Biographical: Libraries from which Lovecraft could borrow books?

[Extollager]

My impression is that, at one or more points in his life, Lovecraft lived near Brown University. Was he able to check out books from its library? What libraries do we know him to have used?

Thanks.

 

[Ningauble]

At 66 College Street, Lovecraft could look into the stacks of the John Hay Library from his kitchen window. There is another building there now, but if you visit the place you'll see how very close it was.

I can recall off the top of my head that he used the Public Library in NYC when reading Gertrude Selwyn Kimball's book on colonial Providence, but that particular book he had to read there. And he mentions in a letter that he met Arthur Fredlund at the Public Library in Providence. I don't know whether the various libraries of Brown University were open to the public or just to academics.

 

[Extollager]

11 Oct. 2020: waking about 4:03 a.m.: I dreamed that H. P. Lovecraft had borrowed, by mail, a book from the collection of the Oregon Historical Society about a sea captain…. Now, in the present, I found this book on a shelf of a library (perhaps the Ashland public library) with an Oregon collection, and in it, sure enough, was a slip with Lovecraft’s name, address (I think Providence was abbreviated as Pice), and the date(s) he had borrowed it, perhaps in the early 1930s. I think Chautauqua (probably not spelled correctly), Ashland, was stamped in the book. “Chautauqua” isn’t a Lovecraftian entity but a word referring to a late 19th-early20th-century adult education movement. In the dream it seems I got, as it were, a vision of the former location of the library from which the book that Lovecraft had borrowed had been mailed, which had an element of Ashland’s Lithia Park and perhaps of the massive Foellinger Auditorium on the University of Illinois-Urbana campus. I think it did seem, in the dream, that the book’s present location was less grand than its former one, but perhaps they were the same.

Ashland, Oregon, public library as it was around Lovecraft's time

Ashland public library as it is now

Foellinger Auditorium

I waited for many hours to type up this record from the notes I scribbled when I woke. This may have been my first dream of Lovecraft, though I have been reading him since 1969. I had been thinking of Lovecraft and libraries recently, wondering about where he had borrowing privileges, and certainly, the day before this night, had been wondering about whether he voted or not.

 

[dask]

Now you're beginning to scare me.

 

[JJewel]

Yeh, that was a suitably weird statement, perfect for a Lovecraft thread.

Initially I was under the impression his grandfather had a large private library that served as his hunting ground?

 

[Extollager]

Well, that's the sort of thing, JJewel, that I want to learn about. Lovecraft was a bookish man, but his funds were limited. What sources were available to him for borrowing? I'm curious to know more.

It was a pretty pleasant dream, btw, like something I'd have enjoyed if it had been real.

 

[JJewel]

From what I remember and @BAYLOR will fix my errors I am sure and as always I bow to his wisdom on the subject

After his father died he stayed with his Grandfather who was once rich with a fine hosue and library, as a reclusive kid he read a lot. Also it was said his Grandfather was a mason and so much of that knowledge was probably within the volumes of the library.

So when he was older he poured it out onto paper.

Their is an interesting short story I read about him as a kid, where he befriends a young girl his age and the story concerned the truth behind the Unicorn legends. It was written by Charles Stross that I remember in his collection of short stories.

 

[JJewel]

Well, that's the sort of thing, JJewel, that I want to learn about. Lovecraft was a bookish man, but his funds were limited. What sources were available to him for borrowing? I'm curious to know more.

It was a pretty pleasant dream, btw, like something I'd have enjoyed if it had been real.

It would seriously make a good short story, you could even expand on it easily.