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This is his attitude toward general literature; as evinced by his cautious disparagement of mellowed, broadly representative books, in favour of modem, locally American, and potentially ephemeral writings.

This sentence is from an essay of Lovecraft about amateur writing. The article is titled "The Case for Classicism." The word "modem" seems very out of context here, not to mention the fact that there were no internet or modems in Lovecraft's time. I couldn't find any secondary meaning of this word other than the one related to internet connection. I thought it could be a typo and downloaded the article from different sources but all of them are the same. Does this word have any other meaning? I still think it's a typo and it's actually "modern" but I wanted to ask just in case.

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  • 12
    It appears to be a typo or OCR error for modern.
    – Phil Sweet
    Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 17:22
  • 3
    It is an error for "modern". Just look at any print copy of the book (example).
    – Laurel ♦
    Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 17:25
  • @Laurel I think you should turn that into an answer, the print copy link is all the proof you need.
    – BoldBen
    Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 23:16
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about a typographical error.
    – Chenmunka
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 11:20

1 Answer 1

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Print versions of the book, such as this scanned one from Google Books, will show you definitively that the word here is supposed to be "modern":

image of the quote showing "modern"

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  • A Hardy answer!
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Feb 11, 2019 at 1:30
  • Thank you! I thought the same but couldn't find a printed copy to check.
    – Dennis
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 11:08

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