Interesting Editions

Hey everyone! I'm starting this thread so that people can show off their loveliest or most interesting volumes of Gothic fiction.

I'll get the ball rolling with my Folio Society Ann Radcliffe set I picked up this afternoon. Photos tomorrow!

I do still plan on doing this. Now, if I can just pick up that camera instead of a cookie...we might get somewhere...

Okay, not up to Folio Society, perhaps, but I can't get over how cheap the Wordsworth Library Collection books are. This was only £6-90 ($11-39 at the time of posting) and I bought it purely on impulse while ordering a couple of other items on Amazon. I already have a paperback Poe anthology but I just couldn't resist.

I love the painting or whatever on the front! I have the Library of America Poe volume, and I try not to double dip titles anymore, or I'd probably pick one up myself!

Still going to get around to that Radcliffe, tomorrow, I promise...and then perhaps I should share my Melmoth the Wanderer, since Ms. Lola has been asking to see it!

Also, I think Wordworth did a Wilde volume in this treatment, I've been considering...now that I know the inset photo doesn't look 'cheap,' I might pick it up! (Although again, that would be double-dipping...sigh...the trouble with favorite authors/works/pretty-things...)

#5 - I think Wordworth did a Wilde volume in this treatment

Yup - it's on its way.

Alright, finally: here we are! I apologize for the blurriness of some of the frontispieces. Check the link for the rest of the photographs. There is one for each frontispiece, as well as the two photos of the books proper.

http://s1082.photobucket.com/albums/j367/veilofisis/









http://s1082.photobucket.com/albums/j367/veilofisis/

very nice. I really like the color and overall design of the cover. Hmmm....Even though I already own all these in Oxford World Classics, I think I'll have to track down a copy of this FS edition! Thanks for posting.

Those look yummy, Isis! I've never read Radcliffe so not sure I'd want to commit to such a hefty set physically--my space is now measured in teaspoons--but, but... should I come across it... I don;t think I could resist. Such wonderfully gory illustrations too.

(And I still want that chair...)

By the way, looking for Horla I stumbled upon a book I didn't know I had, Susan Hill's The Woman in black--as soon as I finish it... Distractions. Temptations. I can't resist.

Radcliffe is a great writer, in the sense of stringing together words. She’s an able storyteller, but she’s no Edgar Allan Poe. Her biggest flaw, to me, is that she insists on debunking her suggestions of the supernatural in all but one of her novels. Of course, this is now something of a staple in a certain sub-genre of Gothic fiction (namely, the detective story), but with her florid prose and Romantic disposition, you'd think Radcliffe would have left Udolpho with more mystery than denouement...

That said, I quite like her and her work—and not just as historical oddities or as texts of importance in the understanding of other texts (like most feel about, say, The Castle of Otranto). She certainly has her own magic about her, though apparently redundancy is a major issue with her novels. Of course, one has to remember that this was not exactly high literature at the time, but a means of entertainment not too disparate from the best-selling potboilers of our own day. Radcliffe, though, obviously rises above that classification when all is said and done, and is much more than just an 18th-Century Dean Koontz: her fiction is beautiful, if curious, and remains entertaining to an extent, if perhaps only to a certain kind of reader.

The novels I've started, got a few chapters into, and then put down are The Romance of the Forest, The Italian, and A Sicilian Romance. The first seems quite interesting, if, again, redundant in the context of what came before (and after) it; the second is apparently a bit of a reaction to Lewis’ The Monk and its revolutionizing of the Gothic genre, which Radcliffe was understandably quite possessive of, and seems like it will be wildly entertaining, like Lewis’ predecessor-in-spirit; the third, which I admit I only gave a passing gloss, seems like decadent stuff, indeed, and much more Otranto than Udolpho…

As for Folio’s set, I find the frontispieces…interesting; I’m not in love, but I don’t hate them. I am glad, though, that the texts aren’t actually illustrated beyond this (though they make fantastic use of ornamentation for delimiting chapters and such, which I always adore—at the end of the day, I’ll take the arabesque over almost anything else). The bindings are just beautiful: I can’t think of anything more appropriate. Lastly, Devendra Varma’s introductions are always illuminating, witty, evocative, and endlessly charming, and I love that he introduced every single novel, at length, and not just, say, Udolpho or The Italian. He is a fabulous writer in his own right, and his introductions to Folio’s editions of Uncle Silas, Melmoth the Wanderer, and The Monk are also fantastic.

So, in short, Ms. Lola—HA!— I recommend you ‘run, don’t walk,’ regardless of space concerns! This is probably one of my better purchases this year.

(Also: I might have to edit and then post this ‘review’ of sorts to my blog! I’ve been meaning to do a spotlight on a certain edition, and I seem to have rambled away here, which seems to be a trademark of mine!)

After this month's batch of purchases, I've been getting round to considering thinking about deciding to make up my mind to entertain the idea of cutting down on the book-buying and using the local library more. Then you go and show me stuff like this, Isis! And I positively salivated over the Uncle Silas!

Ah, how well I know that desire to 'consider thinking about deciding to make up my mind to entertain the idea...'

In other news, this showed up in the mail yesterday. I ordered it sight unseen as it was priced very low (just a few dollars more than a Penguin or Oxford paperback), I've needed a copy for some time, and, from the description, it seemed in remarkably good condition for an eighty-five-year-old book (that wasn't exactly meant for posterity). That said, the book is...fascinating, and I don't mean the work itself (Caleb Williams). It's neon orange, with a bizarre, Scarlet Pimpernel esque character in the lower right hand corner of the cover (the Rogue, I presume) and also on the paper spine label. Incidentally, paper spine labels are always rather attractive to me on older books, and this one is ever-so slightly off-center, which usually would bug me, but for some reason I find it endearing here (just as I find the somewhat frayed spine, which is, again, bizarre according to my generally perfectionist tastes). As for 'The Rogues' Bookshelf,' all I can find on them is some copyright data from 1926 that includes Caleb Williams and a half-dozen or so others, of similarly 'political' and Romantic natures (they say on their publications page that other titles are in preperation, but it seems as though they never got that far). I consider Caleb Williams a Gothic text, in essence, and so I figured it met the 'interesting' requirement set out in this thread's title, which is why I'm sharing all this. Here are some photos:

Has anyone got any of the Centipede Press gothic stuff?

I'm not sure if they're worth the money, I'd love to see one in person. Plus some of the art looks justa little too 'horror' for me sometimes. I do like a few of the sci fi/fantasy ones though. Their website is terrible and doesn't show you the books at all, just snippets of the art. They currently have Vathek and Jekyll & Hyde in production so probably score some points with veilofisis! Although since you're no longer double dipping I doubt there's much to interest you on there (it'll be interesting to see how their artwork for The Golem stacks up against the Folio one, which despite it's simplicity and lack of colour I love).

Subterranean Press also do some more contemporary stuff that very occasionally verges on the gothic (usually more sci fi and fantasy again though, if sometimes the darker end of it). I'm really tempted to go for their limited edition of The Deathbird Stories as it helped get me into readint hat sort of work quite a few years ago and the book holds a special place in my personal reading history - I already have a signed leather Easton Press version though... but this one is expanded! And look at the fancy art! http://www.subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_C...

I have a Wordsworth copy of Grimm's fairy tales going spare if anyone wants it. I have also the Folio Society one and they both have the same tales and the same Rackham illustrations so I don't need both (wordsworth version just doesn't have the colour plates). In general those books are great value though.

I have a nice Barnes & Noble Poe collection from quite a few years ago (not sure how I got it since B&N don't exist over here int he UK) which is hardback and a large size with some great contemporary woodcuts (I forget the artist).

Also I quite like the simplicity of the newish Four Corner books. I have a copy of their Vanity Fair signed by the artist but I'm considering picking up this Dracula too: http://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/Dracula.html
Not as fancy as Folio/Easton but quite different and a nice sorta mash up of old school and modern. I look forward to them tackling more classics in the future. I can imagine they're probably books you'll either like or hate.

>13 veilofisis:

As an aside, every time you post pics I get flashbacks to my time in Morocco.

>14 LipstickAndAviators:

I am oh-so meaning to save up for Centipede's Algernon Blackwood anthology. He's my favorite writer, and I have no fine-press version of his work. A near-complete compendium in as gorgeous an edition as Centipede's seems fitting then, but I fear I wouldn't read it after paying the $250 price tag, if only for fear of damaging it... On principal I generally won't buy a book I don't see myself reading--and I mean 'reading' as in, handling; I've bought many books I'll never 'read' just because they're intimidating or dry or whatever the case. Most of those also seem to be 'from the Russian...' ;)

Back to Centipede: I think their other Gothic stuff looks banal at best, and, at worst, tacky. Those photographic covers are just...ick! I mean, this is, essentially, two-hundred-year-old work...why 'glam it up' if that means attatching some crappy, late-Nineties, public domain photograph of a witchy lesbian vampiress with black lipstick on the cover? Maybe I'm exaggerating, and I certainly have nothing personal against witchy lesbian vampiresses, but I don't need the like gracing an edition of Stoker. It's out of context and limiting...

What's really fascinating me right now is Tartarus Press, which a certain Folio Devotee has a nice roster of. They have a collected supernatural stories of F. Marion Crawford, for God's sake! That's awesome! Their Arthur Machen short fiction collection looks promising, as well, and their aesthetics seem pleasantly old-fashioned, bordering on the esoteric, and lovely...

>15 LipstickAndAviators:

HA. I think, of all my friends with Middle-Eastern heritage, I'm the one most fitting a stereotype. :D

I do love taking photographs on that table. It lends some opulence to the affair...

>16 veilofisis:

On the Centipede volumes, I think it's only their cheap trade paperbacks that have those awful covers. I believe the covers for the $250 ones are plain or stamped silk normally, and the art is usually something fairly old or stylish too (victorian photographs, Lynd Ward lithographs etc). But the website makes it look like they have awful artwork covers. Like I said I really feel I'd have to see one in person before I ever bought one.

I'm pretty sure I'd 'read' itby your definition of reading lol. I have the Folio LE of Alice's Adventures Underground that I handle in such a way. I don't think I could ever buy anything and not have a fiddle or poke around in or with it, however much it cost. The only questions really are is it worth the money and can I even afford it? Unfortunately regarding Centipede those answers currently stand at 'I don't know' and 'certainly not'.

http://www.librarything.com/work/book/72945336

Strange and Fantastic Stories - fifty tales of terror, horror and fantasy
Joseph A. Margolies

One of my favorite gothic collections. Some classic stories and some lesser known.

That looks great, tros!

The only two 'multi-author anthologies' I've ever really given much adoration to (thus far) are Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural and The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, which are both quite intelligent and not just a 'greatest-hits' compilation, which is refreshing...

What does yours contain??

I was afraid you'd ask! ;-) Too bad we don't have table of contents for short story collections. I suggested this a while ago.
For instance, "In a Mirror" by V. Brussof (Bryusov). The selections from
well-know writers tend toward their less-known tales:
E.T.A. Hoffman "The Story of Serapion".

The only special edition I have is the Borzoi Poe collection of his tales, poems, and some critical work. I got mine cheap because it's a bit beat up so it's no collector's item. You can see some of the illustrations at this (not my) flickr page.

Other than that my editions are pretty run of the mill - mostly Penguin or Oxford classics or the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural set (which are a nice inexpensive way of getting some of these authors in paper book form). I've actually been purging some of my bare-bones editions of public domain stuff since I've gotten an e-reader.

ETA: Removed touchstone for the Poe book - it's combined in with other complete works so isn't helpful for showing this particular edition.

>19 veilofisis:, 20
www.worldcat.org often has the contents of anthologies. They do have it for Strange and Fantastic Stories.

>22 lucien:

Wow, thanks!

I'm glad to see that that anthology contains one of the most bizarre, unsettling things I've ever read: 'Caterpillars,' by E. F. Benson...ick, I just got a shiver!

Those Poe illustrations are something else! Thanks for sharing!

Myriades has some interesting illustrations from her edition of The Old English Baron here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/116621

Thanks, Lucien.
Strange google din't find worldcat. Maybe LT should import table of contents for story collections? ;-)

A couple of interesting collections:

http://www.librarything.com/work/book/73523112
The Book of Fantasy
by Jorge Luis Borges

http://www.librarything.com/work/book/73523274
A Treasury of the Fantastic : Romanticism to early twentieth century…
by David Sandner

Does anyone own any hardbacks of the Leonaur Publishing 'Supernatural Fiction Series'?

http://www.leonaur.com/collections/collections.php?seriesid=8&page=0&lim...

The vast majority of the series have that cover design that's in the link, with just variations in colour, and I was wondering if they'd make an attractive collection, seeing as they have a lot* of authors I'd like to have. But you don't really get a good look at them - do they have dustcovers, what do the spines look like? It's a very subjective thing, of course, but are they attractive editions when you meet them in the flesh?

*Well - three or four, anyway.

I'd really like to know about those, too...I always appreciate relatively inexpensive hardcover books. I never keep the dustcovers on (and I don't understand why one LTer once called me a 'blasphemer!' for it) because I don't like the images--just a nice, solid book. So, I'd like to know if they have dustcovers, because if they have that ugly image pasted on, I'd probably pass...

Blasphemer! Haha! I suppose if you keep the dustcovers safely tucked away in the dark somewhere, at some point in the remote future you'll find you've added to the books' values. As it happens, I've been haviing similar thoughts over the last day or two regarding slipcases - which I quite dislike. I was half thinking of wrapping them in plastic and sticking them up in the attic.

I have to admit that my ideal is the leather binding with gold lettering; but, failing that, I prefer books with dustwrappers to those without and where the actual covers have the glossy coloured artwork.

I love a slipcase!

I do keep the dustcovers in a box. And there are a scant few books I prefer them on (mostly architecture stuff).

I feel like, at the end of the day, a slipcase feels less like a part of the book, because it does more to protect it than a finnicky, prone-to-damage dustcover, which is why I prefer slipcases. I feel like I can focus on the book, and not have to worry too much about foxing and sunfade and all that crap. Being in the dustcover-hater league seems to have won me some good bargains on used books, too, which is always hard to argue with...

I should really take some photos of a few more of my books for this thread.

This site - http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/gothic/index.html - has some illustrations, title pages and front covers of a lot of Gothic works' first editions.

My (replacement) Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft just arrived. I'm really pleased with how attractive an edition it is ...



(the smear on the back is the result of my removing one of those horrid sticky labels and then trying to rub off the stickiness left behind - it's coming, just needs more elbow work) ... I really like the way it's illustrated ...



... and it has this on the insides of the covers ...

I love The Night Gaunts verse at the start.

#31 - Actually, now that the first rush of excitement has worn off, I realise that those first two pictures don't really give much of an idea of the cover. I'll try to get better ones to replace them in daylight/sunlight tomorrow.

veil was interested in the FS edition for Frankenstein, so I'm happy to oblige. enjoy.

http://s1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff500/brother_salvatore/Frankenstein/?albumv...

Also I received yesterday FS new edition of In a Glass Darkly by Le Fanu.

http://s1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff500/brother_salvatore/In%20A%20Glass%20Dar...

#35 I love the needle-work.

Thank you for posting the pictures.

Frankenstein isn't quiiiite doing it for me, but the illustrations for In a Glass Darkly have me absolutely salivating! I need to renew STAT so I can get my copy!

#35, #36, #37, #38

v. beat me to it while I was managing to freeze my PC solid on the last attempt at this post and lose the lot. This PC is heading for a good kicking.

It's all a matter of personal taste of course, and if the good brother likes them that's all that counts, but I didn't care for the Frankenstein illustrations either. Imagine me saying this with a chuckle and a good-humoured if rueful expression ('cos I still refuse to use 'lol'), but one of the reasons I disliked them was that 'patchwork quilt' stitching (sorry pg) - but generally, they were a bit too modern-looking for me.

Likewise, I absolutely loved the Le Fanu - illustrations and exterior. The word I used was drooling. I'm feeling quite covetous - especially as I've yet to spot an attractive 'collected' or 'complete' short stories.

On the latter subject, a query:

Wikipedia has a reference to a three-volume, Ash-Tree Press, 2002 collection called Schalken the Painter and Others. All I can find online, including in LibraryThing, is a one-volume, limited edition from the same publisher and same year with a rather unimpressive (personal taste again) dustjacket.

Anybody know anything about this? Or has Wikipedia simply got it wrong?

I have a good paperback Poe collection here, and I have the Wordsworth Poe I pictured up in #3 - so I do not need another Poe collection.

I do not need another Poe collection.

I do not need another Poe collection.

And then AbeBooks sends me one of those unsolicited emails ...

... there are editions of Tales of Mystery and Imagination with Arthur Rackham illustrations!!!

Oh ye gods! I love Rackham (been thinking of getting some Rackham prints for the walls); I love Poe. I'm trying to restrain myself from buying more books for a month or two for my bank account's sake - I think I've been overdoing it lately - and, even if I wasn't -

I DO NOT NEED ANOTHER POE COLLECTION.

I think I'm going to curl up, whimpering, on the floor in the foetal position, sucking my thumb.

Anyway, here's a site with those Rackham-Poe illustrations: http://www.nocloo.com/gallery2/v/arthur-rackham-mystery-imagination/?g2_page=1

Those are great images.

Have you ordered it yet? Have you ordered it yet? Have you ordered it yet?

You may not need another Poe Collection, but it appears your health may suffer it you do not get a Poe collection with Arthur Rackham illustrations.

You see, people on LT understand what you're going through.

Thanks for posting the link.

>40 alaudacorax:

I hate to fuel the habit (oh, who am I kidding?), but whenever I buy another copy of the same works by the same author...I merely tell myself I'm not buying another POE collection, I'm simply picking up my first ARTHUR RACKHAM collection...

You can rationalize anything, my friend. So, like pgmcc said...have you ordered it?

Also: I like these illustrations, but I think I'm still giving the award to Harry Clarke's...

I'm supressing my desire by focusing, not on the cheap copies at one end of the AbeBooks list, but on the £24,740 one at the other.

#42 - I've just been looking up Tales of Mystery and Imagination with Harry Clarke illustrations - http://dossierjournal.com/look/illustration/harry-clarkes-edgar-allan-poe-illust...

I do not need more Poe collections...

I do not need more Poe collections...

I do not need more Poe collections ...

I do not need more Poe collections...

They're a bit like potato chips, in that you can't stop at just one... HA. GET IT? POE-TATO CHIPS!! HAHAHAHA!!

(Oh God, somebody shoot me!)

POE-TATO CHIPS!!

"The Great God Pun!"

46

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

#45, #46 - Now I'm torn between whimpering and hysterical laughter.

... and at this moment of existential angst, a dealer in angling books, from whom I haven't heard in, perhaps, a year, has chosen to send me a catalogue - containing at least half-a-dozen books that have been on my hit-list for years - and there's one in 'fine' condition for about two-thirds of the price the online dealers are asking ...

#49 Excellent. Do you have any kidneys left?

I rather miss the old days when I had to rely on second-hand bookshops and dealers' stalls at shows and printed catalogues where I phoned for a book and found someone else had bagged it while I was making up my mind, and where I might find four or five prizes in a year - if I was lucky - and I'd remember clearly where I found each one - 'the thrill of the chase' and all that. The 'hunter gene' was a relatively benign and rather fulfilling little chap. Now it seems to be being made redundant and the 'collector gene' taking over, and the latter is reminding me strongly of one of these malevolent entities from Gothic tales - like 'The Horla' or 'The Listener', for instance.

I try to avoid buying books to own them (as opposed to to read them). My most recent failure was a facsimile edition of Donelly's Atlantis the Antediluvian World, whose seller snuck around my mental defenses by mentioning that it came from the collection of a late physicist and author with whom I was slightly acquainted.

I posted this youtube video in the Hell Fire Club Group's discussion on "Praise for real books". I think it is also appropriate to this thread as it addresses the topic of sourcing books to collect or to read.

By a strange synchronicity, I was in London yesterday and looked in at the Atlantis Bookshop, and DIDN'T buy the Tartarus Press edition of The House of The Hidden Light - because I can't afford £120 for an impulse buy - and then there it is near the start of Ray's video today.

Also, I lost my copy of that Tomorrow People novelisation many years ago.

Never mind, it's a nice video and Ray says some interesting things. I agree about having the books around you being a reminder of the stories inside them.

#54
I have been hooked on the Tartarus issues of Robert Aickman and Sarban. Ok, so I also have an Oliver Onions, a H.G.Wells, a Guy de Maupassant, a...

I haven't quite been cured of the collecting bug, and Ray knows it. Just when I've get some money saved he sends me notification of another Aickman collection he's published.

Has anyone got the new, hardback, OUP, M. R. James Collected Ghost Stories yet? It was published this month. I'm dying to know what it looks like physically, and why it's so cheap.

In spite of the fact that some person has combined all the different publicatons of James' short stories into one work (it's a total mess), I just couldn't get the Touchstone to work. Sorry.

ETA - Ah - I've just realised it was only published yesterday.

Also, if anyone from the OUP site is reading - your search engine is crap.

www.flickr.com/photos/65741746@N08/6258876110/in/photostream

Here's a photo from my MacBook's webcam. (I don't know how to get it to show as a photo in this post, but I have at least learned how to "flip" photos so they are not mirror-images.)

I held the book open in case the text could be discerned - it can't, and my hand looks unintentionally menacing! However, you can "look inside" this book on Amazon.UK. It's clear to me that the paperback edition will be in the "Oxford World's Classics" edition, presumably replacing Michael Cox's selection.

It adds "The Experiment", "The Malice of Inanimate Objects", and "A Vignette" to the contents of the 1931 (and the 2007 Folio Society) collected edition, plus collects various prefaces, etc. alongside "Stories I have tried to Write". The two-volume Penguin edition collects a bit more material (i.e. "A Night in King's College Chapel", "The Fenstanton Witch", "Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories").

Neither edition prints the unfinished "A Game of Bear".

The book has a ribbon marker and is quite heavy. On the minus side, the margins are quite ungenerous (the ends of lines on the left-hand page almost disappearing into the gutter) and there is some show-through on the paper. However it is surprisingly cheap (and half-price from Amazon at the week-end!)

I hope this has been useful.

Your bookshelves look very neat. How did you do that?

> 58
Thank you! Actually it's deceptive. There are built-in MFD shelves along two walls of the front ground-floor of my little Victorian terrace. The height of the shelves differs, with smaller books along the top, bigger ones along the bottom, middling in the middle. So the books run in 3 parallel lines, vaguely following the Dewey decimal system as I understand it (or choose to interpret it, or misunderstand it). That's why, if you can discern any titles, they're all non-fiction. You're looking near the start of the shelving. All very neat and methodical.

Problem is, I quickly run out of room. There's a cheap (i.e. not a Billy) Ikea bookcase in the back room holding Folio Box sets only, because they won't fall off the open ends of the shelves. Upstairs, there are books in the built-in wardrobes I inherited from the previous owner and haven't tackled (i.e rippped out, replastered, painted) yet. There are boxes full of books stacked on the floor.

There is a boarded-out loft where my poor paperbacks suffer extremes of temperature in summer and winter.

There are books under the stairs, there's a "currently reading" pile on the floor... you get the idea.

I do - more or less - know where everything is though.

57

Your hand DOES look rather menacing...

:D

#59

At last count I had10 of the wide IKEA Billys in place. Eight full of books (mostly double stacked - shame on me), one with DVDs and vinyl LPs, and the tenth containing a mixture of items including my wife's books, VHS tapes, etc... There are several other assorted bookcases around the house, e.g. on the landing, containing books.

And yes, boxes. Plastic boxes so I can see what's in them.

I have one more Billy to find space for and that should eliminate the need for about eight boxes.

Of course, once I empty the boxes they will only have to be filled again.

Unfortunately, the attic timbers do not suit conversion and we have not basement. :-(

Like yourself, I do - more or less - know where everything is though.

Yea! Right! ;-)

I wish I could fit ten Billys... I have five.

#57 - Thanks for the reply, paper - I've been away from home for a few days so I've only just seen it. In your link, are we looking at the dustwrapper on the right-hand side and the book itself on the left?

> 57

Yes, that's right - the book is covered in textured paper rather than cloth (like most modern hardbacks), and it's the usual Oxford University Press blue.

Another thing to mention is that the gilded lettering on the spine looks defective, but it's actually "distressed" to match the dust jacket. An unnecessary touch, to my mind.

Off topic exclamation: so you're a Doctor Who fan, houseful! (took a gander at your profile) I discovered Whoverse only this year.

> 65

I am! I was on the fringes of Doctor Who fandom for a while in the mid-80's, but was never very active in it. However, I do have memories of the programme that go back to 1972 if not further.

When pirate copies of old stories began circulating (on VHS) within fandom, and I saw "The Claws of Axos" I actually jumped when an image I had in my head (the 'golden-children' Axons freaking out in their psychedelic spaceship and turning into tendrilly monsters) was on the screen, and I realised it was a memory from watching the original transmission.

There was a lot of strange and fantastical stuff on British Children's TV back then, plus the Apollo missions and an apparently widespread acceptance of ESP in the adult world. Strange times.

I think it was wonderful. (Old Who over NuWho for me, btw.) I always considered myself lucky for having grown up pretty much TV-less (we lived in the Near East), but I would have ADORED it then--Tom Baker's era would've covered just the right period for me, five-sixish onward. As it is, I fell super-hard for another British product, Space:1999 at about six, shown on Turkish TV, which we sometimes could get.

Feels right silly to go hankering after that scarf NOW...

> It's an "iconic" image that deserves the name!

Incidentally, Space: 1999 was scheduled against Doctor Who, so a choice had to be made. Back then there was no guarantee that a programme would ever be repeated.

You hear the story that the BBC wiped and reused videotapes because they were relatively expensive (true), but the other reason that few programmes were re-broadcast was (as I heard it) because the actors union had negotiated that, if anything was re-broadcast more than 2 years after original transmission, they would get paid in full all over again.

Edited to add - in saying the above, I in no way intended to engage in union-bashing and, in fact, recognise that if more repeats had been permissible/economic back in the 1970s, fewer brand-new programming would have been made. It's just that with my collecting mentality, I regret the loss of those programmes not saved.

#64 - Thanks, houseful.

#56 It appears that the "Look Inside" feature for the OUP Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James contains the entire book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Ghost-Stories-M-James/dp/0199568847/ref=sr_1_...

#68

With you on the regretting! Maybe something will yet resurface.

Anyone remember Blake's 7? English sci-fi tv series. 80's. Probably the best sci-fi on tv EVER! (in spite of pitiful budgets) Definitely some of the best sci-fi writing for tv.
Most of the characters were surly, not the usual cheerful tv characters.

I remember it, although I had to catch up with the second series (not "season", this being Britain and 1978/79) ten years later on VHS. Something to do with being enrolled in a judo class. You're not your own master at age 11, let me tell you.

From a British TV perspective, I don't think the Liberator crew were particularly surly - have you ever seen The Sweeney, for instance, or Steptoe and Son?

#72 & 73

I loved Blake's 7.

I recently saw some of the episodes and was amazed at the low budget scenery. It wasn't the same. I stopped watching lest I destroy my wonderful memories.

www.flickr.com/photos/65741746@N08/6270232861/in/photostream

www.flickr.com/photos/65741746@N08/6270225567/in/photostream

I thought I'd better get back "on topic". These are images (again, only from my webcam) of booklets published by Brian J. Showers' Swan River Press.

So far, the series consists of the publication of a bibliography, an anonymous story identified as by Le Fanu by M.R. James, his complete Ballads and Poems and his complete Ghost Stories of Chapelizod, otherwise split between the novel The House by the Churchyard and the collection Madam Crowl's Ghost.

I have to take and post photographs of Curfew by Lucy M. Boston. It was published by Swan River Press and is a beautiful hardback book with not just a nice dust jacket, but a beautiful image on the book covers themselves.

#72 - Servalan!!! Um ... excuse me ... cold shower ...

#73 - I caught an episode of Steptoe and Son in the early hours a couple of days ago. I was a little surprised at how dark it was - much more so than I'd remembered.

Servalan was a hot babe. There was constant conflict, friction, mistrust and violence between the crew. Hard to tell who was the "enemy".

www.abebooks.co.uk/books/thriller-castle-dark-horror-romance/gothic-fiction.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-U111003-h00-gothicAV-_-01cta&abersp=1

I've just been sent this link

Folio's baby! Yeah, that cover's a total win.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/65741746@N08/6296378580/in/photostream

This is the dust jacket for a 60-page hardback collecting two stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Spalatro: Two Italian Tales. It was published in 2001 by the Sarob Press, which (I learned recently) ceased publishing in 2007 but has started up again. Presumably this copy is second-hand (it's from Cold Tonnage Books) but it looks unread and "as new". Confession: I haven't read it yet.

p.s. re. the off-topic discussions earlier, Tanith Lee wrote an episode of Blake's 7, I thought possibly that fact could legitimise the discussion?

I've recently 'discovered' and been quite blown away by the now defunct Franklin Library. Here are some relevant editions I found -

http://s1131.photobucket.com/albums/m548/alaudacorax/Franklins/

Anyone know of - or preferably own and be will be willing to upload pictures of - any more?

ETA - A fraction off-topic but I've ordered one of their editions of Paradise Lost (how the hell can one touchstone Paradise Lost and not have John Milton come up top of the list?!). Yet again I'm planning to pay for it and lose weight by giving up takeaways for February (who said 'fat chance'?).

82

I have a sole Franklin Library: a Tales of Mystery and Imagination Poe volume with the Harry Clarke illustrations... I linked to the plate for 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' in our reading group thread. The cover scan is in my library somewhere, but I can't seem to get touchstones to refer to it... (And I experience the same WTF touchstones moment when I link to The Island of Dr. Moreau (which I left as is so you can see the problem yourself...Joseph Silva's script from a remake of a FILM?!)).

Anyway... :D

Edit: oh wow, the touchstone for the FL seems to have worked!

Utterly off-topic: scrolling through the photos on here...those are some sexxxxxy shots I took of the Ann Radcliffe set on that rococo chair!!

I wonder if one can call those Franklins 'rococo books'?

I've got three Franklin Library books. I don't recall that they were ever marketed in the UK, but about twenty years ago I picked up copies of The Odyssey and Candide in a discount bookshop. Most of the shop's interesting stock consisted of US hardbacks.

This summer I took a chance and ordered a copy of Murther & Walking Spirits via ABE books. This is in their "Signed First Edition" series.

I've also got one Easton Press book, also from ABE: The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

86

I have a few Easton Press volumes. They've mostly gone to s**t the past few years (I used to subscribe, but the quality dipped a LOT), so when I find the earlier editions they're pretty gorgeous! My favorites are the Poems of John Keats, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (GORGEOUS!!), Heart of Darkness (really nice!), and The Arabian Nights.

I have the Cambridge University Press Christmas Book for 1955, privately printed, limited to 500 copies. The title is "The Town of Cambridge as it ought to be reformed: The Plan of Nicholas Hawksmoor interpreted in an essay by David Roberts and a set of eight drawings by Gordon Cullen".

I don't know much about it (putting "Cambridge University Press" or "Cambridge printer" into a search engine doesn't lead anywhere helpful) but it's a handsome book, having marbled front and back covers, the front with a clear red spot in the middle of the marbling (I'm sure I read somewhere that it was made by a drop of ox blood, but I don't know where I saw that). Inside the spot is an embossed image of what I presume is a college building.

The eight "vistas" compare, in double spreads, Cambridge's medieval streets with Hawksmoor's baroque or neo-classical proposed re-modelling.

If it belongs here, it's by virtue of Hawksmoor's sinister reputation (thanks mainly to Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, I believe).

Can I ask for a little help?

I've been looking online at the Library of America Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches and it's given in several places as 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.8 inches (20.6 x 13.2 x 4.6 cm) and 1,493 pages.

Now, this doesn't seem quite credible to me - 1,493 pages and only 1.8 inches thick? It seems to me that the paper would be so thin as to be transparent.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Is it a good, sound edition - worth having?

I've had my impressions of Hawthorne revised upward a bit by our reading of Rappaccini's Daughter - I was rather put off him when we did The Black Veil - so I've been considering a 'complete' edition and this is the only one I've turned up, so far.

> 89

Hello. The LOA Poe: Essays and Reviews runs to 1544 numbered pages and measures 2 inches thick (including the covers).

The paper is thin and there is some show-through but it is sturdy. I'd say it's similar to the paper used in a compact Bible. Also, it "meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48 - 1984".

The LOA volumes are in a standardised format, hardcovers (cloth cover rather than textured paper), sewn bindings. The texts are all freshly edited and typeset.

Many thanks, houseful.

89

I've got both LOA Hawthorne volumes: the novels and the tales. They are only about 2 inches thick. The paper is what my grandmother calls 'bible paper:' thin, but of very good quality. I suppose houseful already covered this, but figured I'd give my two cents as a big LOA fan. ;)

Many thanks, veil.

The Folio Society box set mentioned up the top, The Complete Novels of Mrs Ann Radcliffe, arrived here an hour or two back.

So, I was sitting here, drooling over it, entering it into my library and so on, and generally happy as a sandbag, when, suddenly, my nit-picker gene exploded into life like somebody stuck a pin in me. 'Mrs Ann Radcliffe'? 'Mrs Ann Radcliffe'! 'Mrs Ann Radcliffe'!!!

Now, in my younger days, a woman could only have been called 'Mrs Ann Radcliffe' if she had been a widow, and I assume this would have been so in her day, too. And she never was a widow. She should have been known as 'Ann Radcliffe', 'Mrs William Radcliffe' or - and I'm fairly sure this is how I remember her being referred to prior to the last few decades - 'Mrs Radcliffe'.

Thank goodness it's only on the slipcase and I won't be able to see it once it's nicely tucked into a shelf of books, otherwise it would be nagging at me for the rest of my days.

ETA - And I'm sure she'd have been affronted at such a breach of etiquette.

It gets worse.

Trying to find out more about this online, I was surprised to find it asserted that the form 'Mrs Ann Radcliffe would only have been correct form for a divorced woman. While I might possibly have got the wrong end of the stick about widows, I have doubts about the historicity of this as I can't imagine there would have been a conventionally-accepted correct form for a divorcee before the twentieth century. Not in the UK, anyway.

Have we any experts here?

> 94, 95

Now you've pointed it out, I'm annoyed I didn't spot it on my copy.

I imagine it's the result of an editorial decision rather than ignorance: they'd want the author's full name, but know that she's at least as well known as "Mrs"...and end up with a compromise that erroneously suggests (to those who know about correct forms of address) she was a divorcee.

As I said, my nit-picker gene was playing me up - you should ignore me, really.

http://www.librarything.com/pic/4273469

Apologies for the poor quality - I still haven't got anything better than my MacBook to take pictures with - but that above is The Northanger Set of Jane Austen Horrid Novels, published by the Folio Society in 1968.

Unusually for FS, they are not illustrated (in fact they came out under the 'Folio Press' imprint, which was used at various times for books not quite in the mainstream of the Society's output).

This particular set is admittedly a little bit tatty (and smelly, the books have been airing for the past two weeks), and was hardly a bargain. Still, if had I passed up this opportunity I don't know when or if another one would have come along.

Okay, let's try this again (can't get the pics to work...).

Earlier, while dusting, I stumbled upon an interesting volume, so thought it fitting to resurrect this thread from the dead (how apropos...).

This is the oldest Folio Society volume I own (1956), a copy of Radcliffe's The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (using the latter title exclusively, though I've noticed that 'The Italian' is preferred in every other example I've seen). Some really clever use of Gothic tracery ('Gothick' as the introduction has it!) on the spine and in the text ornaments; the woodcuts remind me very much of Folio's edition of The Golem. I also have a set of Folio's Complete Novels of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (which includes this same book with typical 'The Italian' title, incidentally), but they aren't illustrated beyond frontispieces, so this is really a pretty neat edition!

Apologies for the blurry pics (I've got shaky hands). Let's hope this works this time!

(Edit: alright, couldn't get the damned thing to work, so just including a link to Imgur.)

http://imgur.com/gallery/jMp8W

>101 veilofisis:

That's a nice edition. I've seen it on offer from Ardis Books but their website rarely provides photos of the interior pages of the books they offer. With its marbles sides it looks like in series with the Folio Society edition of The Monk. It would be an informal series though, since the two editions were published 28 years apart!

I can see what you mean about the woodcuts, although at the same time, Vladimir Zimakov's illustrations for The Golem are surely evoking early 20th Century Expressionism; whilst one of the interesting things about the illustrations in Folio Society books generally, is that you can trace fashions (and available technologies) in British commercial illustration through them.

In the '50s, a publication like Radio Times might well have commissioned something like the work in The Italian to illustrate a TV or radio drama. Up until very recently, in fact, they would still be commissioning tiny pictures from the likes of Mick Brownfield or Clifford Harper (illustrators of recent FS editions of The Martian Chronicles and The Camberwell Beauty, respectively) for the "Today's {radio} Choices" column - actually, no, they still commission them. This evening's performance of Billy Budd on Radio 3 was illustrated with a picture by Julian de Narvaez (The Green Fairy Book!)

A book from Centipede Press, and bit of an extravagance.

Here's my usual blurry photography, showing the dust jacket and title page. The illustrator, Harry Brockway, is someone whose work for the Folio Society I'm familiar with (he illustrated their Frankenstein, for example). His distinctive "seen-through-a-snowstorm stippling technique - if that's the correct technical term when it's wood engraving - isn't very clear; it's produced some moiré interference on the title page image.

Anyway, this is "Writing Madness" and is a collection of fiction and non-fiction by Patrick McGrath who was something to do with the New Gothic in the '80s. I don't really know what the New Gothic is, although I read his collection Blood and Water when Penguin brought it out as a paperback original (which I still own - making this purchase even more of an extravagance). On the basis of what I remember of those stories, there was an engagement with sexuality and gender identity that I don't think got much play in traditional Gothic, plus a provocatively tongue in cheek, camp tone to some of the stories..or maybe it was rather more ironic (using certain tropes but not playing it straight). It's a long time since I read the book and glancing through this new collection has refreshed my memory somewhat but it's not the same as rereading properly. And I couldn't say if that one collection is a fair representation of the whole New Gothic movement.

The non-fiction includes a memoir of his childhood next door to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum (is it was then called). His father was the "medical superintendent". I guess more like a prison governor than a doctor, although McGrath records he "set about dragging this unwieldy, overburdened institution into the 20th century".

http://www.librarything.com/pic/5858753

Advance warning: I noticed that Amazon UK is offering pre-publication orders for an expanded second edition of Jonathan Rigby's American Gothic. The original version covers 60 years of horror cinema, from the sllents up to the late 40's. There's no indication what the expanded material will cover, e.g. is it more recent films, have more films from the original 60-year period come to light?

>104 housefulofpaper:

Thanks for that. I wanted that but when we last discussed it copies were only available at silly prices.

I've pre-ordered it. It will probably turn out to be far cheaper within a few weeks of publication, but if I hadn't pre-ordered it would almost certainly sell out quickly and only be available at silly prices again (sigh).

Does anybody own the Knickerbocker Classics edition The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (I'm not sure touchstones links the correct edition so I didn't use them)?

From what I've seen - Amazon, etc - it looks very tempting, but it's very cheap, which gives me pause.

>106 alaudacorax:

I've seen it in Waterstones, but wrapped in cellophane so I wasn't able to assess it properly. The reviews on Amazon look encouraging, but on inspection they refer to at least on other collected edition (Barnes and Noble).

I think I read that there was a possibility that Leslie S. Klinger would produce a second Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, so that all the stories would be collected in two large volumes.

>107 housefulofpaper:

That happens a lot with Amazon - irritating.

A quick look on Klinger's website didn't find any info, but I might be interested if a second volume creates a 'complete', as opposed to a 'selected'. I hadn't paid much attention to the current volume, seeing it as a 'selected'.

I've been dithering for ages - years, perhaps - about buying the Eldritch Tales hardback to go with my Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales ... - checked the other day and the only copies available were hundreds of pounds. Should have bought one when it was new, shouldn't I?

Having said that, cheap hardbacks are cheap for a reason and the spine of my Necronomicon clearly shows that the book has been dipped into a lot - it doesn't look too bad but it wouldn't pass as 'mint'. With the Knickerbocker Classics, I was wondering if the physical quality of the books is any better - and suspecting not.

Since I posted >106 alaudacorax:, though, I've ordered the three Joshi Penguins, but it would be nice to have a complete, decent-quality, hardback collection. Perhaps I'll start collecting the Arkham House editions ...

>108 alaudacorax: - Perhaps I'll start collecting the Arkham House editions ...

I wrote that bit assuming that the Arkham House editions currently in print are good quality productions - anyone know any different?

... because I've just had a brilliant idea. I've started August back up to thirteen stone again (182lbs for friends across the pond). If I was to treat myself to an Arkham House edition every time I managed to go a calendar month without eating a takeaway I'd lose weight and end each month with an nice new hardback and more money in the bank! Why is pizza so enjoyable, though?

>109 alaudacorax:

Personally, I'd be cautious about obtaining the Arkham House editions - the press is apparently more or less moribund, although the website is up. I've looked from time to time but never dared to order from it. It would be good if someone with first-hand knowledge could let us know the actual situation with them.

That said, I can let you know what the Lovecraft editions are like, because there was a period when some Arkham House books appeared in the London branch of Forbidden Planet.

So, they are good quality hardbacks, but not fine press editions. They're a little smaller than the usual commercial hardback. Keeping the dimensions, I imagine, of their first editions from the 1940s, about 14x21 cm. The binding cloth under the dust jacket IS cloth, and not the usual textured paper. The paper is off-white with no show-through to speak of (it's only noticeable if the other side of the leaf is blank). The typeface is very legible.

You want to make sure that the edition you get hold contains the corrected texts edited by S. T. Joshi; the older editions are apparently marred by carrying over errors from the stories original magazine printings or, where original typescripts were available, misreadings of Lovecraft's handwritten amendments. To be honest, the older editions are probably going for crazy prices.

The current jacket illustrations are probably not the best these books have ever had, being a little stiff; but for all that they give the whole package an air of a book produced in the 60s or 70s and aimed at public libraries rather than private owners.

The stories in the Penguin editions are all in three Arkham House volumes (in a different order; and the Penguins include some later editorial revisions). There is a fourth volume, The Horror in the Museum which includes the "revisions" and collaborations - the Lovecraft entered into both for friends and paying clients - and which often touch on (and sometimes extend) the Mythos.

>111 housefulofpaper:

The Arkham House Facebook page offers more information. Apparently they have recently reprinted some popular volumes, and the Lovecrafts are certainly listed on the website. I couldn't find any suggestion online that orders aren't being fulfilled.

Eldritch Tales sweeps up the stories omitted from Necronomicon, mostly early/minor ones, but including some that are arguably important vis-a-vis the development of the Mythos - "Nyarlathotep", "The Festival"; some of the collaborations/revisions; a short piece of cod-scholarship, "History of the Necronomicon"; Lovecraft's long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature"; the sonnet-sequence "Fungi from Yuggoth" and a long afterword by editor Stephen Jones, "Lovecraft in Britain".

Neither the Penguin or Arkham House collections include the poems or "History of the Necronomicon" (although no doubt Arkham have published Lovecraft's poetry as some point). Klinger includes "History of the Necronomicon", and also reproduces a copy of Lovecraft's annotated typescript.

Production-wise it's in series with Necronomicon, but the type is a larger size (definitely easier to read) and thankfully almost free of typos.

>110 housefulofpaper:

For what it's worth, I filled in an order on the Arkham House website - not to buy but just to work out how much the postage would be (one of the three volumes you mention currently asks 'profiteering' prices on Amazon and Abebooks) ... and I couldn't get the system to work - kept telling me I'd filled in a field incorrectly when I clearly hadn't. Which suggests to me they're having trouble keeping on top of things.

>112 housefulofpaper:

Useful round-up - thanks for that.

I'm probably riding an old hobby-horse here, but it's something that really baffles and annoys me. How can someone on AbeBooks ask £45,000-plus for a first edition of Uncle Silas ... and not include some photographs?

Okay - fair enough - anyone thinking of spending that amount of money is probably going to go to look at the thing, but when you come right down the price range to three figures, have they really not got a camera, a laptop with a webcam, a mobile phone, even?

>113 alaudacorax:
Glad it was useful. I wish my typing hadn't been so wayward, though.

>114 alaudacorax:
I was intrigued by what you wrote, and searched Abe Books "highest price first" - and the prices being asked for paperbacks, or for the Folio society edition, are what shocked me. Sellers with a 4-star rating, too.

>115 housefulofpaper:

That idea I had about abstinence from takeaways occasioning nice hardbacks had me window-shopping ('drooling' would be more honest) on AbeBooks for ages. There are all sorts of really nice-looking editions about, but, in particular, both Franklin Library and Easton Press did really tempting leather-bound editions of Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Easton Press did Frankenstein and Dracula and Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

Oh well ... I have to try to survive till September 1st on a healthy diet, first ...

>116 alaudacorax:

Um ... I had no idea that Easton Press was still in business (or did I know and had simply forgotten?) I've just discovered that they are putting out a four-volume The Complete Fiction of H P Lovecraft. Problem is, their website doesn't say anything about the editing.

>117 alaudacorax:

You must have missed the "healthy rivalry" between the Easton Press Collectors and the Folio Society Devotees groups on here, then!

I'd hazard a guess that the book(s) will be freshly edited. There isn't a venerable old edition for them to scan-and-reprint as an expensive facsimile, and they're in direct competition with Knickerbocker Classics, Barnes and Noble, etc. in the U.S. This is another site where I personally would be cautious about ordering directly; a number of posts to the Easton Press Collectors group cite production/quality control issues, and as business they're reportedly not really geared up to taking foreign orders. But that said, the book (or set) might be worth the hassle.

By the way I've got an Easton Press Tales of Mystery and Imagination (second hand from Ardis Books in the UK). I'll take some pictures on my trusty fuzzy webcam and post them to my gallery. I've also got the Easton Press complete poems, which has a very nice cover - black with a repeating raven design in gold - but it turns out the insides are a photographically reduced reproduction of an LEC (Limited Editions Club) edition. Now that might be worth investigating, if you win the lottery (some LEC prices are reasonable if you ignore postage from the US, but not Poe titles).

>118 housefulofpaper:

Done. Four photos added to my member gallery.

>118 housefulofpaper:

Following on your post ('healthy rivalry') I looked at some threads in the 'Folio Society devotees' and 'Easton Press Collectors' groups. Hmmm.

I have to say I'm not really a fan of Folio Society books. I find the cover designs of so many of them 'cheap-looking' - garish, even - and much prefer what I think of as the more traditional look of Easton Press or Franklin Library. Perhaps it's my age ...

However, I'm nonplussed that Easton Press don't give any info in their advertising on the text they use in the Lovecraft - it seems unprofessional and darkens my impression of them.

Having said all that, some of those threads are pointing me to other imprints to look into - one's finances are at serious risk browsing this website!

I pre-ordered a book in the summer and it arrived from the States today. Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill is an edited collection of letters between H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. It's massive, 800 pages long and fairly small print. At first glance you could easily mistake the book for The Oxford Companion to the English Language or the like. I haven't had a chance to do more than peek into it so far. Lovecraft seems to be the more voluble of the two correspondents (no surprise there). The index suggests the subjects of their letters concentrated on weird fiction, the magazine business of the time, and their circle of professional acquaintances.

>121 housefulofpaper:

It's funny how long it takes you to see something correctly once you've seen it wrongly - I've been puzzling for a couple of minutes on the significance of 'Downward Spire' - and I am wearing my reading glasses!

I'm sort of curious, but not enough to shell out for it. Anyway, I've spent rather a lot on books lately (not Gothic, though). I'd be interested to know how highly-crafted their private letters were, though. One would suspect that either man could be a great letter-writer, in slightly different ways.

>122 alaudacorax:

Yes, it autocorrected to "Downward" when I first wrote the title despite - as you noted - it not making any sense.

I haven't got, or read, any of the collections of Lovecraft's letters that Arkham House published, but I do have the collection of letters published by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society in 2015. These are the letters he wrote to one of his "revision" clients (revision covering a sliding scale from editing/tuition in writing for publication, to outright ghostwriting).

I'm always a little in awe of anyone who can write and write with the ease and fluency of speech, and the sheer length and number of his letters shows Lovecraft was one of these people; that said, there is still a stiffness and a pedantic tendency to over-explanation are on show from time to time (and they're in his literary works, too). He can be chatty, in his way, though, and reveals quite a lot about himself (perhaps more than he intended). Most importantly, they are readable, even as you notice their flaws, or wince a little at a gauche moment, you want to read on.

Of course the tone between Lovecraft and Smith is likely to be quite different, and the correspondence was carried on over a longer period. I'll let you know how I get on with it.

A few minutes ago I - momentarily - thought I'd bought a real bargain.

I found a The Leisure Circle Library edition of Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Stories, for £2 in an used book shop (can't, for the life of me, find a touchstone for that edition even though it is present on LT). I was just looking online for a cover image, and I found all the used copies on Amazon are asking over £100. I was quite pleased with myself.

Then I checked AbeBooks - lots of the exact same edtion going for under a fiver. There are some right chancers on Amazon ...

Here's a book I learned about on the Fine Press Forum, here on Librarything. It's a small press edition of "Rappaccini's Daughter", printed letterpress by the Allen Press in 1991 (as an aside, does anyone else's computer insist on autocorrecting the first word of the title to "Rapacity"? Grr!)

Anyway, I was intrigued enough to keep an eye out for the book on AbeBooks from time to time, and two copies were listed a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps foolishly, because it wasn't cheap, I bought a copy and here it is, coincidentally just as the story's come up as a topic of conversation.











Apologies for the wonky angles and "artistic" framing - I didn't want to crack the book's spine by opening it flat (I don't think this copy's ever been read, actually). I think I've captured enough to give an idea of the book's distinctive features.

There's the striking printed cloth cover of course, which was the first thing to catch my eye.

The book runs to about 100 pages and the first half consists of three "reflections on Hawthorne" reprinted from essays by - as the title-page states - Poe, Trollope, and Henry James. There are wood engravings by John DePol - one full page and a couple of smaller ones. Titles and running heads are printed in a second colour - as you can see.

I was warned by the Fine Press Forum discussion that there are some faults in the printing: typos, faulty leading (the running head almost touches the main text on a couple of pages). The introduction by, presumably, the Allens themselves (husband and wife, I gather), is curiously disjointed and unfocused. The discussion raised the point that the Allens were well into their eighties when this book was made. It's among, I think, the last three or so titles they produced after more than 50 years of book production.

Some dissatisfaction with the book was expressed in the forum because of these technical shortcomings. I prefer, perhaps romantically, to view the book as a testament to the Allen's choosing to continue to work at their craft despite the challenges of age.

>125 housefulofpaper:

Well, I'm envious - flaws and all ...

>126 frahealee: - Maybe a new bookshelf is in order ...

Ah - the well-known refrain of the Librarythinger ...

>126 frahealee:

I'm sorry, I somehow missed your Flannery O'Connor question. No, neither of those works are in the FS collection. I think they're both novels, aren't they? I keep meaning to see the film adaptation of Wise Blood.

>129 housefulofpaper:

Both Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away are novels, although really short ones. I thought Huston's adaptation of Wise Blood showed a lot of love for the novel but lacked its power. An obvious problem is that, in the book, Sabbath Lily is 12 while the actress (surely to avoid a mess of issues) looks about 18. One thing that's nice about the film is that it has lots of character actors in it that are always great to watch and Huston himself makes an appearance.

I'm resurrecting this thread to give notice of newly published, or recently announced, editions that may be of interest.

Dracula
The Folio Society's "Christmas collection" was announced on their website today. It includes an edition of Dracula. This is a standard version (i.e. a rather less luxurious edition) of the 2019 limited edition illustrated by Angela Barrett. Still looks very nice.
https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/dracula.html

Frankenstein
Amaranthine Books of Zagreb (I have a copy of their 2019 Dracula) have announced two new books. One of them is Frankenstein. No indication of whether it will be based on the 1818 or the 1831 text. Apparently this will be available to preorder before the end of the year.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
And this is the other announced title. This is, according to the email, further along in the production process and should be available for preorders quite soon.

But I saw on LT today that yet another edition of Dorian has been announced today. This one is being done by Lyra's Books. Thread here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/335923#unread

>132 housefulofpaper:

An hour and a half just slipped through my fingers, somewhere between publishers' websites and AbeBooks. My plastic cards are cowering in fear, somewhere. Houseful must be at it again ...

I really do want a nice hardback, 1818 Frankenstein; but those prices ...

>133 alaudacorax:

Just been looking at the last couple of posts on the 'Vathek' thread.

I've realised that, paradoxically, my problem is that I've got TOO interested in Gothic literature. I dread to think how many £100s I've spend on softcover, Gothic lit. studies in the last few years (so many of which I'm still reading or haven't even started). If I'd been less obsessed, that money could have build up a rather nice collection of Gothic fine editions by now. But would I have wanted to? Catch-22.

Has anyone any experience of these 'Gyan Books Pvt. Ltd', leatherbound editions from New Delhi? I'm regularly seeing them when I look up older classics on AbeBooks or such. They look very nice in the images, but what is the quality like in your hand? Are they worth the price?

>135 alaudacorax:

I've also seen them coming up in searches, but I haven't been tempted to get one for myself.

There's a subreddit with a few comments - some pro, some con but I'm not sure I'd trust any of them.

There's also this promo I found on YouTube, which at least gives an idea of what the book covers/cases look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOjKQkQqq2E

Both the promo and the subreddit are clear that the books are printed from digitised scans of old printed copies.

>136 housefulofpaper:

Hmm ... not too sure about digitised scans. To be honest, new leatherbound editions are something I associate with winning the lottery anyway.

The Castle of Otranto

An appreciation, with photos, of the Folio Society edition of The Castle of Otranto. I have a copy of this edition too and I think I've put some pcitures of it up, but Dr Carter has a much better camera!
https://www.librarything.com/topic/355569#n8303990

Poe's Phantasia

Have they been talking about this fine press edition of Poe over at the Fine Press Forum? If they have, I managed to overlook it.
https://www.arionpress.com/store/124-poes-phantasia

As well as their "Tales of the Weird" paperback series, in recent years the British Library has also published a few hardback collections, usually one-author collections. The latest one, which I've seen in the wild (i.e. in a branch of Waterstones) is devoted to Bram Stoker: https://shop.bl.uk/products/the-burial-of-the-rats-and-other-tales-of-the-macabr...

Talking of the Tales of the Weird, I was aware that they were coming out pretty frequently, but there is evidently a firm monthly publication schedule, and the BL is even offering a subscription service.

I was thinking about the Belgian Marabout Fantastique paperback series. My French friend had a copy of the Marabout Malpertius in the family home and I posted pictures of some other titles in the series, listed at the back of that book, a while ago.

I don't know how I managed to miss it at the time, but I've just found an entry, with reproductions of many covers (and a link to yet more) in the Halloween 2022 entry of John Coulthart's blog:

https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2022/10/31/marabout-fantastique-book-co...

The first two volumes in Hippocampus Press's collected short fiction of Algernon Blackwood have arrived. These were due last September but publication was delayed.

They are POD and although I ordered direct from the publisher they were printed in the UK. I hope they were sent direct from the print facility rather than making two Transatlantic journeys first.

The books are now listed on Amazon UK.

Volume 1 has about 500 pages and volume two has about 550. The copyright page indicates that there will be six volumes in total.These first two volumes cover the years 1889-1907 and 1908-1910.

>141 housefulofpaper:

I've ordered them but, oh dear, so conflicted. The last Hippocampus books I bought (as far as I remember) were all those Arthur Machen books three years and plus ago and I've still to read any of them. TBR pile is going to topple and crush my house. But they are eventually going to add up to a complete Algernon Blackwood (we hope)—just GOT to have them ...

One of the troubles is, of course, wasting time online when I could be reading ...

I made a tangled-up post about The Picture of Dorian Grey here, then decided to move it to its own thread ...

>143 alaudacorax:
I have enjoyed reading your tangled thread and your quest for the original version.

>144 pgmcc:

Thanks, but they really come from posting before thinking things out properly ... perilously close to 'stream of consciousness'.

>145 alaudacorax:
That is part of their charm. It was an honest flow of thought.

>142 alaudacorax:

I don't know if those Hippocampus Blackwoods are selling like hot cakes. The second volume was out of stock when I ordered and thus was possibly going to arrive when I was on holiday last week, so I cancelled it. I've just remembered about it and reordered and was surprised to see that it's now in stock (on Amazon) but marked 'only five left'. If that's a sign that they're moving fast I'm quite pleased—I feel that Blackwood is a brilliant but underrated author.

>147 alaudacorax:

I don't know what it means for a print on demand book to be out of stock, or "only five -" or "only one copy left". I mean, is it sharp practice or does it reflect the operational realities of Amazon's printing facilities?

There's been an encouraging uptick in reprints of Blackwood in recent years. There's even a reprint of a late collection - I thnk it's called Shocks! - that was stocked in Waterstones last year. I didn't buy it, in the expectation that in time all the stories would be in this Hippocampus press edition.

I haven't seen any of his novels reprinted since some House of Stratus editions in the early 00's, which I think must have used early laser printing technology, since the pages looked just like bound-up photocopies.

>148 housefulofpaper:

Now you've put another thought in my mind. I don't remember that I've ever read a novel by Algernon Blackwood.

>148 housefulofpaper:, >149 alaudacorax:

It surprises me that a quick search online doesn't really throw up much information on Blackwood's work. For instance, none of the novels seem to have a Wikipedia entry. I suppose I could find some info if I work at it ... too lazy at the moment ...

I got a bee in my bonnet following the discussion of Arkham House books a little while ago. As as been mentioned several times in the past, these books have been reprinted and were a mainstay of British bookshops' Sci Fi and Horror shelves in the 1970s.

It made me want to review the Arkham House books that I own in other editions.



First off then, Out of Space and Time (1942) and Lost Worlds (1944). Reprinted - via the intermediate step of a UK hardback published by Neville Spearman (both titles in 1971) - by Panther Books in 1974 (split into two volumes).

I think I'm right in saying Witch House was the first novel published by Arkham House, in 1945.

The edition pictured is a hardback from Centipede Press in 2013.

The Hounds of Tindalos was first published in 1946. According to the copyright page of these UK Panther editions (1975), the text is reprinted from a 1950 UK edition brought out by The Museum Press (I can remember small publishers having offices, or a presence/shopfront on Great Russell Street facing the British Museum. Maybe one or two are still there).

Obviously, Panther have again split the contents across two separate volumes.

Also first published in 1946, a big collection of short stories by Robert E Howard (creator of Conan).

Skull-Face and Others is another book that was published by Neville Spearman (in 1974).

Split across three volumes, the Panther edition appeared in 1976. The cover illustrations are credited to Chris Achilleos (who inter alia was doing the covers for Target's Doctor Who novelisations at the same time and also did a lot of "sexy lady barbarian warrior" sword and sorcery covers, one of which Kate Bush borrowed from for her "Baboushka" video).

Cover price, by the way, was 60p per volume.

Three from 1947.



This Mortal Coil by Cynthia Asquith (Lady Cynthia Asquith) was later reprinted in a revised edition under a new title, What Dreams May Come. This 2024 edition from Solar Press is apparently the first reprint of the original version (albeit with reference made to the later version for copyediting etc.).

And it's a strangely similar story with Ray Bradbury's first short story collection, Dark Carnival. It was extenstively revised and retitled The October Country in 1955. I think this 2024 paperback (from HarperCollins under their HarperVoyager imprint) is the first mass-market edition of the original version.

And another important American Horror/Fantasy/Science Fiction author, Fritz Leiber; and again, a first book: Night's Black Agents. Once again, the copyright page credits the first UK publication, from Neville Spearman in 1975. This UK paperback - from Sphere, this time - dates from 1977.

First published 1958, The Mask of Cthulhu contains six stories by August Derleth in continuance of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos (although, as commentators have noted, imposing a Christian framework onto Lovecraft's Godless universe). Also, every home seems to have a copy of The Necronomicon as if it were the telephone directory or TV Guide. This 1976 Panther paperback again comes about via a Neville Spearman UK hardback (1974). The excellent cover art is by Bruce Pennington.

The Arkham House edition of The Abominations of Yondo was from 1960. Neville Spearman hardback 1972. This Panther paperback was published in 1974. Cover art by Bruce Pennington. (Touchstones all go to the short story).

I think Tales of Science and Sorcery was the first posthumous CAS collection that Arkham House published. It features as a forward a "memoir" of CAS by E. Hoffmann Price. As the copyright page only mentions the Arkham House edition I assume this 1976 Panther paperback was the first UK edition.

A big change here. The original editions were published by Arkham House in the late '80s -into 1990. The editorial policy had made a turn to publishing a lot more science fiction.



The Jaguar Hunter is a short story collection from Lucius Shepard. The copyright page shows original publication was in magazines such as Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Original publication was 1987. As you can see, this 1988 UK paperback is in Paladin, which was Collins' highbrow, "B" format imprint. (as Paladin was part of Grafton, which was the successor to Panther via a series of corporate takeovers and sell-offs, there's some DNA shared with the pulpy 1970s paparbacks above). And the marketing is clearly pushing this as mainstream literary fiction, maybe with a Magical Realism tinge. Cover by Liz Wright.

Bruce Sterling was a pioneering Cyberpunk author. Crystal Express is another short story collection and, again, the copyright page shows original publication in the American digest-sized Science Fiction magazines. Original publication in 1989. This 1991 UK paperback is from Legend, Arrow Books Science Fiction imprint, but the real ultimate owner was Random Century Group. We're coming to the end of the period when UK hardcover and paperback publishers were separate entities. Cover illustration by "Keith Scaife of Sarah Brown Artists Agency". 33 years ago and it's aready getting all too corporate for my liking!

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is yet another short story collection. James Tiptree, Jr was a pen name used by Alice Sheldon. Her identity wasn't exposed until about a decade into her writing career. A lot of these stories were first published in original paperback anthologies which were quite a feature on 1970s Science Fiction publishing. The Arkham House edition was published in 1990. This Gollancz sf masterworks edition dates from 2014 (although my copy is actually a 2nd printing). cover by Christopher Gibbs.

This is the final batch, unless I discover that I've missed something.

These - more or less - all from the 1990s and return to Arkham House's Lovecraftian roots.



"A chilling collection of stories written and inspired by the Master of Horror", Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was originally published in 1969, but Arkham House produced a revised edition in 1990. My edition is a US paperback published by Ballantine under the Del Rey imprint (picked up from Forbidden Planet in London, where I also got some actual Arkham House titles). This is a paperback version of the 1990 version, originally published in 1998 but this is the 13th printing. Cover by John Jude Palencar.

Alone With the Horrors was a career-spanning retrospective for Liverpudlian author Ramsey Campbell from 1993 - so as it turns out, less than halfway through his career (he's still going). This UK paperback was published by Headline in 1994. It features a set of "plates" in the centre of the book- photomontage illustrations by J. K. Potter - unusual for a fiction title (aside from the old movie novelisations with stills and publicity photos in the middle). This copy is inscribed "All the Best, Matt!" by the author. Cover by Simon Dewey.

Cthulhu 2000 was a collection of mostly new-ish (an outlier from 1964, most from around 1990) Cthulhu Mythos fiction published in 1995. This Del Rey edition (again, from Forbidden Planet) was first published in 1999 and my copy's the 8th printing. Cover by Bob Eggleton.

Here's another book originally published by Arkham House. Revelations in Black in a new edition from Valancourt Books:





Edited to add: the original publication year was 1947 (as it says on the back cover).

It would make sense to post photos of my actual Arkham House books, wouldn't it:

The book on the left was bought new in Forbidden Planet about 15 years ago, but was published in the mid-1970s. I presume some of these titles were very slow sellers. Most of my books came secondhand from online sellers.





I couldn't resist showing the back cover of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean - Donald Sidney Fryer in his "troubadour costume".

Here are my H P Lovecraft Arkham house editions. These were also bought new from Forbidden Planet.





And here are all the books, with the dust jackets off.



As far as I know none of these books are especally rare, although I did start buying them 15 years ago, and Arkham House itself has apparently gone out of business, so even the Lovecraft titles can only become rarer as time goes on.

I'm not a huge Lovecraft fan, but those editions look amazing.

>161 housefulofpaper:

I don't know about 'especially rare', but Kecksies and Other Twilight Tales sets one back upwards of seventy quid these days, 'cos I've just been looking. Chain of thought: the word 'kecksies' caught my eye because I looked it up years ago after hearing it in Burgundy's speech towards the end of Henry V, probably Branagh's film; and I was quite taken with that front cover; and then I looked up the book online and it looked very promising; and then I saw the price ... slump ...

If I said I'm not going to buy any more books until I've knocked at least twenty off my reading lists and bought at least one new bookcase, would I stick to it? Don't know ... don't know ... never have so far ...

After breakfast yesterday I sat down to read some Jane Austen but instead managed to 'accidentally' read the whole of Helene Hanff's Q's Legacy which I'd bought about a year ago and completely forgotten about (you wouldn't believe the number of books I manage to get through when I'm trying to read something else). Finished a couple of hours ago. And that reminded me that I'd read it previously—in April, 1995 according to my journals—and it had prompted me to decide to read some of Quiller-Couch's (the 'Q' of the title) literary studies works ... and I still haven't got round to them ...

And now I've got a wish list of Quiller-Couches that are mysteriously not in the Kindle 'complete works' I've just lashed out £1-99 on. And that's on top of the wish list of books on Jane Austen I put together a few days ago. And then I get housefulofpaper tempting me with hemlock ... I should probably find a good quote from Socrates here, but I really should have been in bed hours ago ...

>160 housefulofpaper:, >161 housefulofpaper:

I have the same editions of Lovecraft and Myers. The latter was bought second hand, but the former I bought directly from Arkham House. I was slightly starstruck to discover that the woman who handled my order was surnamed Derleth - a daughter or granddaughter (in-law) I assume?

>164 AndreasJ:
I stumbled across a blog post some time ago that talked about members of the Derleth family taking over the running of Arkham House. I can't remember the details or what had happened beforehand - whether they had always owned the company but relinquished editorial control, or the history was more complicated. I'm sure the blog said that they had hoped to refocus the firm;s business onto the Cthulhu Mythos, in the belief that August Derleth's original business agreements gave them IP rights.

>163 alaudacorax:
I've read about the dérive, the drift, in connection with psychogepgraphy. I do drift through my reading - all reading plans go by the board - and sometimes odd coincidental connections are made. Actually the last one was a combination of YouTube and reading. Somehow I'd found a clip of Orson Welles performing one of Falstaff's speeches on, of all things, The Dean Martin Show. I found issue with Welles' presentation of Falstaff s the embodiment of "Merrie Olde England", was driven to find other interpretations (Roger Allam at the Globe seemed truer to the darker character I'd first encountered in school English lessons). Then the next day I happened to be reading a long piece by Marcel Schwob about François Villon, which was continually giving me illuminating resemblances between Shakespeare's version of 14th Century England and 15th Century France. I've had the Penguin Classics edition of Villon since the early '90s - still unread.

Quiller-Couch is somebody I became aware of through Rumpole of the Bailey. I think that's why I bought his edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse. Apart from that, all that I've read of him is one anthologised ghost story.

>162 Bookmarque:
It's an illusion, because they look different from UK hardbacks (and smell different too - the paper stock has a definite vanilla odour), but as soon as I saw them they reminded me of the kind of books that you used to seee only in school and public libraries. It's a strange kind of false nostalgia, I suppose. But that aside, I do think that the covers are very striking and effective (even the slightly rough-hewn finish adds rather than detracts from the effect).

Speaking of Arkham House, I came across this in a recent book sale (limited editions of Ben Hecht's preposterous dreck from the library of Donald Wandrei, AH co-founder and publisher):

The top most vignette repeats every chapter.

I also took a few snapshots of The Kingdom of Evil, published a few years later also by Covici, but with a different illustrator.

ETA: I didn't buy the books, they were just kind enough to show them to me.

>166 LolaWalser:
Preposterous dreck? I'll take that as fair warning! I was only vaguely aware of Hecht's career as a Hollywood scriptwriter but mentions of him as a late-decadent writer, when I started encountering them, was a surprise nevertheless. I haven't read any of his prose works (and looking through IMDb I've missed most of his films too; or at least I haven't seen them from beginning to end but must have caught bits on TV).

I have to confess to having been reeled in by the Decadents over the last thirty years or so, since viewing them with a degree of - disdain? distaste? - coloured by their critical reputation as second-rate, plus the now shop-soiled nature of the "shocking" elements of their work, anyway.

Turning to the actual book, thank you for sharing these pictures. I only knew the publisher through a couple of Arthur Machen titles that were complied by Vincent Starrett in the 1920s, but they evidently aimed for a market somewhere above mass-market bookmaking. Something like the Limited Editions Club, perhaps? Or am I wrong about early 20th Century US book publishing (excluding paperback publishing?) and this was the standard for the trade?

Wallace Smith's illustrations seem in the same spirit as Mahlon Blaine's illustrations for Alraune.

Edited - to correct "seen" to "seem".

Wallace Smith's illustrations seen in the same spirit as Mahlon Blaine's illustrations for Alraune.

Or Harry Clarke?

Hecht was a great scriptwriter but his "decadent" output is, IMO, simply goofy. He was much too late for the movement, which was ripe for satire even in its heyday, and in addition lacked any sort of originality (in contrast, for example, something like Burroughs' Naked lunch, although even later than Hecht, arguably expresses the decadent spirit with uncommon power).

I've read his earliest and last "decadent" novels, from Mallare and The Kingdom of Evil to The Sensualists, with a mixture of cringe and boredom. It's teen boy's Nietzschean fanfic... the verbal equivalent of waterboarding. Cutie: a warm mama, which he co-wrote (or co-signed) with the clochard/drunk-about-town Maxwell Bodenheim is almost touching in its attempts to be "naughty", and eminently forgettable. Apparently all of his novels are, seeing not one of that prolific mass has survived into popular memory. I had started a few that were situated in the film industry but I just couldn't keep my interest up. It's as if all the verbiage he knew so well to keep out of his film scripts, gushed forth in revenge in the novels.

Anyway, here are two snaps from the limited editions of The Kingdom of Evil:



Endpapers:



I presume even these limited editions are quite affordable, as they were priced here at only a hundred dollars or so. I was tempted for a bit, as I liked Angarola's illustrations, but then gave in to a first of A. J. Liebling and a couple ancient mysteries.

>169 LolaWalser:
Harry Clarke is probably closer in terms of the actual ink line but I don't think I've seen any nudes or overtly sexualised images in his work (and I'd be surprised if there was any, given that he was also active as a maker of stained glass and had many commissions for churches in Ireland).

I've had a look on Abe Books and the prices are a bit higher for somewhat scruffier copies, but then the shipping from the US bumps up the overall price by another 25% or so. There are cheap copies of UK paperbacks (the ones I saw all from the 1960s) of other Hecht titles. I also had a look at the Covici-McGee Machen editions currently available, but I resisted temptation.

I also looked at the Wikipedia entry for Pascal Covici, which supplied some facts, whereas I'd just gone on "vibes" from photos and footage of someCovici-McGee and Pascal Covici, Inc. books.

>169 LolaWalser:

Interesting. I'm sure I've come across a number of writers over the years who regarded their really memorable stuff as hack-work and couldn't see that what they thought was their life's work was, in reality, poor stuff.

Jean Ray ("the Belgian Edgar Allan Poe").

I've read all the Jean Ray translations from Wakefield Press. Looking online just in case there was anything else available in English, I found this:




Although the book is from a US publisher, I bought this copy from a Belgian online seller. About half of the contents are not in the Wakefield Press titles published to date (I hope there will be more).

I also bought the five "Penguin Weird Fiction" titles even though Claimed! is the only one I didn't already have in some form (Physical copies, not e-books).

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the Blackwood title has different contents from at least two previous titles from Penguin called Ancient Sorceries (and with a black cat* on the cover). This one collects all five Dr John Silence stories (there's been a Dover Thrift Edition with the same contents for decades, but I've never seen it in the UK, and I think I read that they don't get distribution here any more). BELATED CORRECTION! - The book does NOT include all the John Silence stories, it includes the last published story "A Victim of Higher Space", but drops one - "The Camp of the Dog", I think.

And also as I noted earlier, the Chambers title only contains the first half of the original The King in Yellow collection. It doesn't any other examples of his supernatural fiction, so it's a very short book (so, for that matter, is Claimed! - arguably it's a novella rather an a novel).

* it might have been a big cat on those earlier titles.



So here's the contents page for the anthology. I think this would have been a more exciting selection a few years ago but the Sinclair and Broster stories, which I would have said were harder to get hold of, have recently been reprinted (e.g. by British Library and Handheld Press - both stories are in Women's Weird.



One mistake I made was assuming the books were A format paperbacks. They are B format. I would say this new line can be directly compared to the "Penguin Mordern Classics Crime & Espionage" series that started a year or so ago. I've grabbed some actual 1960s Penguin and Crime A format paperbacks for comparison (It was a coincidence, but the "Good Show Sir! — bad science fiction and fantasy covers" group are mocking that exact J. G. Ballard title today).

I have a couple of additions to my Arkham House collection: one actual AH title and one modern paperback reprint.

This collection of Lucius Shepard's short fiction was published in 1991.









I thought the Shepard was a bargain when I saw it listed online. It turns out it was ex-library. It hasn't suffered too much, but the listing did NOT say that the library stickers have been torn off the cover.

Robert Bloch's career started as a teenage H. P. Lovecraft acolyte. This collection, originally from 1945, includes some Cthulhu Mythos stories. According to the book's Wikipedia entry, this is one of those AH titles that UK publisher Neville Spearman published in hardback in the 1970s, to be followed by Panther issuing it in paperback, split across two volumes (I've never seen them).

I've got some additions to my Arkham House/reprints of Arkham House titles. At this point, I wish I'd created a separate thread for them - I didn't anticipate having so many.

First off, this is a book I obtained a while ago, but I overlooked it because it's pure science fiction. Originally a serial in Astounding Science Fiction, Slan was published in hardback by Arkham House in 1946. This is a 1974 reprint, with an archetypal (I assume Chris Foss) '70s cover (but it doesn't seem dated, to me anyway. Is that because it's too abstract, or because film and TV SF still largely looks like that, or am I kidding myself and I only think it hasn't aged because that was my era?). The title had been a Panther paperback since 1960 and would obviously have had different cover art on earlier printings.

This might be a bit of a reach, but an element of the Gothic is the sense of sublime caused by untamed nature - or just natural things that are outside the usual human scale - mountain ranges being the classic case. And bearing in mind how the causes of the sense of the sublime grew over time, from the modest peaks of the Lake District, to the Alps, to the natural wonders of the continental United States, the discoveries that massively increased the size of the universe as we comprend it (it was as late as the 1920s I believe, when it was realised that nebulae were not "clouds" of some kind but other galaxies - "island universes" as they were called for a while. Gothic's sublime passing the baton on to Science Fiction's sense of wonder, as it were.





New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was an anthology of new Mythos stories that Arkham House published in 1980. This is the 1988 UK paperback. As the back cover blurb says, Grafton also published the book's predecessor Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. You can see my US Del Rey edition in >157 housefulofpaper:.

A digression into UK publishing history: Grafton was how Granada books was renamed, when Collins purchased the publishing imprints (including Panther Books) that Granada had acquired over the years. Granada apparently started as a cinema chain but I remember it as a conglomerate with fingers in many pies: Granada television - which held the ITV franchise for a big chunk of northern England, centred on Manchester, from 1956 to 2004 (at which point the franchisees merged to create ITV plc). It made, among other things, Coronation Street and the various Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series and TV movies. Motorway service stations. Television rental. Bingo Halls (formerly their cinemas). And so on.

I remember these Grafton paperbacks as the only Lovecraft editions in UK high street bookshops in the 1980s. The anthologies were joined by three volumes of HPL's original stories. They all had matching livery and Tim White illustrations (not very evocative of HPL perhaps but it's where adaptations and so forth had gone - this was the era of Re-Animator, after all).

I believe the texts for the three HPL volumes derived not from Arkham House (not even via the intermediary step of the Neville Spearman reprints), but rather from Gollancz hardbacks that date back to the '60s. Back then no hardback publisher had a paperback imprint, but would licence the rights to what were still seen as vaguely disreputable paperback reprint specialists (I suppose Penguin were changing perceptions but even by the '60s it was still an ongoing process).

Just recently, by the way, the three HPL volumes in identical livery have reappeared on the shelves, now published by HarperVoyager, because Harper & Row and William Collins, Sons & Co. merged in 1990.





And this last one, despite not being a hardback, is an Arkham House original.

In 1979, they published an edited version a notebook kept between 1929 and 1961 by Clark Ashton Smith. They excised "miscellaneous nonlierary material and kept story notes and poems. There are notes for both finished stories and others which were never developed beyond these short summaries. The title of the book is The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith.

>175 housefulofpaper: - I didn't anticipate having so many.

The story of a LibraryThinger's life ...

>175 housefulofpaper:

Fascinating post. I think it's going to be a weird sort of day, though. When I woke up an hour or so ago, I didn't suspect that part of my mind would shortly be pondering on how the concept of the sublime might apply to the mountains I was just seeing over on facebook in the backgrounds of photographs from Mars, while another part would be pondering on what HPL's take on stockings and suspenders might have been ...

Anyone have any hardbacks from or know anything about Nightbloom Library?

I'm tempted by this on Amazon,
In A Glass Darkly,
but though they seem to have a large number of publications, a lot of them very attractive as far as you can see on Amazon, an online search throws up nothing at all about this publisher, which makes me a bit wary.

Further to my comment over on the Gothic Gossip thread about the sheer volume of lesbian vampire books showing up when I was trying to do LT's latest Treasure Hunt, I don't know if this ties in but I suspect it does. Anyway ...

After posting >178 alaudacorax:, not seeing many attractive hardbacks of In a Glass Darkly, I searched for just Carmilla, to see what that would throw up (really, the gap I was feeling in my library was an attractive hardback Carmilla rather than In a Glass Darkly anyway—it's Carmilla that's the really important work). There are absolutely dozens of them out there! I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't more of a demand than for Dracula. There's even what looks like being a quite gorgeous, illuminated edition coming out in October (from Beehive Books). And here was I thinking that Carmilla was quite a niche interest.

Anyway, I've just managed to cure myself from lusting after that Barnes and Noble Dracula I've been mentioning over on the Dracula editions thread, which I really didn't need, and now I find myself lusting over that Beehive Carmilla for three or four times the price. Oh dear ...

>178 alaudacorax:

The trouble with books that look, online, like they have an embossed cover is that you don't know whether the cover is embossed or just printed with the image of an embossed cover ...

Why the devil would you want to abridge Carmilla? If you really feel the need to abridge it, you should share a pit in hell with the publishers who cut 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' and 'Dulce Domum' out of The Wind in the Willows.

If you want to publish a stand-alone "Carmilla", one'd think you'd want to maximize the page count.

(And yes, Mr Autocorrect, I'm very sure I didn't want to type "Camilla".)

>178 alaudacorax:

I hadn't heard of this publisher so (obviously) haven't seen any actual examples of their books. But my guess would be that these books are Print on Demand, and the binding options on a hardback edition would be limited. I also noticed that, on the back cover shown on Amazon, the barcode overlays the three-dimensional image which does lead me to think that it's a flat printed image.

I had missed that there are so many editions of Carmilla about, although I've seen the Pushkin Press edition on the shelves in Waterstones. And I do understand the attraction of having the story in a separate volume. About 20 years ago I found a paperback edition from a French publisher (but in English) in a bookshop - just one of those quirky interesting things that sometimes appear unexpectedly on the shelves (thanks to the booksellers, of course).

I've also got it in a couple of nice hardbacks. One is the Folio Society edition of In a Glass Darkly and the other is one of the three volumes of Le Fanu's collected short fiction from Ash Tree Press (I got all three volumes just as Ash Tree Press was winding up, but before prices went through the roof).

>183 housefulofpaper:

Good point on the barcode. I really should have spotted that. What I have spotted—and it's really annoying of Amazon—is that if you select for hardcovers only, the images they show you in list view are not necessarily those of the hardcovers.

>183 housefulofpaper:

Further to this plethora of editions of Carmilla: anyone know what 'Independently published' means as Amazon uses it under 'Product details'? I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to find out. Searching online always seems to lead to reference to small, independent publishers, obviously thinking in terms of known names (either that or a reference to ebooks); but the term on Amazon mostly means an absence of any publisher's name or, in one or two cases, a publisher's name that throws up nothing to online searches. So I've got, in this instance, a shipload of editions of Carmilla with, partly because of this absence of info and partly because of Amazon's system of organising reviews, no way of finding out about the quality of the product.

To be honest, my instinct is not to touch with a barge-pole anything with 'Independently published' under 'Product details', but I'm really curious about what's going on there.

>185 alaudacorax:
I think independently published might mean published independently of a publisher, i.e. published by an individual or group of individuals using Amazon’s publishing tools. They could be trying to make money by offering books of public domain novels. As this would include POD they would not incur significant costs and would be happy with a limited trickle of income from limited effort on their part. Product quality would not be their primary concern.

I hasten to add this is what I think and do intend this as a slur on independent publishing in general.

;-)

>186 pgmcc:

Thanks for the pointer on POD. I honestly had no idea how easy it is to produce actual physical books until reading your post and looking up the business online. Of course, someone was bound to take advantage of this to produce public domain books. Now it makes sense to me how the one or two I found with actual names (that is, 'Independently published' under 'Product details', but a publisher name somewhere in the description) were able to 'publish' huge numbers of titles and yet apparently have no other online presence. I'd been assuming that any sort of publishing would involve a hefty financial outlay.

>187 alaudacorax:
I have also seen books published under a publisher name and discovered it is the only book published by that publisher. I believe this is individuals thinking they will add credibility to their publication if it has a publisher’s name even if this is a made up name. I am very sceptical about this trend.

The organisations (or individuals) that offer services at a price to would-be published authors to publish their own books strikes me as modern day vanity publishing. There is a very humorous chapter in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum that describes vanity publishing in the good old pre-digital days.

On my Facebook feed today I saw an announcement of some books Penguin are publishing next month, just in time (of course) for Halloween. This looks very similar in conception to the Weird volumes from last year (>173 housefulofpaper: refers) but are labelled as "classic horror".

There's J. B. Priestley's Benighted (the source material for James Whale's film The Old Dark House); a Gothic novel from the '70s, Moths by Rosalind Ashe; and a historical about witch trials, The Witch and the Priest by Hilda Lewis.

There are also two short story collections, one of Edith Wharton's stories, Pomegranate Seed and Other Ghostly Tales; and Classic Horror: an Anthology, the blurb for which on Penguin's website doesn't include a list of contents, but apparently the ten stories will include "Mary Shelley’s iconic tale of a ‘body swap’ gone wrong" (I don't know this story, so and would query its "iconic" status) and, from the teaser descriptions, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Yellow Wallpaper".

I know these editions are a purely commercial exercise for Penguin (now Penguin Random House and since 2020 owned by Bertelsmann) but this feels more cynical than last year's Weird selection because the three novels were brought back into print by Valancourt Books (and I was going to say are still in print, but looking on Amazon UK only the Ashe seems to be available in the Valancourt edition). It feels like a big multinational corporation bullying a small independent.

The Edith Wharton would be more exciting if I didn't already own the Tartarus Press hardback selection of her supernatural stories. The anthology seems as if it's going to be full of old warhorses (despite my not knowing the Mary Shelley story, I might have it in an anthology that I haven't got around to reading yet - my "unread books" collection on here is well over 3000 titles).

Anyway, here's the link to the webpage on Penguin UK's website:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/476002/classic-horror/9781405985239

Edited to add: ah, I've just seen on Amazon that the British Library produced a hardback selection of Edith Wharton's stories earlier this year. Well, well.

(this series of hardback supernatural fiction, which seemed to me, to be overlapping and treading on the toes of the BL's "Library of the Weird" paperback series, is apparently now branded as "British Library Gilded Nightmares").

>189 housefulofpaper:

Looking at the beginning of Transformation, I know that I've read it but I really remember little or nothing about it, which doesn't speak well for its 'iconic' status.

>189 housefulofpaper:

The trouble with anthologies is that you reach a point where you've inevitably read some if not most of the stories before. I managed to get half-way through The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack before I was properly convinced I'd read it before but somehow neglected to log the reading dates on LT. And now I'm reluctant to give up on it in case I never finished it first time round and the next story is going to be new to me!

Anyway, I've lately made a resolution—no more anthologies ... single-author collections or nothing from now on.

>191 alaudacorax:

Um ... is a single-author collection actually an anthology too?

>191 alaudacorax:
I saw something online or in print just recently, saying "collection" is single author and "anthology" is multi-author.

I think that means I ought to go and tidy up my Tags.

WP claims that an anthology is distinguished by that the contents are chosen by the compiler; the page doesn't outright state that they have to represent multiple authors, but the following discussion seems to assume it.

ISFDB does define an anthology as a multi-author collection (though sometime recently-ish they appear to have made most of their wiki invisible to non-members, so finding the definition took a little bit of work).

Perhaps of interest - the word etymologically means "collection of flowers", on the idea that the complier has picked out the "flowers", i.e. the best, of something, originally poems.

>190 alaudacorax:
The link for Transformation took me to the Hesperus Press edition. Apparently they are still going (they have a website and a blog updated this year, at any rate). I'm surprised because I haven't seen them in bookshops for years.

They used to be good for bringing obscurities back into print. I especially appreciated that they would bring out the as separate anthologies all the stories from the "Christmas numbers" of Charles Dickens' magazines. These were intended to be read as a cohesive "round" of stories (usually with a frame narrative), but before the Hesperus books I had only seen Dickens' contributions printed as standalones, or at most with a bare summary of the connecting narrative.

>194 AndreasJ:
That must be the reason why a famous collection of poetry assembled during WWII was entitled Other Men's Flowers. I seemed rather twee when I first heard of the book. Belatedly, I've learned better.

>189 housefulofpaper:

Thanks for this news. I agree that the slate could be a bit more adventurous. Luckily there is a great number of houses bringing out under-read titles and authors, so it's not as much of a loss.

Edith Wharton, I would say, is actually over-collected. Not only with the three editions you mention; there are also a Wordsworth paperback, an NYRB collection, a Virago Modern Classics assemblage, and some out-of-print but easily-found editions like the Scribners.

I suppose she has a market beyond the ghost story crowd, but there are only so many stories to be recycled.

>194 AndreasJ:

Very much of interest, thanks! I never recognized that, and it's a cool fact.

>196 rtttt01:

you're right, of course, and I've spent some time looking at the available editions (The Wordsworth edition has a new cover, in series with their recent Arthur Machen collection. Their horrible photoshopped covers - I read somewhere that there was supposed to be a sound commercial reason for them - finally seem to be a thing of the past).

I knew that most Victorian and Edwardian authors had some ghost stories or weird fiction of some stripe in their oeuvre, but also that mainstream publishers don't tend to highlight it, or publish it at all (thank goodness for those publishers that do).

Despite knowing that, and possibly because of the film adaptations that got some media attention (The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, which still seem quite recent in my memory) which I think was how I first became aware of her, Wharton always seemed to me the epitome of the realist, novel of manners author, and her ghost stories even more of an anomaly (it would be going to far to say a dirty secret).

>198 housefulofpaper:

Re Wharton's tendencies, this is an interesting point that never occurred to me. Even the ghost stories are fairly mannered and not lurid or blunt, but still, yes, I would have to think that the characters in her non-supernatural work would snicker at the existence of these tales!

Re horrible Photoshop art: I can't speak for what Wordsworth did, but I know some shoestring operations pay a small fee for a stock image (or swipe it) and then Photoshop til it's not recognizable (not always successfully). I suppose that that is indeed less costly than using a real artist. It's a shame, though, because there are plenty of good artists who don't charge much.

Once an author is in the inner-circle canon of literature, then everything is of interest, and no one seems to look askance at finding ghosts in Hardy or Henry James. But for some readers that probably haven't given it a proper chance, everything else under "ghosts", "supernatural" or weird is uninteresting by fiat. Another shame. But no one can read everything. (Although you might be close!)

On the other hand, there are hundreds of ghosts in mainstream, mystery and romance books right now, so as with sf, there's no need for concern about their extinction in public tastes.

Here are the Penguin "Classic Horrors".



The contents page for the anthology:


The contents page for the Wharton collection:

I read Brian J. Showers essay "Some Thoughts on Horror: Consideration of an Effect". It is a 20 page pamphlet published by Calque Press. My review is below. I though people, especially @housefulofpaper might be interested.

>201 pgmcc:

You've reminded me of the late Tanith Lee—wonderful storyteller—who was, apparently, quite hostile to the whole concept of genre. I suppose it is quite an artificial construct. It's a difficult question, though. One can see it as a pain in the wotsit to an author, quite useful to the publisher, and a bit of both to the reader. Does he/she explore the author or the genre? And in this particular case there is a tremendous variety to the kind of story squeezed under the umbrella of 'horror', even without considering the ones that supposedly stray over the boundaries. I'm tempted to say that I prefer to explore the author rather than the genre; but if I were really doing that I wouldn't be here, would I? It would seem to be an intractable problem on a number of levels from the personal to the literary-academic.

>201 pgmcc:

Yes indeed, thank you! I've ordered a copy, along with the book by Silvina Ocampo. I bought an early '90s reprint of The Book of Fantasy anthology that she co-edited with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. It included many authors that I didn't encounter again until this centiry, when the Penguin H.P. Lovecraft reprints, and the discovery of the Tartarus Press, properly introduced me to the world of Weird fiction.

>202 alaudacorax:

There have been times when it would have been useful, as a reader, to have the guidance of a genre label on what I was reading. I'm thinking back to the early 198os when I read US science fiction magazines. These were successors of the pulp magazines - titles such as Analog, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now shortened to Asimov's Science Fiction, I see, but still going), Fantasy and Science Fiction. These had "newsstand distribution" in the UK back then. I don't know if they'd always been there, or if they were riding a post-Star Wars boom.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that some of them (F&SF, naturally, but Asimov's as well) would print fantasy alongside the science fiction stories. And if I read a fantasy story assuming it was science fiction, it would always be disappointing because I'd be expecting the clever explanation at the end, either an ingenious twist, or the "Novum" (Darko Suvin's term, recently popularised by the Outlaw Bookseller YouTube channel, for the "new thing" that's not (currently) in the real world but that can be imagined as plausibly e.g. existing, or as being created through logical scientific means and not by magic).

It's almost the difference between the journey being the point (fantasy) as against the destination being the point (science fiction).

That said, I do recognise (more than I did just a couple of years ago) that trying to define genre boundaries is like drawing a line over spreading ink blots, or a 1960's-style light show.

Also, I imagine any author reading this would want to tell me, just read the story again!

(I did, in fact - the first story in Tales of the Quintana Roo, after 43 years. The book as a whole might be the best thing I read last year. It's certainly stayed with me).

Oops ... houseful's done it again! If you're going to call something the best thing you read in a whole year, then I've just got to get hold of it ...

>202 alaudacorax:
I agree about exploring the author. My own reading tends to follow author rather than genre, but then again, as you say, if we were purists in following authors would necessarily be in this group.

I take genre with a grain of salt. Categorisation is a human approach for coping with complexity in the world. However, the categories are simply a convenient construct to simplify the world. The categories, or in this case genres, do not necessarily have and concrete meaning, so the real world will have things that do not necessarily fit neatly within one category or another. Sticking rigidly to a genre is letting the tail wag the dog.