Review: Lovecraft's Library

By William P. Simmons

Review by Henry Wessells in New York Review Of Science Fiction

Turning now to Lovecraft's Library, the library catalogue has an entirely different history as a genre and demands a different set of measures. To attempt to understand the mind of the writer through the books on the shelves is as old as Montaigne's marginalia and no doubt much older; it is also, instinctively and spontaneously, one of the first things anyone does in entering a room of books. There are lists of books compiled by living authors, the auction catalogues when their libraries are sold (before or after death), and variations on these forms. Swift's own lists and library catalogue have fascinated scholars for decades and are the subject of a new massive four-volume compendium; in more recent times, the Peter Hopkirk sale (Sotheby's, 1998) of central Asian travel literature was the reference library that the author of Quest for Kim, The Great Game, etc., had collected when no one else was interested in such books. The list is nearly infinite Johnson, Dickens, Moskowitz . . . .

Lovecraft's Library is an expanded revision of the 1980 compilation by Joshi and Marc Michaud. Michaud was founder of the Necronomicon Press where the first seeds of Lovecraft studies were sown; the press seems to have fallen dormant after a last, excellent crop: Joshi's exhaustive Life (1996) and the collection Mosig at Last, gathering the pioneering and still compelling essays of Dirk W. Mosig (1997).

Even though the mainstreaming of Lovecraft proceeds apace, the grassroots activity is greener than you know. Hippocampus Press publisher Derrick Hussey seems to have stepped in to fill the small void created by Michaud's inactivity. The improved production values and general legibility of the new edition of Lovecraft's Library (hereafter LL) reflect a different, post-mimeograph aesthetic as well as advances in publishing technology.

The first edition of LL (including the fugitive Addendum #2) listed about 930 items, mainly from a handwritten inventory of books prepared after Lovecraft's death, with the briefest of annotations (principally citations to the Letters or collections of stories. The new edition has added more than 50 new titles and the annotations are more substantial, identifying the basis for inclusion (the Mary Spink inventory list and those prepared by Lovecraft and his literary executor Robert Barlow, a few booksellers' catalogues). For inscribed copies or books bearing Lovecraft's ownership marks, Joshi indicates when the book survives and has been examined by him.

LL is of interest for a variety of reasons and in different ways. What reader could fail to be moved by LL 443, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), inscribed by the author: "To my friend Howard Lovecraft, Best Wishes, Houdini, 'My brain is the key that sets me free.'"

To leaf through the book is to find that Lovecraft's fascination with the eighteenth century was indeed rooted in family copies of books from that period, both major and minor. There are turgid volumes of miscellaneous verse and books of rhetoric at every turn. So, too, there are enough astronomy books to see how the youthful Lovecraft turned his gaze to the stars. From an antiquarian perspective, the single most valuable book in his library was certainly LL 598, a first edition of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England . . . (London, 1702), "the most famous American book of colonial times and the indispensable source for colonial social history" (Streeter 658).

But Lovecraft read all manner of literature, from Walter Scott to Frederick Rolfe to LL 954, the Modern Library Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose of Oscar Wilde (1918). Joshi notes that Colin Wilson considered "The Birthday of the Infanta" to be an influence of "The Outsider" (composed in the summer of 1921). From his satire of T. S. Eliot, "Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance," it is evident that Lovecraft read "The Waste Land" in The Dial for November 1922, which figures as LL 238. (Lord Alfred Douglas, on the other hand, despised "that impudent jackass" sufficiently to scrawl his verdict in a copy of Eliot's Collected Poems.) The range of Lovecraft's reading of contemporary and near contemporary anthologies and short story collections is impressive and fully documented here.

Lovecraft's library was his gateway to the infinite universe. In terms of usefulness, importance of content, and concision of relevant detail, LL is a successful reference book, genuinely improved in this new edition.

Of all the millions of words Joshi has published about Lovecraft, the single most interesting passage for this reader remains the annotation of LL 400, The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories (1909), a ten-volume anthology edited by Julian Hawthorne (son of that Hawthorne). The books are small drab things, easily overlooked on the shelves of a used book store or library book sale (where they are usually encountered lacking one or more volumes), but the contents are not to be dismissed.

Joshi's annotation to The Lock and Key Library cites the specific stories in these books that figure in Lovecraft's essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, first published in LL 723, The Recluse (1927). In essence a roadmap of the essay, LL 400 sheds light on the essay's strengths and clarifies its sometimes curious omissions. It is no exaggeration to say that Lovecraft essentially defined a new genre and a new way of looking at literature through his careful selection from these volumes. Until that act, the stories were viewed as a subset of the mystery field; but to paraphrase Borges in "Kafka and His Predecessors," it is no longer possible to do so. Lovecraft was not the first nor the only critic to point to supernatural aspects of literature, but the impact of Dorothy Scarborough's The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) is minuscule -- within the genre or without -- in comparison to that of Lovecraft's book. LL 400 is where it started.

Joshi also cites the relevant portions of Lovecraft's correspondence to demonstrate that Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic, Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), was known only from the excerpt "Wieland's Madness" in this anthology. Sometimes the Recluse of Providence just couldn't be bothered to track down the original or complete text.

So, two reference works on Lovecraft, the Encyclopedia nearly essential, if flawed; and Lovecraft's Library indispensable and of even greater interest. And today, in the earliest days of 2004, the milestones of canonical acceptance -- The Norton Critical Edition of H. P. Lovecraft! The Cambridge Lovecraft! -- to which I alluded in jest in these pages (in a review of the Joyce Carol Oates Lovecraft in 1997) no longer seem so distant.