The Man Who Collected Lovecraft

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" was the name that R. H. Barlow bestowed upon his impressive collection of manuscripts, pulp magazines, and other material that he assembled through his contacts with such leading figures in weird fiction of the 1930s as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffmann Price, and C. L. Moore. What happened to this priceless collection of Americana? As Marcos Legaria, a leading scholar on Barlow, establishes in this pioneering study, much of Barlow's collection ended up in academic libraries, but other parts of it fell into private hands as it was successively curated by George T. Smisor (Barlow's literary executor), August Derleth, and others. Legaria marshals documentary evidence-unpublished letters, book catalogs, and other data-to present a comprehensive portrait of the disposition of a remarkable assemblage of material that was central to the weird writing of its time.

"The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" was the name that R. H. Barlow bestowed upon his impressive collection of manuscripts, pulp magazines, and other material that he assembled through his contacts with such leading figures in weird fiction of the 1930s as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffmann Price, and C. L. Moore. What happened to this priceless collection of Americana? As Marcos Legaria, a leading scholar on Barlow, establishes in this pioneering study, much of Barlow's collection ended up in academic libraries, but other parts of it fell into private hands as it was successively curated by George T. Smisor (Barlow's literary executor), August Derleth, and others. Legaria marshals documentary evidence-unpublished letters, book catalogs, and other data-to present a comprehensive portrait of the disposition of a remarkable assemblage of material that was central to the weird writing of its time.