book was probably A. E. Waite’s The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts; the bookshop was the Old Corner Bookshop, formerly of 77 Empire Street and then on 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, R. I. Lovecraft browsed their wares for well over a decade, perhaps two, and no doubt the proprietor sold him many a volume—little knowing that those selfsame books might come back to him one day.

According to some letters, at the time of his death in 1937, H. P. Lovecraft’s library consisted of up to ~2,500 books. At the time, believing she might need to sell some of the books, his aunt Annie Gamwell asked a neighbor Mary Spinks to catalogue the collection; this partial and not always accurate list covers part of the books Lovecraft owned. R. H. Barlow, the executor of Lovecraft’s estate, was given the pick of some. Others may have been sold or dispersed. Sometime after Annie Gamwell’s death in 1941, a large portion of Lovecraft’s library—and, apparently, manuscripts and some of his knick-knacks—were purchased by H. Douglass Dana of the Old Corner Bookshop. Some of these were eventually sold to the John Hay Library to become part of their Lovecraft collection:

…but for a while there were books from Lovecraft’s library available for general sale.

Imagine Providence in 1945. The war was over, or almost would be. Word had got out that the bookstore had purchased what remained of Lovecraft’s library, and two fantasy fans converged like ghouls to an unopened grave. Donald M. Grant had just graduated high school; Thomas P. Hadley was a few years older. Together, they quickly decided to produce a tribute chapbook to H. P. Lovecraft: Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) was published by Grant-Hadley Enterprises, with a second edition issued in December. The partnership wouldn’t last—Grant was drafted near the end of 1945—but both Grant and Hadley would go on to make their mark on fantasy publishing in various ventures.

That is the legend. I’ve yet to find a direct account from Hadley or Grant on how they met or decided on their subject. The earliest I’ve been able to trace the story is Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era (1983) by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. But the timing is more or less right. H. Douglass Dana had been selling used books in Providence, R.I. since 1910; Lovecraft used to frequent the Old Corner Bookstore, and mentions it in his letters. Dana’s bookstore was noted for periodic disasters: hurricanes flooded the shop in 1938, 1944, and 1954, and after every wave of destruction would require fresh stock.

It would explain why there’s a memoir from Mary V. Dana.

Mary Van Meter was born in 1909. The 1930 Federal census lists her profession as salesperson at a bookstore. By the 1940 Federal census, she had married Herbert Douglass Dana, and was definitely helping him run the Old Corner Bookstore. Her memoir of Lovecraft is probably the weakest entry in the bunch—how much might any bookseller remember a single, occasional customer?—but we can actually time this memoir fairly specifically:

Though the shop was then at the foot of his street and he came in occasionally, we rarely exchanged a word or even knew his identity until the summer of 1936. […] We met at that time a young booklover, R. H. Barlow by name, who became badly smitten, biblimanically speaking, with a little set of books we had. He was visiting an uncle, whom he mentioned with such enthusiastic admiration and affection, describing him as an author and scholar of rare erudition, that he aroused our curiosity. He kept popping in practically every day of his visit to look at this set, trying to calm his conscience or squeeze his pocketbook. Finally, he decided to have his uncle lend his approval to fortify his own.
—Mary V. Sana, “A Glimpse of H. P. L.” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft 25

The “uncle” was Lovecraft; Grant and Hadley either didn’t know better or didn’t care to correct her on that point. Barlow visited Lovecraft in Providence from 28 July—1 September 1936 (O Fortunate Floridian xvii; for more on Barlow and Lovecraft, see Adventurous Liberation: Lovecraft in Florida), so the dates work out. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of new material on Lovecraft, otherwise. The one cogent observation Mary Dana made was:

In fact, the only thing we remembered about him up to that time was the fact that he often had a copy of Weird Tales or similar magazine under his arm, and once spoke with distaste of their lurid covers.
—Mary V. Sana, “A Glimpse of H. P. L.” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft 25

As an anecdote, this should be taken with a grain of salt, though it isn’t out of keeping with some of Lovecraft’s comments about Weird Tales covers in his letters. A comment similar to this may have been the origin of a particularly long-lived Lovecraftian legend:

[Lovecraft] was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing. When he bought pulps at Douglass Dana’s Old Corner Book Store, at the foot of College Street, he tore off the more lurid covers lest friends misunderstand his interests.
—Winfield Townley Scott, “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944) from Exiles and Fabrications 71

There is no physical proof of this, or mention of such a practice in Lovecraft’s letters, but the Danas would seem to be a likely source for such an anecdote. It is ironic that Mary V. Dana remembered Barlow so vividly, a decade later. In 1951 catalogue, the Danas advertised for sale the books from Lovecraft’s library that Barlow had inherited (see The Man Who Collected Lovecraft), which they purchased after Barlow’s death.

There is one other important contribution that the Danas made to Rhode Island on Lovecraft. The book was “illustrated by Betty Wells Halladay from objects owned by H. Douglass Dana and the John Hay Library.” Halladay was then 15 years old and attending Hope High School in Providence; the drawings also appeared in a newspaper article that ran in the Providence Journal for 11 Nov 1945—with the added caption:

These drawings present objects from Lovecraft’s collection of oddities, items that he inherited, picked up on his travels, or was gifted by friends. While there are clues in Lovecraft’s letters that might help us identify some of these items, any such effort would be speculative. Is that stone head the Nameless Eikon that Clark Ashton Smith sent H. P. Lovecraft from California? Or the Cthulhoid effigy the horror in clay made for him by R. H. Barlow? Is that clay humanoid figure a gift from Stuart M. Boland or Samuel Loveman? Did Lovecraft pick up the Egyptian seal and scarab from some museum trip? We really don’t know. Some of them may yet reside at the John Hay Library, and perhaps there are answers there. For now, we can only say there were one more contribution that the Old Corner Bookshop made to preserving (and dispersing) Lovecraft’s legacy.

“A Glimpse of H. P. L.” was first published in Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945) and the second edition; it was subsequently reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998) and Ave Atque Vale (2018). It has also been translated into German by Malte S. Sembten for Namenlose Kulte (2006).

Rhode Island on Lovecraft can be read for free at the Internet Archive.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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