£60.00
Hardcover
Pre-owned copy with a Faint odour of cigarette smoke
some minor wear to the cover
some spotting to the dustjacket
1 in stock
Description
Read about the most dangerous man in the West; the poem written by a stuffed crocodile; the alchemist called the great-nephew to the Queen of Faerie; aesthetes, dandies, visionaries, antiquaries, fortune tellers and fakirs, forgotten writers and much more.
Mark Valentine’s third collection of essays explores the curious byways of literature and lore in a similar manner to his earlier volumes Haunted by Books and A Country Still All Mystery.
Taking its title from an encounter in Thomas De Quincey’s youthful wanderings, Valentine’s writing shares that author’s delight in the arcane, the recondite and the obscure.
Containing:
Introduction
‘He Saw the Absolute Coming through the Door’: Rex Warner’s Allegories
Through the Spaces of the Dark: G.W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost
The Palace of Isis: A Note on Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kôr’
Call for the Colonel: The Crime Novels of Philip MacDonald
Dusty Cathedral: The Piquant Thrillers of Edwin Greenwood
Pagan Mysteries in the Novels of P.M. Hubbard
Dorian by Candlelight
Narcissus of the Nineties: The Poems and Prose of Richard Le Gallienne
A Most Surprising Book: John Davidson’s Earl Lavender
Always Gaping at Weeds: Frank Kingdon-Ward, Himalayan Plant-Hunter
Perceval Landon’s Book of Shadows
J. Milton Hayes: The Green Eyed Yellow Idol Man
The Seer of Simla
The Craziest Road of All: E.H. Jones and The Road to En-Dor
Some Books on Tea Cup Reading
Three Dandies of the Thirties
‘A Rather Beautiful Refuse’: Mayvale by H.E. Clifton and James Wood
The Ephemeral is the Eternal: Sidney Hunt, Avant Garde Pioneer
Of an Antiquary
‘A Crocodile Truly’: The Poet of St Bertrand De Comminges
‘The Rare, the Choice and the Curious’: A.N.L. Munby’s ‘The Comte de Marnay’
Echoes of Saumur
Scottish Gothic: Lord Kilmarnock’s Ferelith
Modern Ghosts: The Macabre Fiction of L.P. Hartley
The Ancient Art: The Tales of A.E. Coppard
‘Great-Nephew to the Queen of Faerie’: A Note on the Grindletonians
At the Club of Bad Books: Dylan Thomas & John Davenport’s The Death of the King’s Canary
The Pierrot on the Shore: Robert Walmsley’s Winged Company
The Peterley Mystery
Zodiacs in Britain
The Return of the Grail
Beyond Tradition and Dream: Three Forgotten Authors
At the Sign of the Black Pterodactyl: George Hay and Books of ‘Some Other Dimension’
Through the Three Choir Shires: A Holiday Among Bookshops
Acknowledgements
