H.P. Lovecraft's Missing Manuscript for "The Unnamable" Sold on Ebay?

An auction closed on Ebay.com not long ago, seemingly for a good quality manuscript of H.P. Lovecraft's story, "The Unnamable." Although this is a typed version and not a handwritten draft, a rare surfacing of an unknown Lovecraft manuscript from private hands appears to have occurred--though only for a moment. The $2026.00 total the manuscript closed at means it passed into the hands of another collector, as it's unlikely any scholar or university would shell out that much for a single Lovecraft artifact. And that relies on assuming there are a few of those out there, trawling the online markets for rare bits of Lovecraftiana: an unlikely phenomena in of itself.


Still, the (re)appearance of "The Unnamable" manuscript is curious for a few reasons. Many Lovecraft materials--especially his voluminous letters--remain in private hands, hidden from the prying eyes of scholars. More importantly, however, S.T. Joshi listed "The Unnamable" as one of the missing Lovecraft manuscripts in his essay "Textual Problems in Lovecraft" (which made an appearance in Darrell Schweitzer's 2001 collection of scholarly texts, Discovering H.P. Lovecraft). Joshi notes, "The task of restoring the texts of Lovecraft's fiction is in essence simple, thanks to the survival of manuscripts for nearly all of his original tales...Important tales for which no manuscripts exist are...'The Unnamable'" (Page 100). Earlier in the same piece, he records the fact that certain H.P. Lovecraft texts are "notoriously corrupt," with stunning misprints of words and entire passages.

Clearly, the diligent work of S.T. Joshi and other enthusiasts has done much to restore Lovecraft's texts to their intended constructions, even moreso since this essay appeared in 1982, and again in 2001. Still, it would be interesting to know if this "Unnamable" manuscript that exchanged hands on Ebay is one of the fabled lost manuscripts, and, moreover, what textual alterations could be lurking in its old pages.

-Grim Blogger