Henry Armitage, Doctor of Letters (Princeton, 1881; Cambridge, 1892), served as Head Librarian of the Orne Library at Miskatonic University for thirty-seven years. During that tenure he led one successful documented intervention against an active Mythos incursion, trained four subsequent investigators, and retired at sixty-nine without public acknowledgment of his work. His personnel jacket runs to forty-one pages. None of the entries are interesting until the one dated September 1928, after which they become considerably less so by design.

The Bureau's posthumous assessment is the briefest in the file: Subject demonstrated operational judgment consistent with training and exceeded expectations in the field. The training in question was the reading of books. The field in question was a hill outside Dunwich, Massachusetts. The expectations were that he would not come back.

The Career

Armitage was hired by Miskatonic in 1899 to catalog the recently consolidated holdings of the Orne Library, including the materials transferred from the Phillips bequest and the older restricted collection that had previously been kept in a locked room behind the Dean's office. The cataloging took six years. By the time he had finished, he had read enough of the restricted collection to understand what kind of institution he actually worked for.

He continued to work for it. Promoted to Head Librarian in 1906. Awarded tenure in 1909. Married Edith Vance of Boston in 1911 (one daughter, predeceased him in 1934). His public scholarly output during this period consisted of three monographs on medieval Latin paleography and a well-regarded translation of a fourteenth-century Cistercian liturgical manuscript. His private scholarly output is preserved in eleven leather-bound notebooks held in the Orne Library's Armitage Collection, available by faculty request.

The notebooks contain a running incident log. By 1925 the log contained sixty-three entries. Each entry is brief, dated, and unsentimental.

The Dunwich Response

The Wilbur Whateley matter reached Armitage in February 1928, when Whateley presented himself at the Orne Library and requested access to the restricted copy of the Necronomicon. Armitage declined the request, observed the subject closely during the interview, and made notes immediately afterward. The notes describe a man who was not entirely a man and who knew exactly which passage of the text he wanted to consult.

Whateley returned in early August. The attempted theft, the encounter with the library's guard dog, and Whateley's death on the floor of the restricted reading room are documented in the Dunwich incident file. What is relevant to this jacket is what Armitage did next. He read Whateley's diary and identified the threat. He requested the assistance of Professor Warren Rice (Classical Languages) and Dr. Francis Morgan (Comparative Anatomy). He prepared the necessary materials over a period of three weeks. On the morning of September 15, the three men boarded a train to Aylesbury, hired a wagon, and proceeded to the Whateley farmstead.

They ascended Sentinel Hill on the afternoon of September 15. They confronted the entity. The entity was destroyed. The three men descended the hill on the morning of September 16, returned to Arkham, and resumed their normal duties on Monday the 17th.

Post-Incident

The university acknowledged no involvement. No press release was issued. The Aylesbury Transcript ran a brief article describing "an electrical storm of unusual intensity" in the Dunwich hills, which was the cover story Armitage had agreed upon with Rice and Morgan during the train ride home. Armitage continued as Head Librarian until his retirement in 1936. He trained his successor, Dr. Wingate Peaslee, declined the university's offer of an honorary chair, and spent his last three years in his home on Crane Street, visited weekly by Francis Morgan until Morgan's own death in October 1939. Armitage outlived him by six weeks.

Assessment

Armitage is the Bureau's model case. Sixty-nine years old at the time of the intervention. No combat training. No specialized equipment beyond a brass spray-canister he had built himself in the library workshop and a Latin recitation he had memorized from a book most of his colleagues did not know existed. Led a three-man team up a hill and came back with three men. This outcome is statistically anomalous.

The file notes without editorializing that every subsequent investigator who has cited Armitage as a model has died in the field.