The FP of H.P. Lovecraft

[Polyhistor]

Hello FP enthusiasts!

 

After only reading the forums for a while (and thus learning many things I didn´t know till now, what an incredible knowledge base this place is! ) I´ve decided it´s time for me to take one step forward and register.

 

Some words about me: I´m 23 years old and have always loved writing with FPs, but switched to ballpoint pens some years ago. After discovering that my already bad handwriting had turned into something that I not even I could decipher anymore, I decided I´d go back to FPs about two years ago, starting with an old Pilot model I still had lying around from my childhood days. My handwriting has improved considerably and my little collection includes a Pelikan M200 (my daily companion) and some others I´ve bought or rescued from various garbage cans (a Rotring 600, Parker 45, two Élysees...).

 

 

But let´s get to the point now, shall we?

 

 

Since I turned twelve or thirteen I´ve always been a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft (for those of you who don´t know about him, here´s a good source of information: The HP Lovecraft Archive); I first was drawn into those weird stories of his and later got more and more interested in the man himself and his time, i.e. mainly the 20s and 30s.

 

So my question is, does anyone have any clue of what model/brand FP he used or could have used, being a relatively poor (and extremely conservative and old fashioned) guy in the 1920s/30s.

Being a (more or less professional) writer, he might as well have owned something a little bit more upmarket, it´s at least a possibility that just crossed my mind...

 

 

Thank you!

(and please excuse my English, I´m a bit out of practice )

[Dan Carmell]

Just speculation, here, but wasn't he is Massachusetts? In that case, he might have used the home town brand, a Moore pen. But in my mind's eye, I can easily see him with a big black hard rubber Waterman of that era!

 

best, Dan

[RichardS]

I've always admired HP Lovecraft's work - even when, as an impressionable 12-year-old I read his short story "The Rats in the Walls" before going to bed. No sleep that night at all!

 

I'd imagine him with a Mabie Todd Blackbird - less expensive than the Swan brand, and more appropriate in colour and imagery as a bird!

[Polyhistor]

Just speculation, here, but wasn't he is Massachusetts? In that case, he might have used the home town brand, a Moore pen. But in my mind's eye, I can easily see him with a big black hard rubber Waterman of that era!

 

best, Dan

Hi Dan,

 

thanks for the quick reply!

 

It was Rhode Island where he was born and spent most of his life, but since he often went on trips to Boston your suggestion sounds very plausible, I´ll definitely take a look at these Moore pens!

And I´ll have to do some research on older Waterman pens as well. Do you happen to know how common they were back then?

 

Regards, AD

[Polyhistor]

I've always admired HP Lovecraft's work - even when, as an impressionable 12-year-old I read his short story "The Rats in the Walls" before going to bed. No sleep that night at all!

 

I'd imagine him with a Mabie Todd Blackbird - less expensive than the Swan brand, and more appropriate in colour and imagery as a bird!

I was about the same age, when I discovered him. Back then I lived in an old (at least 18th century) house, my room was right under the roof, next to the dark and roomy attic with its naked stone walls, real stones, not bricks. Locked my door on more than one night. But it was the perfect place to read Lovecraft in the dim light of a candle.

 

"The Rats in the Walls" is a favourite of mine till this day, along with "Call of Cthulhu" and many others.

 

I´ll be sure to have a look at these makes and models!

I think the Blackbird would have fit Lovecraft´s sense of dark humor perfectly - while a Swan surely would have evoked inside him the (mildly erotic, nothing for the "puritan" HPL) antique Legend of Leda and the Swan...

 

Regards, AD

[Dan Carmell]

At that time, Waterman was still a market leader, although slowly losing out in the late 20s and into the 30s to Sheaffer and Parker. I think a conservative type still would have stuck to their HR pen!

 

Dan

[BillTheEditor]

Since I turned twelve or thirteen I´ve always been a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft ...

 

So my question is, does anyone have any clue of what model/brand FP he used or could have used, being a relatively poor (and extremely conservative and old fashioned) guy in the 1920s/30s.

Why do you think he used a fountain pen? Given the day, he may well have used a dip pen or pencil (Hemingway used pencils, as I recall). He might also have banged stuff out on a typewriter.

 

If it was a fountain pen, my guess is that it would have been a Conklin.

 

Edited to add this, found at http://www.eldritchdark.com/misc/such_pulp...re_made_on.html :

 

"Whipped on by some inner compulsion to write, Howard Lovecraft passed most of the forty-seven years of his life in an old Georgian house in Providence, Rhode Island, timorously shunning all rough-and-ready contacts with the workaday world. At an early age, through the medium of his own microscopic calligraphy, he began to create his own subjective universe. This imagined cosmos was peopled with ghouls and demons, primordial creatures of Manichean evil surviving from prehistory, or super- cosmic Titans ready to take possession of the human race at some unguarded moment. Lovecraft spun his own endless filature of ink as an armour against the external. He communicated with other sympathetic minds through the medium of letters. With more than two hundred unseen friends he corresponded regularly-- letters of forty, sixty, or seventy sheets of standard typewriter size, covered on both sides with spidery penmanship. Some of these letters grew longer than a full-length novel, bulking from fifty to one hundred thousand words."

 

So -- he probably did not use a typewriter, certainly not for all those letters. Considering his poverty, my suspicion is even stronger that he probably used a dip pen.

Edited May 25, 2006 by BillTheEditor

[JRodriguez]

I don't really have much to add - other than to say that Waterman pens were very common - but I love the conversation!

[Johnny Appleseed]

Were he relatively poor, and if he did use a fountain pen, I would suspect it would not be a Waterman but one of the many 2nd-tier or no-name brands available at the time. Perhaps he had a Remax or one of the lower-priced Waterman sub-brands.

 

John

[antoniosz]

My guess is that a poor person would not use a fountain pen but a dip pen during that period of time...

[RLTodd]

My guess is that a poor person would not use a fountain pen but a dip pen during that period of time...

Considering the poor state of his income for the time he did most of his writing that sounds like a sound conclusion. If he had fountain pens they would probably be the least expensive things available.

 

There is always this point to consider. If you look at human behavior, most people ( and by that I mean almost all people ) then as now do not buy expensive writing instruments.

[BillTheEditor]

Did a little more research on this (can't help it, I'm a writer and an editor, and I'm a sucker for a good question).

 

Lovecraft lived in relative poverty from his mid-teens until the end of his life. He was very poor at the time of his death from intestinal cancer, and lived with his aunts after his mother passed away. He managed to make a poverty-level income by selling his stories to Weird Tales, and also wrote a column on astronomy.

 

I found information that at least one of his story manuscripts, now in the possession of Brown University in Providence, was written in pencil in a child's notebook (see http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University...Lovecraft.html).

 

Another site (http://www.sfsite.com/06b/so130.htm) has this to say about the same manuscript:

 

"Often cited as pulp horror master H.P. Lovecraft's last major story (and some would argue, his greatest) The Shadow Out of Time has never been published as Lovecraft originally intended, until now. The introduction, by editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, details the story's difficult path from conception to publication. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, Lovecraft's confidence was so poor at the time that he refused to type a draft of the manuscript. That task fell to 17 year-old weird fiction fanboy R.H. Barlow, who, despite a sincere effort, inevitably made mistakes transcribing Lovecraft's barely legible handwriting. Lovecraft's original manuscript was lost until 1995; the rediscovered manuscript serves as the foundation of this corrected version. "

 

Apparently, the John Hay Library at Brown University has all of Lovecraft's manuscripts, so if anyone has a contact there maybe you could ask whether the manuscripts are in pencil, pen, or typewritten. If he did use a pen, it's very possible that the library has the pen itself. There is another Lovecraft collection at Northern Illinois University.

 

Knowing the way that many writers work even today, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Lovecraft wrote his original manuscripts in pencil in those children's notebooks, and that he typed up some of them, but not all. I still doubt very much whether he used a fountain pen, and I'm beginning to doubt that he used a dip pen much for his manuscripts. ALTHOUGH, you can see a specimen of his signature from 1919 or 1920 at http://www.biblio.com/books/3621181.html and it certainly appears to be in ink (given the date, I feel safe in saying that it's done with a dip pen). The signature is on the back of a book club order form, where he also wrote out his poem "Despair" -- which had already been published, so this was something he did for someone who asked for a copy of the poem, rather than a draft.

 

That's all the research I'm doing tonight!

[FrankB]

Wow, BillTheEditor, that's really good job of research.

 

My mother and her surviving siblings are all in their 80's. They grew up poor in rural Pennsylvania in a large family in the 1920's through the 1940's. The usual mode of writing in their family was a pencil on really cheap paper (anyone here recall "Big Chief" tablets?). They had one, exactly one, dip pen for the family and took turns using it. Fountain pens were for much richer folks. I have heard complains about how the ink feathered on the cheaper paper, so anyone who wanted to use that pen usually had to take it on himself to get appropriate paper.

 

If Lovecraft lived in relative poverty in that same 1920's to 40's time frame, I would assume he experienced some of what my own family did. I agree with Bill that he probably used a pencil for most of his writing. I don't think the quality of the paper he might have had at hand can be ignored. When he used ink, I will join those who conjecture he used a dip pen.

 

This is a good thread. Thank you.

[Polyhistor]

Why do you think he used a fountain pen? Given the day, he may well have used a dip pen or pencil (Hemingway used pencils, as I recall). He might also have banged stuff out on a typewriter.

 

If it was a fountain pen, my guess is that it would have been a Conklin.

 

Edited to add this, found at http://www.eldritchdark.com/misc/such_pulp...re_made_on.html :

 

"Whipped on by some inner compulsion to write, Howard Lovecraft passed most of the forty-seven years of his life in an old Georgian house in Providence, Rhode Island, timorously shunning all rough-and-ready contacts with the workaday world. At an early age, through the medium of his own microscopic calligraphy, he began to create his own subjective universe. This imagined cosmos was peopled with ghouls and demons, primordial creatures of Manichean evil surviving from prehistory, or super- cosmic Titans ready to take possession of the human race at some unguarded moment. Lovecraft spun his own endless filature of ink as an armour against the external. He communicated with other sympathetic minds through the medium of letters. With more than two hundred unseen friends he corresponded regularly-- letters of forty, sixty, or seventy sheets of standard typewriter size, covered on both sides with spidery penmanship. Some of these letters grew longer than a full-length novel, bulking from fifty to one hundred thousand words."

 

So -- he probably did not use a typewriter, certainly not for all those letters. Considering his poverty, my suspicion is even stronger that he probably used a dip pen.

Kudos to you, BillTheEditor! I have - for what reason I don´t know - never found the articles you have posted.

 

Why do you think he used a fountain pen? Given the day, he may well have used a dip pen or pencil (Hemingway used pencils, as I recall). He might also have banged stuff out on a typewriter.

 

I basically came to that assumption after reading In Memoriam HP Lovecraft by W. Paul Cook. As far as I remember there´s a mention of Lovecraft "filling his pen" and writing a letter to Cook (about some - in the eyes of HPL - "obscene" story Cook had sent him). Since I´ve only read it in the German translation it might as well be a mere phrase the translator used. But Cook was not just a correspondent of Lovecraft, but also one of the few to meet him in person several times in his hometown Providence and to accompany him on daytrips (to Boston et al.) in search for architectural highlights - and ice cream. It seems to me he should have seen Lovecraft writing some of his famous postcards...

 

Given HPL´s obsession with the 18th century a dip pen is a very good possibility as well, at least for home use.

 

Lovecraft hated typewriters and I am not sure about whether he even owned one himself. In several letters he complains about typing as being not quite appropriate for a gentleman - most likely because he was terribly bad at it.

 

I know he used a mechanical pencil, at least late in his life, when he was very weak, due to his illness. The pencil is, of course, another plausible alternative.

 

 

 

Considering his poverty, my suspicion is even stronger that he probably used a dip pen.

 

Well, for some nice pen he would have probably not eaten a thing, except for some beans and cheese, for a week or two as he did when he was short of money...

 

But, apart from the costs of an FP I just imagined the inconvenience of refilling your pen two or three times (or even more often) a day when you´re writing as much as he did (just the sheer number of letters is amazing).

 

I´m beginning to turn towards thinking he probably used a dip pen at home and, when travelling, some sort of affordable FP...and definitely a pencil on some occasions.

 

 

Wow, that´s become quite a long post.

 

Regards, AD

[Guest JohanO]

I LOVE this topic!

 

I guess he used a steel dip pen or a pencil. Herman Melville used goose quills, although his contemporaries used steel dip pens.

 

please look at this other writer's topic!

 

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/in...=0entry105203

 

Johan

[BillTheEditor]

Great post, AD! You've done a lot of reading about Lovecraft, and have collected a lot of evidence about how he wrote. Great stuff!

 

For what it's worth, *everyone* hated typewriters in those days! They were expensive, noisy, inconvenient, tiring to use, and required lots of maintenance to keep working correctly. Many writers of the time expressed similar disdain for the thing, and those who were better off hired secretaries to do the dirty work for them. I believe that common practice in publishing (especially pulp fiction, where the writers were notoriously poor -- the starving artists in the garret) until after the second world war was for authors to send manuscripts ("handwritten" by definition in those days) to the publisher, rather than typescripts.

 

As someone else has mentioned, pencils were the ordinary person's writing instrument. I have lots of letters and postcards written by members of my father's family, dating back a hundred years, and until the late 1940's they are nearly all written in pencil (some time in the 40's, they started writing in ballpoint pen). These were mostly people without a lot of money, some living on farms, others in small towns. In my mother's family, more prosperous, the letters and diaries are written in dip pen, and later the letters are typewritten. I know that my mother had a fountain pen in the 1920's, as did at least one of her sisters. They were really very well off. But many of the recipes handed down from her mother are written in -- pencil. So for the time, I'd expect to see Lovecraft mainly using pencil and dip pen. I don't know about the expression, "filling his pen." That could have been conjecture, it could have been a phrase that applied as well to a dip pen, or it could have been, as you say, an artifact of translation.

 

Lots of fun in this thread. Now I need to go fill my pen (metaphorically speaking) and get busy with my own work.

[Polyhistor]

Great post, AD! You've done a lot of reading about Lovecraft, and have collected a lot of evidence about how he wrote. Great stuff!

 

Oh, I´ve done too little, I´m afraid! I reread Paul Cook´s essay on Lovecraft today - and sure enough couldn´t find the passage I was refering to in my last post! (I shall wear sackcloth and ashes for the rest of the day... ) Must have read that somewhere else, probably in DeCamp´s poor (and poorly translated!) biography.

 

The more I think about it the more I come to believe it was simply a dip pen Lovecraft was using, especially given his well documented love for anachronisms, and in this case even a very practical one for someone who wrote more or less all day (night) long.

 

For what it's worth, *everyone* hated typewriters in those days! wink.gif They were expensive, noisy, inconvenient, tiring to use, and required lots of maintenance to keep working correctly. Many writers of the time expressed similar disdain for the thing, and those who were better off hired secretaries to do the dirty work for them. I believe that common practice in publishing (especially pulp fiction, where the writers were notoriously poor -- the starving artists in the garret) until after the second world war was for authors to send manuscripts ("handwritten" by definition in those days) to the publisher, rather than typescripts.

 

Well, I´ve never used such an old typewriter, but I can very well imagine how people would come to detest them. When I was little, I hurt myself pretty bad on my sister´s typewriter, somehow I managed to slip off the keys and couldn´t get my fingers out from in between them without some nasty scratches on it - and that was in the early eighties. The typewriters of the thirties must have eaten people alive!

(BTW - Last year I got over my fear and got me a nice one from the fifties )

 

As someone else has mentioned, pencils were the ordinary person's writing instrument. I have lots of letters and postcards written by members of my father's family, dating back a hundred years, and until the late 1940's they are nearly all written in pencil (some time in the 40's, they started writing in ballpoint pen). These were mostly people without a lot of money, some living on farms, others in small towns. In my mother's family, more prosperous, the letters and diaries are written in dip pen, and later the letters are typewritten. I know that my mother had a fountain pen in the 1920's, as did at least one of her sisters. They were really very well off. But many of the recipes handed down from her mother are written in -- pencil. So for the time, I'd expect to see Lovecraft mainly using pencil and dip pen. I don't know about the expression, "filling his pen." That could have been conjecture, it could have been a phrase that applied as well to a dip pen, or it could have been, as you say, an artifact of translation.

 

That´s indeed very interesting! My thought was, that on postcards written in pencil the writing would rub off and become illegible during transport, with the card not being protected by an envelope and thus people would have rather written postcards in ink if possible (on the other hand, one wouldn´t want to write state secrets on a postcard anyway, right? ).

 

I must say this thread (and in particular your post!) has sparked my interest in finding out what was available, in terms of writing instruments, to the generation of my grandparents and their parents (still have my grandmothers, seventy five and eighty years old, who will receive letters full of questions from me soon).

Here in rural Austria, with both the families of my mother and my father being (relatively poor) farmers, they barely had pencils, I guess.

Edited May 26, 2006 by Polyhistor

[BillTheEditor]

My thought was, that on postcards written in pencil the writing would rub off and become illegible during transport, with the card not being protected by an envelope and thus people would have rather written postcards in ink if possible (on the other hand, one wouldn´t want to write state secrets on a postcard anyway, right? ).

 

Here in rural Austria, with both the families of my mother and my father being (relatively poor) farmers, they barely had pencils, I guess.

 

The pencil didn't rub off, and even a hundred years later it's perfectly legible (although probably a lot lighter than it was when written). The oldest letters and postcards are from relatives who lived in West Texas, from Wichita Falls across almost to Lubbock, and points south. Some of the postcards are photographs of the family members, neighbors, their houses, etc.

 

http://static.flickr.com/61/153828643_53fc306663.jpg

 

(Gathering of some kind, 1904 -- front of postcard, back has nothing to do with fountain pens and is only interesting in that it's written in pencil.)

 

For what it's worth, my mother's family (the well-off folks) emigrated from Bavaria in 1843, to Louisville, Kentucky by way of New Orleans. The family was originally from Switzerland, and intermarried here with Austrians and Hungarians from Wien. It's a small world, isn't it?

Edited May 26, 2006 by BillTheEditor

[FrankB]

Thus far I have Aol'ed, Yahoo'ed and Googled, but to no avail. I have even attempted inquiries to the editor of the on-line A. H. Lovecraft Archive, but they keep coming back undelivered. However, I have succeeded in rekindling my interest in Lovecraft, so this thread has been both fun and enlightening.

 

I think it has been established that A. H. L. had at least one mechanical pencil. For as expensive as they were in his day it is likely he might have had a self-filling fountain pen. Such writing instruments might have been gifts from one among his correspondents.

 

The character of his correspondence has led me to believe he used a pen quite a bit, whether a dip pen or a self filler. So many references have been make to his miniscule handwriting! One can manage small handwriting with a standard pencil as long as he keeps sharpening it. The mechnical pencils of A. H. L.'s day had at the smallest 0.9mm lead, which might not be too friendly to one writing as small as he did. A pen with a razor point, EF or an accountant nib, probably would have suited his writing style. - This research is fun. I shall keep at it for a while.

 

By the way, I have been meaning to comment, Polyhistor, that if English is a second language for you you are doing a great job of expressing yourself. Right after my undergraduate experience, I did some post-graduate studies in Salzburg and at the University of Innsbruck. In those day, I was not able to pass my initial matriculation exam for the U. of I. so I wandered by a very cirumventive route to (then) West Berlin. I hope you keep your English skills in good form.

[Titivillus]

Hello FP enthusiasts!

 

After only reading the forums for a while (and thus learning many things I didn´t know till now, what an incredible knowledge base this place is! ) I´ve decided it´s time for me to take one step forward and register.

 

Some words about me: I´m 23 years old and have always loved writing with FPs, but switched to ballpoint pens some years ago. After discovering that my already bad handwriting had turned into something that I not even I could decipher anymore, I decided I´d go back to FPs about two years ago, starting with an old Pilot model I still had lying around from my childhood days. My handwriting has improved considerably and my little collection includes a Pelikan M200 (my daily companion) and some others I´ve bought or rescued from various garbage cans (a Rotring 600, Parker 45, two Élysees...).

 

 

But let´s get to the point now, shall we?

 

 

Since I turned twelve or thirteen I´ve always been a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft (for those of you who don´t know about him, here´s a good source of information: The HP Lovecraft Archive); I first was drawn into those weird stories of his and later got more and more interested in the man himself and his time, i.e. mainly the 20s and 30s.

 

So my question is, does anyone have any clue of what model/brand FP he used or could have used, being a relatively poor (and extremely conservative and old fashioned) guy in the 1920s/30s.

Being a (more or less professional) writer, he might as well have owned something a little bit more upmarket, it´s at least a possibility that just crossed my mind...

 

 

Thank you!

(and please excuse my English, I´m a bit out of practice )

Can't add anything to the pen part of the thread but an interesting thing I ran acrosswhile at Penn State was that they have a copy of the Necronomicon in the rare book room there. Rather an interesting volume.

 

 

K