[The Shadow over Innsmouth.] Original Leaf from the Typescript Setting Copy

Lovecraft, H.P.

Published by [N.p., Providence, 1932

Published in book form November 1936. This item docketed no. 24 of 43 examples in printed note on added title page. Carbon typescript, 1 p., numbered 24 at head, 30 lines, approx. 300 words. 1 vols. 4to. A choice leaf from the setting copy of The Shadow over Innsmouth, the only book published and distributed during Lovecraft s lifetime. This passage sees the narrator, Robert Olmstead, a young man on a low-budget antiquarian tour of ancestral New England, begin his "systematic, though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth s narrow, shadow-blighted ways". It is an entirely descriptive page, first impressions of the decayed architecture of the town, reading in part: [… turning toward the roar] of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed oddly free from the noise of industry. […] Collapsing huddles of gambrel houses formed a jagged and fantastic skyline […] Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous an incredible angles through the sinking of parts of the foundations. These windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Lovecraft wrote The Shadow over Innsmouth in November and December 1931 and August Derleth sent it (without Lovecraft s knowedge) to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, who was beguiled but ultimately rejected it on acount of its length. It was issued in book form late in 1936 by William Crawford in an edition of 200 copies with the imprint of his Visionary Publishing Company. It was Lovecraft s only published book. Paul Cook s printing of The Shunned House in 1928 was never distributed outside Lovecraft s immediate circle, and Supernatural Horror in Literature, his great throwaway essay, appeared in its earliest form in Cook s fine press literary journal, The Recluse, in 1927, and in later form in issues of a fanzine. All three of these works were collected in the posthumous Arkham House collection, The Outsider and Others (1939). A typescript comprising a title page and 72 pages, prepared in January 1932, is preserved at Brown (Accession number Accession A18764), and this leaf of carbon typescript, bearing no editorial markings, corresponds to page 24 of the Brown typescript (https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:735148/); the Crawford edition was notoriously riddled with typesetting errors. Specialist bookseller/printer Roy Squires presented surviving pages of the carbon typescript in his elegant folders (as here). The only example recorded at auction was lot 214 in the Richard Manney sale (Sotheby s 11 October 1991), accompanying a presentation copy of The Shadow over Innsmouth inscribed by Lovecraft to his friend and fellow author Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft adored the colonial architecture of New England and it enriched his writings fiction, travelogues, and letters and nowhere more centrally than in The Shadow over Innsmouth. A NOTABLE SURVIVAL. see H. P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America), pp. 608-9. Provenance: Roy Squires; Peter H. Cannon Some toning as usual, right hand margin with some wear. In conservation folder, stiff paper with printed label Carbon typescript, 1 p., numbered 24 at head, 30 lines, approx. 300 words. 1 vols. 4to Published in book form November 1936. This item docketed no. 24 of 43 examples in printed note on added title page. Seller Inventory # 369360

Bibliographic Details

Title: [The Shadow over Innsmouth.] Original Leaf ...
Publisher: [N.p., Providence
Publication Date: 1932
Signed: Signed by Author(s)