The Vagrant
Issue Twelve, December 1919
The Vagrant was an amateur press publication published and edited by W. Paul Cook.
The Vagrant was published in the early 1900s till the 1920s. Issue #4 appeared in September 1916, and the final issue, #15, appeared in Spring 1927. W. Paul Cook was a member of the United Amateur Press Association and a staunch supporter of the amateur press.
Contributors to The Vagrant included A. M. Adams, Clara L. Bell, Chas S. Campbell, Paul J. Campbell, O. Byron Copper, Anna Helen Crofts, Geo W. Darragh, Lucy Frost, Elsa Gidlow (Les Mouches Fantastiques), Arthur Goodenough, Alma Myrtle Greenfield, Jean Connell Hayes, Edna von der Heide (The Inspiration), J.E. Hoag, Willis Edwin Hurd, Winifred Virginia Jordan (The United Co-Operative), Anita Roberta Kirksey, Franklin K. Lane, Andrew F. Lockhart, H. P. Lovecraft, Samuel Loveman, Pearl K. Merritt, Roswell George Mills (Les Mouches Fantastiques), Edith Miniter (The Aftermath), Mabel I. More, James F. Morton, Jr., Essilyn Dale Nichols, Olive G. Owen, James Larkin Pearson, Geo I. Putman, Robert D. Roosmale-Cocq, Harriet L. Trieloff, Litta L. Voelchert, and Charles L.H. Wagner.
W, Paul Cook was partial to work inclined toward the supernatural. After reading H. P. Lovecraft's juvenalia in 1917, Cook encouraged Lovecraft to continue writing fiction. Many of his works were published for the first time in The Vagrant, including "Dagon", for which Cook wrote the critical introduction, "Howard P. Lovecraft's Fiction" (#11, November 1919). The publication also published work by Lovecraft collaborators Anna Helen Crofts and Winifred Virginia Jordan (nee Jackson) (as herself and as 'Elizabeth Berkeley').
W. Paul Cook was one of the publishers, along with H. P. Lovecraft, Winifred V. Jackson, and others, of The United Co-Operative. Later in the 1940s he published The Ghost.
