11. See “The Dunwich Horror,” note 30, above.
12. The Herald and the Reformer have, respectively, the second- and third-largest circulations of Vermont newspapers and commenced publication in 1794 and 1876. In the 1920s, the Reformer’s circulation was probably around 2,500 copies daily; it grew to three times that by the 1950s and today is at about 6,700 print copies daily. The Herald, with a current print circulation of around 11,000 copies daily, went through a similar cycle. For comparison, the largest circulation today is that of the Burlington Free Press, about 28,500 daily.
13. Charles Edward Crane wrote the Pendrift column for the Brattleboro Reformer for many years. By 1931, when a collection of some forty columns was published under the title Pen-drift: Amenities of Column Conducting, by the Pendrifter, Crane had written over 1,200 columns, all signed “by tf.” The signature was indicative of Crane’s sense of humor; in newspaper shorthand, “tf” (“’til forbidden”) appeared at the bottom of advertisements that were to be printed until the advertiser ordered them discontinued.
14. Townshend, chartered in 1753, is seventeen miles north of Brattleboro, Vermont. It has about 1,200 residents.
15. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), English anthropologist, best known for his two-volume work Primitive Culture (1871) and for his enduring definition of the concept of culture.
16. Probably John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834–1913), who in 1865 published the influential Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, the leading archaeology textbook for half a century. He was a friend and correspondent—and pallbearer—of Darwin’s. A banker and a Liberal MP, the legislation he is chiefly remembered for sponsoring is the 1871 act that created bank holidays, informally known, at their inception, as St. Lubbock’s Days.
17. Undoubtedly Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), author of the celebrated The Golden Bough (1890).
18. Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810–1892), a French naturalist and head of the department of anthropology and ethnology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He wrote, among other works, The Pygmies (http://archive.org/stream/pygmiesquatr00quatrich/pygmiesquatr00quatrich_djvu.txt), a history of “the small black races” (vii)—copiously illustrated with photographs of skulls and bodies and attendant detailed measurements—from the time of Aristotle through the Hottentots and Bushmen.
19. Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963), a highly popular anthropologist-folklorist who received little esteem from the scientific community. Two of her areas of study were Egyptology and Wicca. See “The Call of Cthulhu,” note 18, above.
20. Probably Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), nephew of J. P. Morgan and son of the founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, an American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenicist, and the president of the American Museum of Natural History for twenty-five years. His selection as president marked the first time that a scientist had held the position. Prior to his tenure at the Museum of Natural History, he was vertebrate paleontologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Osborn was a highly controversial figure. He opposed Darwin’s theories regarding the descent of man, holding that humans had originated in Asia, not Africa; espoused radical views regarding eugenics; and urged immigration restrictions to maintain racial purity. Although he was enlisted by the defense team for the controversial Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 (Scopes was eventually convicted of teaching evolution contrary to Tennessee law), Osborn’s views were not unequivocally supportive of Scopes’s position, as Osborn attempted to explain how he believed evolution was the working out of God’s plans for creation. Lovecraft, who rejected traditional theism, criticized Osborn for what he called his “shoddy emotionalism and irresponsible irrationality” in trying to “capitalise the new uncertainty of everything in the interest of historical mythology” (Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long Jr., November 22, 1930 [Lovecraft sardonically dates it “1730”], Selected Letters, III, 225).
21. Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), a Scottish anatomist and anthropologist. Like Grafton Elliot Smith, he supported the view that humans were of European, not African, descent.
22. Likely Pierre-Marcellin Boule (1861–1942), French geologist, paleontologist, and physical anthropologist who made extensive studies of human fossils from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East and reconstructed the first more or less complete Neanderthal skeleton (1908), from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. His best-known work, published in 1921, is Les Hommes Fossiles (Fossil Men).
23. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937) was an Australian-British anatomist and the leading specialist of his day on the evolution of the brain.
24. The list seems a little too extensive to be true. Some of the scholars were little known at the time Akeley was in school (which must have been thirty to forty years earlier—that is, in the late nineteenth century). It sounds like he was seeking to impress Wilmarth with his up-to-dateness.
25. Presumably Black Mountain, in Windham County. Why would Akeley (or Wilmarth) conceal the name but record its proximity to Townshend?
26. The first recording machines came into use shortly after the phonograph, as early as 1881. In 1907, the Columbia Graphophone Company trademarked the name Dictaphone. Although music recordings soon evolved into flat discs, the wax cylinder (originally used for music as well) became the medium of choice for voice recording. In 1923, the Dictaphone Company Ltd. was formed to sell the devices exclusively.
27. “Out of nothing comes nothing,” a phrase associated first with ancient Greek cosmology and today echoed in the laws of conservation of mass and energy. Here Akeley really means something folksier, like “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
28. Later identified as the planet Pluto, Yuggoth was also named in Lovecraft’s poetry cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (1929–1930). In a letter to Duane Rimel (February 14, 1934, Selected Letters, IV, 385–388), Lovecraft wrote, “‘Yuggoth’ has a sort of Arabic or Hebraic cast, to suggest certain words passed down from antiquity in the magical formulæ contained in Moorish and Jewish manuscripts. . . . ‘Nug’ and ‘Yeb’ suggest the dark and mysterious tone of Tartar or Thibetan folklore. . . . I try to represent the different variants under which different races refer to the same thing as remembered from primitive times. . . . Thus, I have had Yog-Sothoth occur . . . as Yog-Sototl among the Aztecs. . . .”
29. An “amorphous, toad-like god-creature,” according to a description later in the tale.
30. The “monstrous nuclear chaos” personified, as described below in this story.
31. Hastur is a person, not a place, first mentioned by Ambrose Bierce in his 1891 story “Haita the Shepherd” as a god of the shepherds. Robert W. Chambers also mentions Hastur, in The King in Yellow (see note 36, below), and lists the name among constellations as well: “. . . the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldeberan. . . .”
32. Yian is first mentioned in Robert Chambers’s The Maker of Moons (1896): “‘Where is Yian, Ysonde?’ I asked with deadly calmness. ‘Yian? I don’t know. . . . It is across seven oceans and the great river which is longer than from the earth to the moon.’”
33. See “The Hound,” note 13, above.
34. The city of Carcosa, which figures in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1891) and Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895) (see note 36, below), is said to be found on the shore of Lake Hali. Marco Frenschkowski, in “Hali,” devotes enormous energy to identifying Arabian scholars and mystics named Hali and wonders why it is a lake. However, the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.), undoubtedly familiar to Lovecraft, lists Hali as a town shown on a map of Arabia. It is southeast of Mecca, in the mountains west of the Dahna Desert. Neither the map nor Google Earth reveals whether there is a lake nearby, but Wadi Hali (“wadi” means a riverbed or water basin that is dry except when rain falls) is not distant.
35. A fabled city mentioned in a 1908 story of the same name by Lord Dunsany.
36. From a story of the same name by Robert C
hambers. The story first appeared in The King in Yellow. The king is an evil figure who exercises mind control over his victims, who are identified by their association with the Yellow Sign (which in itself may control the victim). August Derleth, who developed the Cthulhu Mythos far beyond Lovecraft’s plan, identified Hastur as the Yellow King and the Yellow Sign as a mark of his followers. Lovecraft had several collections of Chambers’s work in his library, including this book.
37. Kathulos was a wizard who appeared in some of Robert E. Howard’s tales. Howard was a friend of Lovecraft’s and the creator of Conan the Barbarian. “L’mur” as a prefix may connect Kathulos to Lemuria.
38. This appears to be a reference to Bran Mak Morn, an ancient Scottish warrior whose accounts were compiled by Robert E. Howard. Bran was also an ancient British-Celtic-Welsh giant who possessed a magic cauldron with the power to restore life to dead soldiers.
39. Latin for “The Great One Who Is Not to Be Named.”
40. The search for a planet beyond Neptune began with the theories of astronomer Percival Lowell, who argued that, based on his study of the motions of Uranus and Neptune, such a body existed. Lowell funded three searches for “Planet X” and set up the Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona. While the first two searches turned up nothing, in 1929, a young man named Clyde Tombaugh was engaged to assist in the endeavor. Tombaugh has been described as a “farm boy,” and indeed his family had seen its share of successes and setbacks on their farm in Burdett, Kansas, including a hailstorm in the mid-1920s that wiped out their crops, subsequent financial losses preventing Tombaugh from attending college as planned. He had built a nine-inch telescope by the age of twenty-two, for which he himself ground the mirrors. His sketches of Jupiter and Mars, drawn on the basis of images captured through the use of this homemade telescope, brought him to Lowell, where, using two specialized instruments, a thirteen-inch astrograph and a blink comparator, he surveyed the skies by taking photographs at intervals of one to two weeks and looked for the shifting of objects against the star fields. On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching,
the 24-year-old Tombaugh was gazing into the eyepiece of a Zeiss Blink microscope at photographic images of a star field, examining a pair of plates taken in mid-January. Suddenly the monotony was broken when his attention was caught by one of the millions of minute specks of lights whose image had moved slightly between one photograph and the next. He checked and rechecked his photographs for 45 minutes before calling his supervisors. He knew he had found Planet X (Kansas Historical Society, http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/clyde-tombaugh/12222).
A few weeks later, after an international hunt for an appropriate name, Pluto was christened by the Lowell Observatory. Note that Lovecraft worked on “The Whisperer in Darkness” between February and September 1930.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union established new criteria for planets and downgraded Pluto to the status of “dwarf planet,” distinguished from “regular” planets. After much public outcry and debate, the category was revised to “plutoid” but still distinguished from other solar planets. Nonetheless, the states of New Mexico and Illinois, proud of the Lowell Observatory and Illini Tombaugh, respectively, declared that Pluto would remain a planet when in the skies of those states.
41. While Himalayan peaks in India and the former USSR were scaled in the 1930s by Westerners, the principal Himalayan mountains were not ascended until the mid-1950s. Wilmarth’s concern was undoubtedly fueled by exploratory missions such as the Everest reconnaissance expedition reported in Howard-Bury’s book (note 9, above).
42. A town in southern Vermont bounded by the upper Connecticut River.
Newfane, Vermont, ca. 1909.
43. About fifteen miles northwest of Brattleboro.
44. Part of Londonderry, a small village about thirty miles northwest of Brattleboro. Why the narrator did not mention Putney or Jamaica, closer to Townshend than Londonderry, is unclear.
45. Robert H. Waugh, in “The Ecstasies of ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ . . . and Other Erotic Studies,” from his collection A Monster of Voices: Speaking for H. P. Lovecraft, points out, “For a New Englander that might as well be across the universe” (10A).
46. The reference to the “waxen mask and the robe that hides” may refer to the garments found by Wilmarth in the study during his escape. See note 77, below.
47. In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate & Film Company, headquartered in Rochester, New York, introduced its first camera, known simply as the Kodak Camera. (Kodak, despite its Slavic echoes, was a trade name invented by George Eastman.) Its marketing slogan was “You press the button—we do the rest.” To make good this boast, the camera was preloaded with enough film for one hundred exposures. When the film was exposed, the entire camera had to be sent back to the manufacturer, which then developed the pictures and reloaded the camera.
The price of the first camera was $25, and the cost to develop the film was $10. In modern purchasing power, this was over $1,700 for the camera and $680 for development of the pictures. However, by 1891, Eastman had introduced less expensive models (costing as little as $6), and, with the introduction of a pocket model in 1895 for $5, the cameras began to be affordable for the masses. The price of a Kodak “Brownie” camera, made mostly of cardboard, was only $1 in 1900. By the early 1920s, Kodak was offering more sophisticated cameras as well; the “autographic” series, which allowed the user to write on the negative, sold for $20 and up. In 1923, Kodak made amateur motion pictures practicable as well, and Kodak processing laboratories proliferated.
48. The new moon occurred on July 17, 1928, so that a “moonless night” in the second week of July is accurate.
49. The moon was indeed full on August 31, 1928.
50. “Rural Free Delivery” was the extension of the postal system in 1891, providing for delivery of letters to addresses even in remote rural areas, replacing the system that required the addressee to pick up the letters at an often distant post office.
51. Not surprisingly, a fictitious address in San Diego.
52. This is a significant clue in “A Case of Identity,” an early Sherlock Holmes tale well known to Lovecraft (but apparently not to Wilmarth).
53. This theme is used to great effect in the charming 1950 tale “To Serve Man,” by Damon Knight, later a Twilight Zone episode (1962), in which the title of an alien book thought to express means to aid humankind is revealed to be a cookbook.
54. That is, fungi with an axis containing vascular tissue and foliage. There are estimated to be over 1.5 million species of fungi, and the classifications have changed markedly since the 1930s. Indeed, the division of plants into cormophytes (mosses, ferns, seed plants) and thallophytes (algae, fungi, lichens), established by the Austrian botanist, writer, literary scholar, and linguist Stephan Endlicher (1804–1849), is obsolete.
55. Daylight saving time, now a matter of federal legislation, was in 1927 still a matter of some controversy and largely local option. Farmers generally opposed the idea as antithetical to their natural work schedule.
56. The principal “legend” relating to Wantastiquet (the Indian name for West River, as the mountain was originally called by white settlers) is that the mountain is a dormant volcano, with activity reported in the 1870s. Investigations by geologists have demonstrated that this is not so; that the loud “explosions” heard by local residents from time to time are the sound of large chunks of the mountain breaking off and falling, and that the detritus identified as material put forth by the “volcano” is in fact Umbilicaria (a lichen) and brown hematite (a mineral), not matter ejected by a volcanic explosion. While Wantastiquet may be an extinct volcano, there is no evidence of any activity in more than two hundred years.
57. The Sacred Cod is a memorial to the importance of the cod fisheries of Massachusetts and hangs in the Hall of Representatives, where it was transferred from the Old State House. The sign is of pine and was made in 1784 to replace one destroyed by fire in the
Old State House.
58. Population in the 1930 census was 662.
59. Il Sodoma (1477–1549), more formally the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (or Razzi). Some scholars assert that his family name was Sodona (as some of his paintings are signed) or Sodoma. The judgment of the British National Gallery on his art is that it has a “slightly provincial but vigorous air.” Sodoma’s work was grounded in that of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian tempera painters who broke away from medieval techniques and subjects and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519).
St. Sebastian by Il Sodoma (1525).
60. A collection or aggregation.
61. By “beef-eater,” the narrator here simply means an Englishman, not necessarily one of the yeomen of the traditional queen’s guards. He conjures the stereotypical image of an old English clubman who suffers from gout, a painful arthritic disease that creates severe swelling of joints, once thought to be the result of eating too much red meat (the “rich man’s disease”).
62. These underground lands are described in detail in Zealia Bishop’s “The Mound,” which was extensively revised by Lovecraft in 1929–1930—almost to the point of ghostwriting—but not published until 1940 (in an abbreviated version) and finally published in its full version in 1989. The realm is actually located under Oklahoma.
63. The Manuscripts (also referred to as the Pnakotic Fragments) are mentioned in a number of other tales by Lovecraft: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, At the Mountains of Madness (1936; here, below), “Polaris” (1920), “The Other Gods” (1933), and “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936; here, below). These sacred texts predate the Necronomicon, written in the eighth century. In a letter to William Lumley (May 12, 1931, Selected Letters, III, 372–73), Lovecraft described them as “the work of the ‘Elder Ones,’ preceding the human race on this planet, and handed down through an early human civilisation which once existed around the north pole. . . .” In another letter, this one in 1936, Lovecraft wrote,
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