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?

Does This Booklet Exist or Not?

In 2010, the shortlived Bandersnatch Books was supposed to publish a small chapbook by T.M. Wright (1947-2015)  titled The People on the Island. The short story was originally written for an anthology Cold Touch, edited by William P. Simmons, to have been published by Prime Books.  The anthology was delivered to the publisher in May 2002, for publication in November 2002.  But the book never appeared.

The short story, however,  appeared in Brutarian Magazine, issue 42 (2005), and was collected in Wright's Bone Soup (2010). It is perhaps most easily found in The Weird (2011), a massive anthology edited Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

There are traces lingering on the web of the Bandersnatch Books edition.  First there is, copied from this source, an early cover for the book, from December 2009:

Next, in July 2010, Noah O'Toole published a series of rough sketches for the forthcoming booklet at his blog, here. Below is one image, for the rest see the blog:

The booklet was seemingly published on 23 October 2010, for the following statement was posted at the Shocklines Forum:

"T.M. Wright's The People on the Island now available”

After a longer delay than anticipated, I'm very pleased to announce that the revised version of the chapbook "The People on the Island" is now available for purchase. With a new cover, interior illustration and a foreword written and available only in this version, this is Terry at his best. Price is $10 plus $1 shipping.

Apparently the final cover

There are other hints that some copies of this booklet actually came out.  On November 23, 2010, the publisher wrote at Raingod's Weblog:

We’ve released T.M. Wright’s “The People on the Island” and will be releasing K.H. Koehler’s “The Dreadful Doctor Faust” in a couple of weeks.

But the Koehler book did not appear until 2015, when the author published it through CreateSpace.

Apparently, Bandersnatch Books disappeared quickly. I've never seen a copy of this booklet anywhere. What I'd like to know, bibliographically, is how many copies of The People on the Island were printed?  How many were released?  What is the content of the new "foreword written and available only in this version"?  Anyone know?

Update (2/13/19):  Thanks to the booklet's illustrator, Noah O'Toole, I can now say that some copies were indeed distributed, but not for very long.  He received only one copy himself.  The publisher disappeared very quickly afterwards.

"All Fled, All Done": Redux on Robert E. Howard's Famous Couplet

The legend* has altered in the retelling, from a slip found in Robert E. Howard's wallet after his suicide in June 1936, to it being the last thing Howard typed on his typewriter before going out to his car where he shot himself in the head. The couplet is now legendary:

All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire.

Rusty Burke published an article "All Fled, All Done" in The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies (Winter 2001), in which he identified Howard's source for the final line of the couplet, a poem titled "The House of Cæsar" by Viola Garvin, which appeared in a poetry anthology Songs of Adventure (1926), edited by Robert Frothingham.  Each of the five stanzas of the poem ends with the line "The Feast is over and the lamps expire!"

Songs of Adventure 1928

Burke also notes that L. Sprague de Camp's assertion in 1966 that the second line of the couplet "seems to be a paraphrase" of a line in the poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" by Ernest Dowson became a statement of fact in de Camp's 1975 The Miscast Barbarian. However, Burke notes that others have thought that Howard would not have found many affinities in Dowson's verse, despite the repetition of the line "the feast is over and the lamps expire." 

Burke also looked into the author Viola Garvin, and found two candidates, Viola Gerard Garvin and Viola (Taylor) Garvin.  Burke suggests the first as the author of the poem "The House of Cæsar" for Viola Gerard Garvin published a single volume of verse, Dedication (1928).  Alas, Burke picked the wrong Garvin.

Viola Gerard Garvin (1898-1969) and Viola (Taylor) Garvin (1883-1959) were related by marriage.  Viola Gerard Garvin was the eldest daughter of James Louis Garvin (1868-1947), famous as a London newspaper editor, by his first wife.  And Viola Taylor was James Louis Garvin's second wife, the marriage occurring in 1921, and thus step-mother to (the adult) Viola Gerard Garvin.  The details of their lives and writings are given in entries at my Lesser-Known Writers blog. Click here for Viola Gerard Garvin, and click here for Viola (Taylor) Garvin, who after her marriage wrote as Mrs. J.L. Garvin. 

The poem "The House of Cæsar" appears in her book Corn in Egypt (1926), as the final item in the collection.  Here Mrs. Garvin gives the Dowson line as epigraph at the beginning of the poem, thus showing that she had the Dowson poem firmly in mind when writing her poem; and that Howard had no necessity to have known it. (The Dowson line does not appear in the reprint of the poem in Songs of Adventure.)

The appearance of  "The House of Cæsar" in Corn in Egypt is credited to "1906" and from the acknowledgements, I suspect it appeared in The Westminster Gazette. I present a scan of this version below. The earliest known reprint of the poem comes from Amphora: A Collection of Prose and Verse Chosen by the Editor of The Bibelot (1912).  I add a scan of that appearance at bottom.

Corn in Egypt 1926

Amphora 1912

Note:  I have published a further update on this subject in August 2025, link here. 

 

*Rusty Burke has discussed the evolution of the suicide note story in "The Note" in The Cimmerian, volume 3 no. 1 (January 2006), pp. 5-11.  

Dunsany, Smiling . . .

A recent acquisition is an odd, college magazine, The Oread Magazine from the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  This issue is dated March 23, 1920, and the reason for my interest is an interview with Lord Dunsany from his 1919 lecture tour of America. The interview, by Francis Herbert Stevens, is accompanied by a photograph headed "Lord Dunsany Greets You With a Smile"--which is I think the only photograph of Dunsany that I've seen in which he sports a toothsome smile. A scan accompanies this post (at right).  Otherwise, the most interesting quote from the interview is as follows:

I have no settled form of philosophy that I am aware of, except that I think one should write from the heart what is actually in one's heart. Then, one will be sincere. I do not put any hidden meanings into my play[s]. The stories are there as plain as starlight. Let each one find his own meaning in them.  I wrote my plays to be acted, not to be read. If I had written them for reading I should have put them in story form.

Lord Dunsany and the "Dictator" series

In 1933, the publisher E.V. Lucas of Methuen in London came up with the idea for a series of small books  to be authored by "a number of the foremost men of the day" to describe what attitudes they would adopt towards "current problems if a dictatorship were set up in England and they were placed in this position of supreme power." (Whether or not this series was inspired by a very similar series of articles published in 1931-32 in the American magazine The Nation is not known. The Nation's series included writers such as Stuart Chase (November 18, 1931), G. Lowes Dickinson (November 25, 1931), William Allen White (December 2, 1931), Lewis Mumford (December 9, 1931), Glenn Frank (December 23, 1931), Harold J. Laski (January 6, 1932), Morris L. Ernst (January 13, 1932), and Oswald Garrison Villard (January 20, 1932).)

Lord Dunsany was invited to contribute in December 1933, and he wrote his book (just over 18,000 words) in a mere four weeks. Dunsany's volume was published in May 1934, the second published of the series.  The first published was by Lord Raglan, and two more appeared in 1934, including volumes by Julian S. Huxley and St. John Ervine.  The "Dictator" series (as it was named by the publisher) had a standard cover design.

Methuen published three more of the series in 1935, by Vernon Bartlett, H.R.L. Sheppard, and James Maxton.  An announced volume by Robert Lynd never appeared, but a volume by C.E.M. Joad entitled The Dictator Resigns appeared in 1936, and was self-evidently connected with the series, providing (at least) a definable endpoint.

Dunsany's biographer Mark Amory gave an interesting evaluation of Dunsany's volume:

He gave it the sub-title, The Pronouncements of the Grand Macaroni, and listed his main quarrels with the twentieth century. It is a good-tempered, short book which manages to include his disapproval of misprints, advertisements (at length), white flour, which destroys the teeth, tinned food, wooden pips in raspberry jams, ginger beer, weedkiller (only salt was allowed at Dunsany), skinning seals, cutting dogs' tails (surprisingly brief), lampshades that fail to shield the glare of the naked bulb and many, many more. Apart from his views that the League of Nations and disarmament are good in themselves but will not present men fighting and a few jokes against Indian independence, he is unconcerned with politics. His only serious positive plea is for a national theatre (Lord Dunsany: A Biography, p. 235).

What Amory leaves out is how dull and dated the book is.  Coming immediately after The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933), one of Dunsany's best novels, it marks a considerable step downward in quality. If I Were Dictator is certainly a low point in Dunsany's oeuvre.

David Lindsay: Familiar Bindings

Mark Valentine recently wrote at Wormwoodiana (direct URL here) about Mary Tyrwhitt Drake's novel Outgoing Tides, published by John Long in May 1924.  What struck me first is that the binding of the book is the same design, and same color of cloth, as that used on David Lindsay's novel Sphinx, published by John Long in December 1923.  Here are some scans of the binding of Sphinx:

Spine

Front cover

 Here is the (soiled) binding case of Outgoing Tides:

And here's another one, for H.M. Egbert's [Victor Rousseau's] Draught of Eternity (John Long, January 1924):

I wonder whether there are other John Long publications from 1923-24 that have the same binding?

The Dust-Wrapper for David Lindsay's Devil's Tor

The first edition of David Lindsay's Devil's Tor, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons of London in April 1932, has an elegant dust-wrapper.  The central illustration is uncredited, but one of the early newspaper reviews of the book reproduces it with a caption that describes it as "A Woodcut for Devil's Tor by William Kermode."

The illustration is probably not a woodcut, but rather art done on scraper board, which was a specialty of Kermode's, so much so that he wrote a book about it, Drawing on Scraper Board for Beginners (1936).

William Kermode was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1895.  He came to England before World War I and joined the British Army (he would also serve in W.W. II.) In the mid to late 1920s he studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. He made a series of vibrant linocuts of his own war experiences, for which Henry Williamson wrote the accompanying text. The resulting book, The Patriot's Progress, appeared in 1930.  Kermode therafter provided illustrations for many magazines, books, dust-wrappers, etc. He contributed a frontispiece to Sylvia Townsend Warner's A Moral Ending and Other Stories (1931). Kermode died in 1959.

A close-up of the vignette for Devil's Tor