To Walter Coates, 1926

Note from Chrispy.

I have tried to make the blog as family friendly as possible. Thousands of people wander by, some addicted to HPL, some only tangentially interested in the topic. The absolute bombastic sentiments of this letter I can't agree with, and it is part of Lovecraft's personality that makes me cringe. I can't make him different, and I am also uncomfortable censoring him a centruy later.

If you do read onward, be prepared for the worst.

_____


H. P. Lovecraft. Autograph Letter Signed "HPL".
Two pages, 5.5" x 9", n.p.
[Providence, Rhode Island], n.d.
["Tuesday", perhaps 1926], to Walter J. Coates, plain paper, ink.

The text of the letter reads, in full:

"My dear Coates: - I wasn't especially defending Emily Dickinson, but was merely pointing out the multiplicity of the causes - & the soundness of a few of them - which impel occasional revaluations of literature from age to age.

The present case is not unique, as you may easily see by following the reputation of any varied assortment of authors through a space of several centuries. It is a mistake, too, to single out Victorian opinion as a basis of comparison.

In many ways the middle 19th century formed a naive & curious Dark Age of taste in all the arts - I hardly need point out its architectural barbarities. If we want to formulate a norm for the Anglo-Saxon main stream, we must consider the average massed opinion all the way down from Chaucer's time.

The Elizabethan age represented a far truer flowering of our racial impulses than did the Victorian. However - as I said on my card, your main thesis seems to me perfectly sound & well taken.

Undeniably - all apart from the effects of natural change and altered philosophic-scientific-psychological perspective - the world of American taste & opinion is distinctly & lamentably Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups. Some of this influence certainly seeps into Anglo-Saxon critical & creative writing to an unfortunate extent; so that we have a real problem of literary & aesthetic fumigation on our hands. The causes are many - but I think the worst factor is a sheer callous indifference which holds the native mind down to mere commercialism & size & speed worship, allowing the restless & ambitious alien to claim the centre of the intellectual stage by default.

In a commercialised civilization, publicity & fame are determined by economic causes alone - & there is where the special talents of Messrs. Cohen & Levi count. Before we can put them in their place, we must de-commercialise the culture - & that, alas, is a full-sized man's job!

Some progress could be made, though, if all the universities could get together & insist on strictly Aryan standards of taste. They could do much, in a quiet & subtle way, by cutting down the Semite percentage in faculty & student body alike.

It is really amusing how we simple Western Europeans have allowed Orientals to trample over our brains for 1500 years & more - ever since we let them saddle us with the sickly Jew slave-religion of Christus instead of our own virile, healthy, Aryan polytheistic paganism. In this matter of religion, though, we are coming back - for the Jew-Christian tradition will be extinct in the Western world in two or three more generations, save for the nominal Catholic ritualism of the eternal rabble.

We are getting back to the same Aryan philosophy & paganism which are naturally ours by right of blood & instinct. However - that isn't what we were discussing. As for literature - you'll find that the causes for contemporary change are many & complex, & that Semitisation is only one contributing influence.

Let Great Britain, still largely un-Semitised, be your index of comparison. Scientific thought in England is pretty straight Anglo-Saxon stuff - Bertrand Russell, Aldous & Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Sir J. Jeans, Eddington, &c. &c. - but we find the forces of change emphatically at work.

It was out of Ireland - where Jews are almost as happily scarce as snakes - that James Joyce's "Ulysses" came. The causes of our cultural changes, be they renaissances or decadences, are buried deep in complex historical & psychological phenomena. Our present convulsion - which is probably a renaissance in some phases & a decadence in others - is far too big an affair to be traced to any single origin. Roughly speaking, the thing is due to the effect of sudden new doses of knowledge, & of sensationally rapid changes in ways of living, travelling, earning money, & making things.

Personally, I think we're losing more than we're gaining; for of all the current changes only the matter of added knowledge & intellectual liberation seems really good to me. Weiss & Harris write very interestingly - especially Harris, who is refreshingly intelligent despite a narrow aesthetic horizon. He'll expand with the years, I think.Rather cool autumn hereabouts, so that I haven't been outdoors as much as last fall.

I don't envy you up in the Arctic regions! Best wishes - & I eagerly await your second article on literary transvaluations.

Yr obt servt
HPL

P.S. Is the magazine you want The American Poetry Magazine, edited by Clara Catherine Prince, 358 Western Ave., Wauwautosa [sic], Wisconsin? The man who prints that is a friend of a friend of mine, & is thinking of founding a pedagogical publishing house. If he does, I shall probably be his chief reviser.
_____
"Walter J. Coates was a fellow amateur journalist and small-time publisher introduced to Lovecraft, most likely, through W. Paul Cook (later to publish Lovecraft's The Shunned House). Coates' and Lovecraft's friendship developed over a mutual love for New England and poetry.

Coates published a great amount of Lovecraft's writing in his regional magazine Driftwind, beginning with HPL's essay "The Materialist Today" in October 1926. Later, Coates would print a good amount of Lovecraft's poetry in the same periodical.

The most striking content in this particular letter from Lovecraft to Coates is the former's bald articulation of an obvious anti-Semitism.

In the midst of a letter discussing Emily Dickinson and socio-literary issues, and amongst discourse on writers such as Russell, Huxley, Wells, and Harris (most likely his friend Woodburn Harris, to whom he had probably been introduced by Coates) Lovecraft launches into a diatribe on a culture he sees as "Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups."

Lovecraft's view of Jewish people is a most curious aspect of his personality. In many letters to friends and associates, Lovecraft espoused a similar opinion of Jewish people as he articulates here. Yet, he had numerous Jewish friends, and in his one marriage, betrothed himself to a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene.

Debate rages over the depth and degree to which Lovecraft actually felt his own anti-Semitism, but there can be no doubt that "the gentleman of Providence" held a viewpoint that is quite unpopular and out of vogue in current times.

Frank Belknap Long attempted to contextualize or rationalize Lovecraft's apparent racism in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp which appears in the latter's Lovecraft: A Biography. Whether or not one believes Long is his or her choice, for certainly enough evidence can be found from Lovecraft's own pen to support a charge of anti-Semitism.

Still, Long attempts to come to the aid of an old friend: "This may be hard for you to believe. But during the entire NY period, in all the meetings and conversations I had with him, he never once displayed any actual hostility toward 'non-Nordics' - to use the term to which he was most addicted - in my presence, either in the subway or anywhere else...If one of them had been in distress he would have been the first to rush to his or her aid. Emotionally he was kindliness personified. It was all rhetorical - the kind of verbal overkill that so many of the hippie underground-press writers engaged in in the sixties.

It was a sickness in him, if you wish - the verbalization part - but it wasn't characteristic of him in a deep, basic way."

This letter is in remarkable shape, with usual mailing folds, one small crease at the bottom right corner, and a barely noticeable fingernail nick along the right edge.

The page has toned slightly, but is overall in very fine condition.
(S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life 427)
From the Robert and Diane Yaspan Collection.

Shipping: Flat Material, Small (view shipping information) Auction Location:
3500 Maple Avenue, 1st Floor Gallery, Dallas, Texas, United States

The Canal: 1933

HARVEST
A Sheaf of Poems from Driftwind (April, 1926 to May, 1933)
Compiled and published by Walter John Coates, Editor
North Montpilier, Vermont: The Driftwood Press, 1933
First edition: One of 150 (of 225) copies bound in limp covers

Trace of soiling to the covers, else near fine in harvest gold textured self-wraps with a black embossed pumpkin patch illustration, titles, decoration and rules to the front cover

Small octavo; 57 pages
This anthology selects poems that appeared in various issues of "Driftwind" from April, 1926 to May, 1933. Collects H.P. Lovecraft's short poem "The Canal."

Attractively printed from hand-set type and printed on fine quality grey paper.

DRIFTWIND'S HARVEST 1933

HARVEST
A Sheaf of Poems from Driftwind (April, 1926 to May, 1933)
Compiled and published by Walter John Coates, Editor
North Montpilier, Vermont: The Driftwood Press, 1933
First edition: One of 150 (of 225) copies bound in limp covers
A hint of soiling to the covers, else nearly fine in harvest gold textured printed wraps
Small octavo; 57 pages
Collects Howard P. Lovecraft's "The Canal" a poem
H.P. Lovecraft DRIFTWIND'S HARVEST 1933 // print: 1/150
(start bid was $99)

Walter Coates Letter

Letter signed (ALS) to "Dear Coates [Walter J. Coates] on both sides of single 5 1/2" x 9" sheet, dated "Tuesday" (1926?), signed "HPL". "Coates was an amateur journalist in Vermont, editor of DRIFTWIND, and promoter of regional poetry. He published a good deal of Lovecraft's poetry but is most noted for publishing his essay, 'The Materialist Today,' an impassioned defense of atheism, in the October 1926 DRIFTWIND, following a 15-copy pre-print pamphlet, one of the rarest pieces of Lovecraftiana. // This letter, following a thread of some previous correspondence, is largely a rant about the debased literary taste of contemporary Americans, corrupted by commercialism and decadent intellectuals and, with the influence of Jews and other non-Aryan elements as the root cause of both -- or perhaps all -- problems. // The issue of Lovecraft's anti-Semitism (like most things about him!) is not entirely straightforward. He talked a good anti-Semitic game in theory but when it came down to particulars he married a Jew and maintained warm personal friendships with Jewish writers, including Samuel Loveman and Robert Bloch. // The auctioneer continues: In some ways he is the opposite of radicals who loudly pronounce their love of humanity while beating their wives, disowning their children and cheating their partners, disdaining 'personal morality' as a bourgeois luxury. // Lovecraft's racial views, as obnoxious as they are, were not especially unusual then (or, in some quarters, now). It should also be understood that Lovecraft as an author of letters was no less literary than as an author of stories or poems, being concerned primarily with the creation of character, mood, diction, etc. In many ways, the 'Lovecraft' he fashioned in his letters had no very strict resemblance to the man who lived in the real world and moved about among flesh-and-blood people. He was always eager (or desperate) in his letters, as in all his writing, to strike a memorable pose -- as a bulwark against the howling void of the cosmos. Militating also against one's revulsion at his call for 'literary & aesthetic fumigation' is the Socratic irony of how summarily Lovecraft, like other armchair fascists, would have been dealt with in the (real rather than imagined) Third Reich, where his writings would undoubtedly have been condemned as decadent and where he might well have rubbed shoulders with 'Messrs Cohen & Levi' on the way to the showers." -- Robert Eldridge. The usual mailing creases, fine. (#114494) Price: $3,750.00

Lovecraft to Coates: Autograph Letter surfaces (1926)

H. P. Lovecraft. Autograph Letter Signed "HPL". Two pages, 5.5" x 9", n.p. [Providence, Rhode Island], n.d. ["Tuesday", perhaps 1926], to Walter J. Coates, plain paper, ink. The text of the letter reads, in full:"My dear Coates: - I wasn't especially defending Emily Dickinson, but was merely pointing out the multiplicity of the causes - & the soundness of a few of them - which impel occasional revaluations of literature from age to age. The present case is not unique, as you may easily see by following the reputation of any varied assortment of authors through a space of several centuries. It is a mistake, too, to single out Victorian opinion as a basis of comparison. In many ways the middle 19th century formed a naive & curious Dark Age of taste in all the arts - I hardly need point out its architectural barbarities. If we want to formulate a norm for the Anglo-Saxon main stream, we must consider the average massed opinion all the way down from Chaucer's time. The Elizabethan age represented a far truer flowering of our racial impulses than did the Victorian.However - as I said on my card, your main thesis seems to me perfectly sound & well taken. Undeniably - all apart from the effects of natural change and altered philosophic-scientific-psychological perspective - the world of American taste & opinion is distinctly & lamentably Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups. Some of this influence certainly seeps into Anglo-Saxon critical & creative writing to an unfortunate extent; so that we have a real problem of literary & aesthetic fumigation on our hands. The causes are many - but I think the worst factor is a sheer callous indifference which holds the native mind down to mere commercialism & size & speed worship, allowing the restless & ambitious alien to claim the centre of the intellectual stage by default. In a commercialised civilization, publicity & fame are determined by economic causes alone - & there is where the special talents of Messrs. Cohen & Levi count. Before we can put them in their place, we must de-commercialise the culture - & that, alas, is a full-sized man's job! Some progress could be made, though, if all the universities could get together & insist on strictly Aryan standards of taste. They could do much, in a quiet & subtle way, by cutting down the Semite percentage in faculty & student body alike. It is really amusing how we simple Western Europeans have allowed Orientals to trample over our brains for 1500 years & more - ever since we let them saddle us with the sickly Jew slave-religion of Christus instead of our own virile, healthy, Aryan polytheistic paganism. In this matter of religion, though, we are coming back - for the Jew-Christian tradition will be extinct in the Western world in two or three more generations, save for the nominal Catholic ritualism of the eternal rabble. We are getting back to the same Aryan philosophy & paganism which are naturally ours by right of blood & instinct.However - that isn't what we were discussing. As for literature - you'll find that the causes for contemporary change are many & complex, & that Semitisation is only one contributing influence. Let Great Britain, still largely un-Semitised, be your index of comparison. Scientific thought in England is pretty straight Anglo-Saxon stuff - Bertrand Russell, Aldous & Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Sir J. Jeans, Eddington, &c. &c. - but we find the forces of change emphatically at work. It was out of Ireland - where Jews are almost as happily scarce as snakes - that James Joyce's "Ulysses" came. The causes of our cultural changes, be they renaissances or decadences, are buried deep in complex historical & psychological phenomena. Our present convulsion - which is probably a renaissance in some phases & a decadence in others - is far too big an affair to be traced to any single origin. Roughly speaking, the thing is due to the effect of sudden new doses of knowledge, & of sensationally rapid changes in ways of living, travelling, earning money, & making things. Personally, I think we're losing more than we're gaining; for of all the current changes only the matter of added knowledge & intellectual liberation seems really good to me.Weiss & Harris write very interestingly - especially Harris, who is refreshingly intelligent despite a narrow aesthetic horizon. He'll expand with the years, I think.Rather cool autumn hereabouts, so that I haven't been outdoors as much as last fall. I don't envy you up in the Arctic regions! Best wishes - & I eagerly await your second article on literary transvaluations. Yr obt servtHPLP.S. Is the magazine you want The American Poetry Magazine, edited by Clara Catherine Prince, 358 Western Ave., Wauwautosa [sic], Wisconsin? The man who prints that is a friend of a friend of mine, & is thinking of founding a pedagogical publishing house. If he does, I shall probably be his chief reviser."Walter J. Coates was a fellow amateur journalist and small-time publisher introduced to Lovecraft, most likely, through W. Paul Cook (later to publish Lovecraft's The Shunned House). Coates' and Lovecraft's friendship developed over a mutual love for New England and poetry. Coates published a great amount of Lovecraft's writing in his regional magazine Driftwind, beginning with HPL's essay "The Materialist Today" in October 1926. Later, Coates would print a good amount of Lovecraft's poetry in the same periodical.The most striking content in this particular letter from Lovecraft to Coates is the former's bald articulation of an obvious anti-Semitism. In the midst of a letter discussing Emily Dickinson and socio-literary issues, and amongst discourse on writers such as Russell, Huxley, Wells, and Harris (most likely his friend Woodburn Harris, to whom he had probably been introduced by Coates) Lovecraft launches into a diatribe on a culture he sees as "Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups." Lovecraft's view of Jewish people is a most curious aspect of his personality. In many letters to friends and associates, Lovecraft espoused a similar opinion of Jewish people as he articulates here. Yet, he had numerous Jewish friends, and in his one marriage, betrothed himself to a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene. Debate rages over the depth and degree to which Lovecraft actually felt his own anti-Semitism, but there can be no doubt that "the gentleman of Providence" held a viewpoint that is quite unpopular and out of vogue in current times.Frank Belknap Long attempted to contextualize or rationalize Lovecraft's apparent racism in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp which appears in the latter's Lovecraft: A Biography. Whether or not one believes Long is his or her choice, for certainly enough evidence can be found from Lovecraft's own pen to support a charge of anti-Semitism. Still, Long attempts to come to the aid of an old friend: "This may be hard for you to believe. But during the entire NY period, in all the meetings and conversations I had with him, he never once displayed any actual hostility toward 'non-Nordics' - to use the term to which he was most addicted - in my presence, either in the subway or anywhere else...If one of them had been in distress he would have been the first to rush to his or her aid. Emotionally he was kindliness personified. It was all rhetorical - the kind of verbal overkill that so many of the hippie underground-press writers engaged in in the sixties. It was a sickness in him, if you wish - the verbalization part - but it wasn't characteristic of him in a deep, basic way."This letter is in remarkable shape, with usual mailing folds, one small crease at the bottom right corner, and a barely noticeable fingernail nick along the right edge. The page has toned slightly, but is overall in very fine condition. (S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life 427) From the Robert and Diane Yaspan Collection.

HPL Letter to Walter Coates circa 1926

"It was out of Ireland - where Jews are almost as happily scarce as snakes - that James Joyce's 'Ulysses' came."

H. P. Lovecraft. Autograph Letter Signed "HPL". Two pages, 5.5" x 9", n.p. [Providence, Rhode Island], n.d. ["Tuesday", perhaps 1926], to Walter J. Coates, plain paper, ink.
The text of the letter reads, in full:
"My dear Coates: -
I wasn't especially defending Emily Dickinson, but was merely pointing out the multiplicity of the causes - & the soundness of a few of them - which impel occasional revaluations of literature from age to age. The present case is not unique, as you may easily see by following the reputation of any varied assortment of authors through a space of several centuries. It is a mistake, too, to single out Victorian opinion as a basis of comparison. In many ways the middle 19th century formed a naïve & curious Dark Age of taste in all the arts - I hardly need point out its architectural barbarities. If we want to formulate a norm for the Anglo-Saxon main stream, we must consider the average massed opinion all the way down from Chaucer's time. The Elizabethan age represented a far truer flowering of our racial impulses than did the Victorian.
However - as I said on my card, your main thesis seems to me perfectly sound & well taken. Undeniably - all apart from the effects of natural change and altered philosophic-scientific-psychological perspective - the world of American taste & opinion is distinctly & lamentably Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups. Some of this influence certainly seeps into Anglo-Saxon critical & creative writing to an unfortunate extent; so that we have a real problem of literary & aesthetic fumigation on our hands. The causes are many - but I think the worst factor is a sheer callous indifference which holds the native mind down to mere commercialism & size & speed worship, allowing the restless & ambitious alien to claim the centre of the intellectual stage by default. In a commercialised civilization, publicity & fame are determined by economic causes alone - & there is where the special talents of Messrs. Cohen & Levi count. Before we can put them in their place, we must de-commercialise the culture - & that, alas, is a full-sized man's job! Some progress could be made, though, if all the universities could get together & insist on strictly Aryan standards of taste. They could do much, in a quiet & subtle way, by cutting down the Semite percentage in faculty & student body alike. It is really amusing how we simple Western Europeans have allowed Orientals to trample over our brains for 1500 years & more - ever since we let them saddle us with the sickly Jew slave-religion of Christus instead of our own virile, healthy, Aryan polytheistic paganism. In this matter of religion, though, we are coming back - for the Jew-Christian tradition will be extinct in the Western world in two or three more generations, save for the nominal Catholic ritualism of the eternal rabble. We are getting back to the same Aryan philosophy & paganism which are naturally ours by right of blood & instinct.
However - that isn't what we were discussing. As for literature - you'll find that the causes for contemporary change are many & complex, & that Semitisation is only one contributing influence. Let Great Britain, still largely un-Semitised, be your index of comparison. Scientific thought in England is pretty straight Anglo-Saxon stuff - Bertrand Russell, Aldous & Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Sir J. Jeans, Eddington, &c. &c. - but we find the forces of change emphatically at work. It was out of Ireland - where Jews are almost as happily scarce as snakes - that James Joyce's "Ulysses" came. The causes of our cultural changes, be they renaissances or decadences, are buried deep in complex historical & psychological phenomena. Our present convulsion - which is probably a renaissance in some phases & a decadence in others - is far too big an affair to be traced to any single origin. Roughly speaking, the thing is due to the effect of sudden new doses of knowledge, & of sensationally rapid changes in ways of living, travelling, earning money, & making things. Personally, I think we're losing more than we're gaining; for of all the current changes only the matter of added knowledge & intellectual liberation seems really good to me.
Weiss & Harris write very interestingly - especially Harris, who is refreshingly intelligent despite a narrow aesthetic horizon. He'll expand with the years, I think.
Rather cool autumn hereabouts, so that I haven't been outdoors as much as last fall. I don't envy you up in the Arctic regions! Best wishes - & I eagerly await your second article on literary transvaluations.
Yr obt servt
HPL
P.S. Is the magazine you want The American Poetry Magazine, edited by Clara Catherine Prince, 358 Western Ave., Wauwautosa [sic], Wisconsin? The man who prints that is a friend of a friend of mine, & is thinking of founding a pedagogical publishing house. If he does, I shall probably be his chief reviser."
Walter J. Coates was a fellow amateur journalist and small-time publisher introduced to Lovecraft, most likely, through W. Paul Cook (later to publish Lovecraft's The Shunned House). Coates' and Lovecraft's friendship developed over a mutual love for New England and poetry. Coates published a great amount of Lovecraft's writing in his regional magazine Driftwind, beginning with HPL's essay "The Materialist Today" in October 1926. Later, Coates would print a good amount of Lovecraft's poetry in the same periodical.
The most striking content in this particular letter from Lovecraft to Coates is the former's bald articulation of an obvious anti-Semitism. In the midst of a letter discussing Emily Dickinson and socio-literary issues, and amongst discourse on writers such as Russell, Huxley, Wells, and Harris (most likely his friend Woodburn Harris, to whom he had probably been introduced by Coates) Lovecraft launches into a diatribe on a culture he sees as "Jew-ridden as a result of the control of publicity media by New York Semitic groups." Lovecraft's view of Jewish people is a most curious aspect of his personality. In many letters to friends and associates, Lovecraft espoused a similar opinion of Jewish people as he articulates here. Yet, he had numerous Jewish friends, and in his one marriage, betrothed himself to a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene. Debate rages over the depth and degree to which Lovecraft actually felt his own anti-Semitism, but there can be no doubt that "the gentleman of Providence" held a viewpoint that is quite unpopular and out of vogue in current times.
Frank Belknap Long attempted to contextualize or rationalize Lovecraft's apparent racism in a letter to L. Sprague de Camp which appears in the latter's Lovecraft: A Biography. Whether or not one believes Long is his or her choice, for certainly enough evidence can be found from Lovecraft's own pen to support a charge of anti-Semitism. Still, Long attempts to come to the aid of an old friend: "This may be hard for you to believe. But during the entire NY period, in all the meetings and conversations I had with him, he never once displayed any actual hostility toward 'non-Nordics' - to use the term to which he was most addicted - in my presence, either in the subway or anywhere else...If one of them had been in distress he would have been the first to rush to his or her aid. Emotionally he was kindliness personified. It was all rhetorical - the kind of verbal overkill that so many of the hippie underground-press writers engaged in in the sixties. It was a sickness in him, if you wish - the verbalization part - but it wasn't characteristic of him in a deep, basic way."
This letter is in remarkable shape, with usual mailing folds, one small crease at the bottom right corner, and a barely noticeable fingernail nick along the right edge. The page has toned slightly, but is overall in very fine condition.
(S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life 427) From the Robert and Diane Yaspan Collection.

Driftwind July 1932

Up for sale-- Driftwind Magazine, Volume 7, Number 1, July 1932. Magazine measures 4.75 x 7.75 inches, 40pp. Condition is clean and sound, with very minor wear to the edges of the covers.
This is a bi-monthly poetry magazine that was edited, hand set, and published by Walter John Coates in North Montpelier, Vermont. Includes submissions by Coates, among others (see photo for magazine contents).
This is a very interesting vintage underground magazine, known to be a "Poetry Magazine of Opinion". This particular issue was dedicated to Peace.

Driftwind December 1936

Up for sale-- Driftwind Magazine, Volume 11, Number 5, December 1936. Magazine measures 4.75 x 7.5 inches, 38pp. Condition is clean and sound, with very minor wear to the edges of the covers.
This is a monthly poetry magazine that was edited, hand set, and published by Walter John Coates in North Montpelier, Vermont. Includes submissions by Howard P Lovecraft, among others (see photo for magazine contents).
This is a very interesting vintage underground magazine, known to be a "Poetry Magazine of Opinion". I find it neat the way that this magazine tended to be bound into wraps made of wallpaper.

Driftwind November 1932

Up for sale-- Driftwind Magazine, Volume 7, Number 3, November 1932. Magazine measures 4.75 x 7.75 inches, 36pp. Condition is clean and sound, with very minor wear to the edges of the covers.
This is a bi-monthly poetry magazine that was edited, hand set, and published by Walter John Coates in North Montpelier, Vermont. Includes submissions by Howard P Lovecraft, among others (see photo for magazine contents).
This is a very interesting vintage underground magazine, known to be a "Poetry Magazine of Opinion". I find it neat the way that the later issues of this magazine tended to be bound into wraps made of wallpaper.

Driftwind October 1934

Up for sale-- Driftwind Magazine, Volume 9, Number 4, October 1934. Magazine measures 4.75 x 7.75 inches, 35pp. Condition is clean and sound, with minor wear to the edges of the covers.
This is a monthly poetry magazine that was edited, hand set, and published by Walter John Coates in North Montpelier, Vermont. Includes submissions by Howard P Lovecraft, among others (see photo for magazine contents).
This is a very interesting vintage underground magazine, known to be a "Poetry Magazine of Opinion". I find it neat the way that this magazine tended to be bound into wraps made of wallpaper.

Major Item: A Big THANK YOU to Ferdy

Dear Readers, Ferdy has graciously consented to show you an item from his private collelction. To my knowledge, this post card has not been indexed or cataloged elsewhere - though my information is certainly not exhaustive. As usual, I do have trouble with HPL's writing, but the best I can decipher is below. Ferdy, amend this in comments if you'd like - and from all of us who are fans, again, a warm "Grazie".

Walter J. Coates, Esq,
N. Montpelier, Vermont

7 August 1931 {Friday - CP}

Congratulations on the two latest Driftwinds - one of which arrived during my absence, the other of which just came. You are surely the premier upholder of Vermont letters! The NY Times last Sunday {i.e. 2 August - CP} had a {fa've??} full-page review of the new Stephen Days Vermont anthologies on p. 2 of the book section.Yours stood at the head of the list! Best Wishes. --> Come down when you can & bring WPC {W. Paul Cook} along. Give him my regards. {Y'rs ??} HPL

Celebration of Lovecraft's Friends: W Paul Cook & Walter John Coates

I just received and am holding in my lap, the book printed in 1927: Land of Allen and other verse by Walter John Coates. The book is still sturdy after 80 years. The paper is heavy and edge cut irregularly. Some pages are cuth straight, others are ragged due to the orientation of the sheets printed. It smells of a bit of mildew - not overwhelming, but of age and history that it has endured but will not speak of.

Once a living man wrote the words within. Once a living man printed the pages. These collegaues created something and now it has passed to one who reveres it but is not worthy to hold it.

Coates dediactes it, "To the wife who has been my faithful companion for twenty years and to the friends who have kindled my idealism at the altar of poesy." One selected poem reads:

The Loved Immortals

Our spirits coexist with theirs. No bar
__Impassable those kindred souls may sever
__When God ordained of old to be together
As he ordained the orbit of each star
__Whoso wrought out mentality for eath
Wrought none impersonal or ill: the ages
__Are but successive epochs of rebirth
In which mankind (connoting fools and sages)
__In one great Likeness live this life below.
__The heights we climb, however fast or slow,
Were climbed before or will be climbed in time
__By kindred spirits in the grand relay
Of aging destiny. Full life sublime
__Is ours who live life fully, even today.

May 7, 1926

W Paul Cook & Walter John Coates Publication

{CP: Walter Coates and Paul Cook were closely associated for years in printing and publishing}

Rare Recluse Press
"Land of Allen And Other Verse" by Walter John Coates. Published by W. Paul Cook. The Recluse Press MCMXXVIII (1928). W. Paul Cook (1880-1948) is best known as a friend and publisher of H. P. Lovecraft.Cook was an important member of the Lovecraft Inner Circle. In 1928 W.Paul Cook printed approximately 250 unbound sets of Lovecrafts "The Shunned House" for The Recluse Press.However, the sheets were not bound at that time. Approximately 150 sets of unbound sheets eventually found their way into the possession of Arkham House in 1959 where they were offered for sale in an unbound state. About 50 copies were sold in that state. The remaining 100 copies were bound by Arkham House and offered for sale in 1961. Cook also printed Donald Wandrei "Ecstasy & Other Poems" (The Recluse Press, 1928 Ltd to 322 copies.) The Recluse Press only lasted from 1925-1929.

Walter John Coates was born near Lowville, NY, on November 9, 1880. He died of a heart attack on July 29, 1941, aged sixty. Coates was a Universalist minister, storekeeper, poet, printer and bibliographer. W. Paul Cook was a close family friend. The Vermont Historical Society published his Bibliography of Vermont Poetry and has a Coates collection.
Book is in very good condition, nice tight bindings.

Chrispy's Copy of Driftwind (December 1936)

As you can see, the evidence is presented that the publisher used wallpaper for the cover. Unfortuntately, the cover has become detatched. This was a former library copy as can be seen in the images.

Driftwind

{Two copies have surfaced. Chrispy also has a copy, and the remarkable thing is that the cover of mine and the Nov. 1932 pictured here are made out of wallpaper. -CP}

DRIFTWIND FROM THE NORTH HILLS. November 1932 (volume 7, number 3). Edited by Walter John Coates. . North Montpelier, Vermont: Walter John Coates, November 1932 (volume 7, number 3). Small octavo, single issue, pictorial wrappers, sewn. Includes "The Howler" by H. P. Lovecraft, the first printing of this poem. Joshi I-B-iii-53. A fine copy. (#108438) Price: $75.00

DRIFTWIND FROM THE NORTH HILLS. March 1931 (volume 5, number 5). Edited by Walter John Coates. . North Montpelier, Vermont: Walter John Coates, March 1931 (volume 5, number 5). Small octavo, single issue, printed wrappers, sewn. Includes "The Lamp" by H. P. Lovecraft, the first printing of this poem. Joshi I-B-iii-47. A fine copy. (#108437) Price: $75.00