LOVECRAFT
Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, inc., 1975. First. Hardcover. Fine / Very Good. Item #84
Stated First Edition. Hardcover. 5 ½ x 8 ½ . 510 pp. Fine in a very good price-clipped dust jacket. Very modest rubbing and soiling to the dust jacket. Binding and text block is in fine condition. Text is unmarked on age toned deckled pages. In a first for me, the red speckled bottom stain is clean and bright.
An engineer by education, Lyon Sprague De Camp wrote the first commercial biography of H. P. Lovecraft in 1975 at the age of 67. Generally panned by critics, this book held the position as THE Lovecraft biography for more than twenty years when S. T. Joshi usurped De Camp. The issue many Lovecraft scholars have with this biography is with the personal opinions of De Camp creeping into its pages. In a 1975 interview, De Camp said “[Lovecraft] was a fascinating character but I wouldn’t have wanted to be him. Like Poe, his model, he was, in the current colloquialism, a loser. He was inept and ineffective in all worldly affairs…” While many may disagree with his sentiments, myself included, the publication of this Lovecraft biography makes it a desirable title for the collector and an important reference for the scholar.
Price: $50.00