Our museum's doughty research department has been busying itself recently sifting through the lower strata of the archives. They have uncovered evidence that famous literary personages have visited the museum at various points in its long and varied history. This past St. Patrick's Day, for example, we published an account of James Joyce's visitation. The researchers have found, to their unspeakable horror, that H.P. Lovecraft seems to have passed this way many decades ago, his blasphemous reportage leaving a hideous trail of gibbering, luminescent slime dripping from the vitrines, eating its way into the shadow-bound heart of our innocent museum. His comments:
There were lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could spawn, moulded with devilish skill, and coloured in a horribly life-like fashion...gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners...hideous parodies on forms of organic life we know...others seemed taken from feverish dreams of other planets and other galaxies....the vaulted museum chamber—an evil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and horizontal in the brick wall on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden courtyard. Other things in the dismal crypt were less describable—isolated parts of problematical entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of delirium.
from "The Horror in the Museum" by H. P. Lovecraft and (as?) Hazel Heald, 1932
Book cover from Monster Brains
A full index to literary visitors maybe seen here
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