The Harvard Crimson:
On the more modern side, Houghton also has plenty of materials connected to 20th-century American horror icon H. P. Lovecraft. Emilie Hardman, Houghton’s Research, Instruction, and Digital Initiatives Librarian, has written an article about the appearance of old books and manuscripts in Lovecraft’s stories. Ironically, the author’s use of these materials to set “the tone for terror in his work” often leads him to appropriate items that are not at all demonic, and his “book-based horrors are often fleeting, unsubstantiated in the light of day.” Hardman points to one of Lovecraft’s short novels, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” as an example of how the author converts innocent books into harbingers of horror and evil; many of the works Lovecraft mentions in the novel can be found at Houghton. The library is also linked to Lovecraft in a much less obvious way: The board game “Call of Cthulhu,” based on Lovecraft’s œuvre, has a game card depicting Houghton Library, complete with a sinister drawing of the building.
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Houghton Library is the “primary repository for Harvard’s rare books and manuscripts.” They don’t have a copy of the Necronomicon in their collections, though. But they do have a book bound with human skin, so at least that’s something.
This post first appeared on The Scrawl Of Cthulhu – A Compendium Of Random O, please read the originial post: here
