I’m pleased to learn that a new postcard has been discovered. Sent by Lovecraft, it shows the quarry that Lovecraft owned at Manton (Dyerville, Rhode Island). The card was unearthed here in the UK. It had of course long been known that Lovecraft had corresponded with certain British amateurs during the First World War, since he talks of…
the letters I used to receive from the British amateurs during the war, with their stickers of government censorship & their occasional salty marks of oceanick mishaps.” (Letters to Alfred Galpin)
As will be documented in a forthcoming issue of The Fossil, this led a Vermont Lovecraftian named Iram H. Gudby Jr. to a small cache of amateur journalism material here in the Midlands of England, and from there to the family of a Mrs. Trellis — once an amateur journalist and owner of the farm estate formerly centered on Bunker Grove, Burslem, Staffordshire. This lady was just the once described by Lovecraft in his letters, as…
from England — solid, precise, fastidiously conscientious yeoman stock — a faded, gentle-mannered soul whose quaint, innately well-bred ways cause her to be greatly liked by all her tenants.
Lovecraft’s 1917 postcard had long ago been used as a bookmark in one of her 1920s romance novels, then long forgotten and the book inherited and left unopened by her family until last year. The card was found to be in excellent condition, and its text by Lovecraft has now been kindly transcribed by Gudby. It is here made public for the first time…
A belated roll of the drums sent ‘cross the monstrous dark Ocean! I trust that the small-pane’d windows of Burslem do not tremble before the approaching engines of Graf von Zeppelin! If it be so then but wave this monstrous postal toward the pestiferous skies. The Hun shall forthwith spy the monstrosity there shewn, and depart in horror at the sight! Some peasant tenantry have furnished me with this pictorial of mine own real estate, a quarry known as the ‘Providence Crushed Stone and Sand Co.’ An abnormally proportioned outcropping is there newly cut from the bedrock, and the clever ciceroni of my Italian tenant impound a nickel from any visitor inclined to gaze upon That Which Is Revealed. There is some doubt about the quantity of creative intellect present, and an unfortunate sedition now thrives among a legion of doubters. Some of whom even link That Which Is Revealed with myself, as a person known in these Plantations to be one of archaistic passion joined to a fantastic imagination. I shun all such plebeian aspersions, and hold That to be a thing truly dug from a shuddering aeon of primal horror and a terrible survivor of some unknown elder age. As usual I send fraternal greetings o’er the water to Katak the Mighty and also to any other massive mammalia who may now prowl the verdant verges of Bunker Grove! — — Howard P. Lovecraft, gent. of Providence Plantations, R.I., Loyal Subject and Humble Akarton of His Britannick Majesty.
My thanks to Iram H. Gudby Jr. for his generosity. Gudby is now planning to collaborate with S.P. Gourdbob on a book about the scintillating new discovery.