Further on the Grill/Binkin Lovecraft Collection

Back in March, I wrote on the Lovecraft Collection of Jack Grill and (later) of Irving Binkin.  It's posted here. 

This is a follow-up, bringing the story to the present as far as I am able. 

The original blog post received the following comment from someone who signed their name only as JohnK:

“Quite a few pieces of the Grill Collection wound up in the 'Undead' Book Sail (John McLaughlin) catalog 1984. McLaughlin also had the Cats Of Ulthar manuscript for sale in the early 90's as I recall. McLaughlin was eccentric to say the least, he had a shop in Orange Ca. that was hardly ever open to the public and was loaded with weird collector's items that he really wasn't interested in selling.

“After McLaughlin passed away many of his treasures were auctioned off by Heritage, including the mostly unsold Lovecraft Grill collection. McLaughlin's dream like many collectors was to have a museum devoted to his collections. His family had other ideas. I actually looked at that Dracula script at his shop one time, it was stashed in a pile of other equally rare stuff.”

I remember that catalog primarily for its long six-page description of the typescript of Dracula (originally titled "The Undead"), and the fact that the package in which it was sent was marked: "Open with Care, Contents UNDEAD." I'd completely forgotten that the catalog included HPL and Weird Tales materials. The catalog itself is dated 1984, but my copy wasn't mailed until February 28th, 1985.

And sure enough, among all of the Lovecraftiana are listings for the manuscripts of “The Cats of Ulthar” and “Some Dutch Footprints in New England,” as well as Lovecraft's Astronomical Notebook, 1909-1915, among many other items. The Lovecraft material is quite extensive, and runs some forty-six heavily descriptive pages, covering items 355 through 468. Additionally, there are many photographs of the various items.

Cover to the 1984 Undead Book Sail catalog

The catalog itself is a lavish production. Most copies were done in trade paperback, with a new color cover by Rowena Morrill, and new materials by Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and others. The print run was evidently fairly large, as the colophon notes that the edition consisted of 1,400 numbered copies, of which one thousand were bound in wrappers, and four hundred bound as deluxe hardcovers (with extra material, and the signatures of the contributors). On top of the 1,400 copies, another one hundred fifty were made for the publisher's use, including fifty copies bound in half-leather for presentation to contributors. The copies were hand-numbered with an ink compound that contained actual human blood. (To add to the absurdity, the inserted errata slip, correcting only one item's price, has a notation that “This errata is limited to 1500 copies.” Presumably the contributor copies were given out without this photocopied errata slip.)

The catalog is subtitled the “16th Anniversary Catalogue” of the Book Sail out of Orange, California. It was edited and catalogued by Bruce Francis, and published and coordinated by John McLaughlin. It is probably fair to call the whole enterprise eccentric, for, basically, it's a kind of vanity publication to show off the materials that McLaughlin had collected and which he really didn't want to sell. (The high prices alone are evidence of a desire not to sell the materials.) And the catalogue itself was sold to inquiring customers. I don't remember the price, but it wasn't cheap, and one was really paying for the privilege to read the often lengthy descriptions of rare and unique items, of which the Stoker manuscript was the prized example.

The proprietor of the Book Sail must also be described as eccentric. John Kevin McLaughlin (1942-2005) was the only child of an IBM executive and his wife. He grew up in Endicott, New York, and graduated from high school there, after which he attended college at World Campus, which was a float that went around the world. He married (and divorced) twice, and was survived by two sons from his first marriage. He founded the Book Sail in Anaheim in 1968, and moved it to a larger location in Orange in 1975. Meanwhile he amassed a legendary collection of antiquarian books, vintage comics, pulp magazine, and movie scripts and memorabilia. He must have purchased the Grill/Binkin collection of Lovecraft manuscripts in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

McLaughlin was reportedly given lavish amounts of money by his father, and thereby was able to build his collections. His parents died in Endicott in the early 1990s, and McLaughlin died there at the age of 63 in June 2005. In August 2006, major chunks of his collections, including it seems much of the Lovecraftiana, was auctioned by Heritage Auction Galleries and Diamond International Galleries. Some of McLaughlin's collection—this looks mostly to be movie ephemera (posters, scripts, photos, contracts, etc.)— ended up in "The John McLaughlin Collection of Popular Culture" in Special Collections at Binghamton University.

Thus, through the auction of McLaughlin's collections, much of what had been the Grill/Binkin collection of Lovecraftiana re-entered the market, and was apparently completely dispersed. Many of these materials are probably still out there somewhere, though individual items are not easily located, and it appears that most of it did not end up in institutions or libraries.

At least the collection per se did not end up in a dumpster. 

 

A 1976 Book Sail Advertisment

The H.P. Lovecraft Collection of Jack Grill and (later) Irving Binkin

In 1975, Jack Chalker's Mirage Press released a two thousand copy edition of A Catalog of Lovecraftiana: The Grill/Binkin Collection, cataloged and annotated by Mark Owings and Irving Binkin. Five hundred copies were cloth-bound, the rest were bound as trade paperbacks. From the vantage point of nearly forty-five years later, the catalog seems very bizarrely arranged. It includes 668 numbered items, the vast majority (the first 586 items) were collected by the first owner “Jack” Grill, with the remaining 82 items added by Irving Binkin as “Recent Additions” after Binkin acquired the collection. The main section of 586 items is divided into seven sections, 1) Professional Periodicals; 2) Amateur Press Works; 3) Books by Lovecraft; 4) Anthologies, Novels and Author Collections with HPL Material; 5) Books about Lovecraft; 6) Letters; 7) Photographs and Miscellaneous. Most of these sub-sections are repeated twice in the “Recent Additions” section.

The catalog also has short note by Irving Binkin in dedication to “Philip Jack Grill,” and a short introduction by L. Sprague de Camp. The use of “Philip Jack Grill” is somewhat erroneous, for “Jack” was Grill's nickname and doesn't seem to have been part of his legal name. He was born Philip Grill in New York on 29 June 1903. He was the son, and second of two children, of Philip Grill (1869-1938), a post office clerk, and his wife Katherine (1871-1941) or Katie. His sister was Clara Grill (1898-1967), who was a hair dresser in a beauty parlor. Grill was probably nicknamed “Jack” to distinguish himself from his father with the same first name. The younger Philip Grill appears in the 1930 and 1940 Censuses as an art worker for a newspaper, or as an artist. He never married.

Jack Grill seems to have began obsessively collecting Lovecraftiana in the late 1940s, and the collection he amassed is very impressive. George Wetzel contributed “A Memoir of Jack Grill” to Huitloxopetl, 1972, published by Meade and Penny Frierson, and reprinted in The HPL Supplement #3 (March 1974), also published by the Friersons. The memoir (collected in Wetzel's Collected Essays on H.P. Lovecraft and Others, e-book 2015; but it is worth noting that a slightly different version, with extra potentially controversial comments, appeared in Marginalia #1, Wetzel's contribution to the 26th mailing of the Esoteric Order of Dagon for May 1979) is about ten pages long, and contains some fascinating observations, including quotes from Grill's letters, and an account of their one meeting when Grill came to visit Wetzel. Their friendship, mostly epistolary, went from about 1955 through 1959, when Wetzel notes, Grill stopped answering his letters.

According to Wetzel, Grill “collected HPL photos, letters written to and by HPL; he interviewed HPL acquaintances, visited many of the Middle Atlantic and New England towns to which HPL had made antiquarian tours, and accumulated many other odds and ends of Lovecraftiana.” An odd, shy man, Grill wished he was “a writing fellow,” but his only writings were letters—in an execrable hand-writing, without paragraphs and mostly without dates.

Grill died in Brooklyn on 12 April 1970. His parents and sister had predeceased him. A lawyer had to deal with effects, and arranged an auction at the Brooklyn house. Enter Irving Binkin (1906-1989), one of those typically eccentric old-style book dealers with a good nose for finding rarities. According to an article by Jack Chalker (“Irvin[g] Binkin Meets H.P. Lovecraft” published in Chalker's fapazine Viewpoint no.1, February 1973; reprinted in Alien Critic no. 5, May 1973), Binkin found the house full of hundreds of No-Cal soft drink cartons, filled with books and papers. The lawyer had listed the collection as being on “Love and Love craft” but quickly Binkin realized that it wasn't sex stuff but a massive collection about a person named Lovecraft. Binkin successfully bid on the collection, though the lawyer withheld some of what he thought were personal effects, at least until an heir could possibly be located. Later Binkin acquired these items, which turned out to be more Lovecraft letters and photographs. Having seen the photographs, Binkin realized that Lovecraft had been a regular customer at his bookstore, just off Red Hook in Brooklyn, over forty years earlier. As he read through the collection, Binkin was bit by the Lovecraft bug. Later he would telephone Jack Chalker, because he was the author of The New H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography (1962), and this connection brought about the catalog of the Grill/Binkin Collection, compiled by Mark Owings and Binkin, and published by Chalker's Mirage Press.

So what was in the Grill/Binkin collection? The main section lists ten Lovecraftian issues of Home Brew, nearly ninety Lovecraftian issues of Weird Tales, and thirteen of the fourteen issues of The Acolyte, a Lovecraftian fanzine edited by Francis Towner Laney from the early 1940s. But the real heart of the collection was in the manuscripts, letters and photographs. A number of these are visible in the twenty pages of photographs in the middle of the catalog: the manuscripts of “The Cats of Ulthar” (dated June 15, 1920) and “Some Dutch Footprints in New England” (1933), as well as Lovecraft's Astronomical Notebook, 1909-1915. Grill seems to have gotten a lot of stuff from Wilfred Blanch Talman, Samuel Loveman, and Cliff and Muriel Eddy, among others. I note that Wetzel, in his memoir of Grill, quotes a letter from Grill (circa June 1957) stating he'd acquired unpublished stories by Hazel Heald, “The Basement Room” (5 pages) and “Lair of the Fungus Death” (25 pages), from Heald herself. But what happened to all this stuff? The Heald stories are not listed in the Grill/Binkin catalog. For “The Cats of Ulthar” I note that in Lovecraft's Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition (2015), S.T. Joshi remarks about “the absence of a manuscript” (Volume I, p. 151), while as regards “Some Dutch Footprints in New England” in Lovecraft's Collected Essays, Volume 4: Travel (2005), Joshi based the text on the typescript in the John Hay Library but also notes that an autograph manuscript is “also extant” (p. 255).

But where is all of this material now? In the 1975 catalog, Binkin is said to be hoping to sell the whole collection in the future to some library. But did he? Or did he sell some things piecemeal? Or did the collection disappear into some limbo after Binkin's death in November 1989, just as it very nearly did after Grill's death in 1970? Such thoughts provide a cautionary tale for collectors and their collections. However prized and cherished they may be while the collector is alive, what happens to such materials after the collector passes?