Lovecraft Letters at Heritage Auctions during Rare Book Week
Ten autograph letters from H. P. Lovecraft to Frederic Jay Pabody will be up for auction on April 6th at Heritage as part of the fesitivites during Rare Book Week NYC. The lot, which totals forty-six pages, opens at $10,000.
Lovecraft, an avid correspondent, wrote these lengthy handwritten letters full of publishing advice to his young fan, Frederic Jay Pabody, in the 1930s. Highlights of the letters include comments on fellow writers R. H. Barlow, Adolphe de Castro, Robert E. Howard, insights into "good" vs "bad" marriages, the nature of weird fiction, and Lovecraft's own hatred of typewriters. A particular highlight is a 1936 letter that includes a hand draw map of Kusha, a mythic land associated with Atlantis.
Parts of two of the letters appeared in the multi-volume "The Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft" edited by August Derleth and published between 1965 and 1976. The majority of the contents in the ten Pabody letters remain, however, unpublished.
