On 'Baron Corvo: The Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived': A Guest Post by Fogus

I’ve previously written about the Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection at Georgetown University, originally owned by the publishing house and preservation society Boo-Hooray, founded by Swedish-born Johan Kugelberg in 2010. Because of this provenance, materials and references from Boo-Hooray feature prominently in the collection. Among its rarities is a slight booklet by Kugelberg himself titled Baron Corvo, the Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived. Below, I’ll offer a brief account of this curious artifact.

First, let me address the title, which is the literary equivalent to “click-bait.” That said, there’s a deeper meaning to the predicate nominative in the title. Almost certainly, if we held a vote for someone better exemplifying its colloquial usage, then Baron Corvo would certainly place far below any number of people populating even modern headlines. Rather, Kugelberg uses a meaning more in line with Georges Bataille’s idea of The Solar Anus, which to risk oversimplification, is a surrealist metaphor for cosmic inevitability. It’s easy to view Baron Corvo as merely a tragic eccentric (he was), but Kugelberg paints a picture of him as someone whose vitality burned so hot that it could only ever destroy and then burn itself out.

In a bit of literary flair, Kugelberg likens Baron Corvo to a Dickensian figure seen through the lens of Lautréamont: larger than life, exaggerated, darkly fascinating, and grotesque. An example of Corvo playing as such a character is revealed in the story behind the book Hadrian the Seventh. The work isn’t merely a novel, but instead serves as a revenge fantasy where a man suspiciously like Corvo himself becomes Pope and through force of will attempts to mold the Catholic Church in his own image. Picturing Corvo slumped over his writing desk furiously scrawling his lurid and lovely rancor onto the page is sardonic and saturnine all at once. I personally find these glimpses beyond the veil, where the novel is the man and vise-versa utterly compelling when reading Corvo and Kugelberg captures this intrigue masterfully.

Indeed, in the tempest that was his life, Baron Corvo himself became a machine that turned failures and grudges into fiction. Kugelberg likens Corvo to Joni Mitchell who turned her heartbreaks into songs and also to Lester Bangs who wrote music reviews that were really about Lester Bangs. Every one of Corvo’s novels are fundamentally autobiographical, sometimes pathetic, sometimes brilliant, but they are always unmistakably Corvine. I can’t help but find this side of Corvo haunting. Years ago I watched a BBC Two documentary on the life of Mervyn Peake and I have since been haunted by the utterly Peakian life that the author lived. Certainly there are innumerable authors who wrote their own experiences into their works, but I suspect that there are very few authors who lived such fictionalized existences as Peake and Corvo, both of whom seemed to inhabit their own narrative universes.

Moreover, the booklet briefly describes (nearly to the point of libel) the picaresque life that Baron Corvo lived: drifting from job to job, bouncing from one benefactor to another, perpetually on the move, and always making very bad decisions along the way. Corvo had a unique talent for the English language, but that ability was dwarfed by his truly epic talent at burning bridges. People would help him, and he’d inevitably turn on them. He perpetually desired patrons, but was even more driven by a hatred for being patronized. He was his own worst enemy, always and without fail. Baron Corvo never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, nor did he ever fail to fail in spectacular ways. In A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, the reader quickly understands that every critical friendship and benefaction was inescapably burdened by the weight of Corvo’s imminent unravelling. That said, the Baron’s betrayals and blow-ups weren’t accidents but instead they were the way he functioned at the deepest level of his being, and many readers find it very difficult to look away.

Baron Corvo was a genius, a crank, a con, and a visionary all at once. He wrecked his life at every turn, but unlike most who go down in flames, he turned the ashes into art. Kugelberg’s booklet is the best elucidation of the paradox at the heart of the Corvo cult, describing a man who was repellent and objectionable while simultaneously magnetic and irresistible, who continues to fascinate more than a century after his death.

(Fogus)

Those Thick Omnibuses from the Thirties

I was looking over my anthology shelves recently, and got to wondering how all those thick anthologies from the 1930s came about in the UK, and which one was the first. Initially I thought of those three Omnibuses of Crime, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers, and then I recalled that those Omnibuses were the US titles. Gollancz had published each of them originally as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (September 1928; second series, July 1931; third series, September 1934). In May 1931, Gollancz had published The Holiday Omnibus, which included novels like The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel and shorter works like "Mrs. Raeburn's Waxwork" by Eleanor Smith. (Of course there were other horror anthologies of the time, including the "Not at Night" series in the 1920s-1930s, and the "Creeps" series in the 1930s; but they were mostly normal-sized books, though each series did an omnibus in due course, The "Not at Night" Omnibus (April 1937), and The Creeps Omnibus (October 1935), comprising the first three volumes of the Creeps series.)  

It appears that Hutchinson was the first firm to follow up, and they produced an extensive series of omnibuses of various types. The first was A Century of Creepy Stories, which came out in June 1934. Next up was The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories in October 1934. The December release of the regular-sized New Tales of Horror, by Eminent Authors, ghost-edited by John Gawsworth, initiated a series of four thick anonymously-edited Gawsworth anthologies from other publishers: Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries (1935); Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (1936); Thrills (1936); Masterpiece of Thrills (1936) 

Some of Hutchinson's omnibuses had named editors (Rafael Sabatini, Hugh Walpole, Dennis Wheatley, P.G. Wodehouse, Francis Brett Young); some had named introducers (G.K. Chesterton); some are uncredited. Of the latter, there is the curious example of Fifty Years of Ghost Stories (October 1935) and A Century of Ghost Stories (May 1936), which subsumed the printed text of the former book (pp. 11-702) into the 1013 pages of the latter. Fifty Years of Ghost Stories was reprinted on its own by Hutchinson in 1949; and in 1970, Hutchinson made up two anthologies from some of the contents of the earlier volumes: Let's Talk of Graves: Tales from 'A Century of Ghost Stories' (1970) and Walk in Dread: Twelve Classic Eerie Tales (1970). The US firm Taplinger would reprint the second book, and they found the original editor still working at Hutchinson. This was Dorothy M. Tomlinson (1910-2002), the daughter of the writer H.M. Tomlinson, who began her forty-plus year career at Hutchinson in 1934. Tomlinson contributed an interesting introduction to Taplinger's Walk in Dread (1972), describing how she had been asked to compile an anthology of ghost stories for Hutchinson a few years after she had joined the firm. She noted that her first inclusion was E. Nesbit's "John Charington's Wedding"--which appears only in the larger 1936 Century of Ghost Stories (where it is erroneously credited to "Evelyn" Nesbit), and not in the 1935 Fifty Years of Ghost Stories. The situation of that story, and the fact that Tomlinson joined the firm in 1934 make me think that she was probably not responsible for Fifty Years of Ghost Stories; and certainly not the editor of A Century of Horror Stories (1934), which is sometimes attributed to her. But we can certainly attribute to her A Century of Ghost Stories (1936) and Walk in Dread (1970 and 1972). 

This small boom in omnibuses ran out in 1938-39 as war began. Here follows a chronological listing of the main Hutchinson omnibuses, with some notes on some oddball titles at the very end. 

A Century of Creepy Stories  
            Hutchinson, [June 1934] 3s 6d
            [July 1934] imitation leather 5 s;  1/2 leather 7s 6d 
            [December 1934] imitation leather 5s 6d; 1/2 leather 7s 6d 
The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories            
            Hutchinson, [October 1934] 3s 6d
            [December 1934] 1/2 leather 7s 6d; imitation leather 5s 6d 
A Century of Sea Stories [edited by Rafael Sabatini]
            Hutchinson, [November 1934]  3s 6d
            [January 1935] imitation leather 5s 6d 
 A Century of Humour [edited by P.G. Wodehouse]
            Hutchinson, [December 1934]  1/2 leather 7s 6d;  imitation 
             leather 5s 6d
A Century of Love Stories [edited Gilbert Frankau]
            Hutchinson, [January 1935]  3s 6d  
            [July 1937] ch. ed. 2s 
A Century of Detective Stories [With an Introduction by G.K. Chesterton]
            Hutchinson, [April 1935]  3s 6d
Fifty Years of Ghost Stories
            Hutchinson, [October 1935]  2s 6d
            Hutchinson, [1949]  evidently 60th Thousand, 10 s 6d 
A Century of Horror [edited by Dennis Wheatley]
            Hutchinson, [October 1935]  3s 6d  
A Century of Boys’ Stories [edited by Francis Brett Young] 
            Hutchinson, [October 1935]  3s 6d 
            [July 1937] 3s 6d
A Century of Historical Stories [edited by Rafael Sabatini] 
            Hutchinson, [January 1936]  ch ed. 3s 6d 
A Century of Western Stories [edited by George Goodchild] 
            Hutchinson, [March 1936] 3s 6d
A Century of Ghost Stories   [subsumes Fifty Years of Ghost Stories]
            Hutchinson, [May 1936] 3s 6d  
The Holiday Omnibus 
            Hutchinson, [July 1936] 3s 6d
            [July 1937]  ch ed. 2s 
The Second Century of Humour 
            Hutchinson, [September 1936]  3s 6d 
Cavalcade of History  [edited by Claud Golding] 
            Hutchinson, [March 1937]  3s 6d 
The Evening Standard Second Book of Strange Stories 
            Hutchinson, [May 1937]  3s 6d  
A Century of Nature Stories [With an Intro by J.W. Robertson Scott] 
            Hutchinson, [June 1937]  3s 6d 
A Second Century of Creepy Stories [edited by Hugh Walpole] 
            Hutchinson, [July 1937]  3s 6d
The Fireside Omnibus 
            Hutchinson, [November] 1937  3s 6d 
The Second Cavalcade of History [edited by Claud Golding] 
            Hutchinson, [January 1938] 3s 6d 
A Century of Spy Stories [edited by Dennis Wheatley] 
            Hutchinson, [May 1938] 3s 6d 
A Century of Girls’ Stories [edited by Ethel Boileau] 
            Hutchinson, [April 1939]   3s 6d 

Other:

The Book of the King’s Jubilee [edited by Sir Philip Gibbs] 
            Hutchinson, [April 1935] 3s 6d  512 pp. 
Famous Trials [by the First Earl of Birkenhead] 
            Hutchinson, [January 1935] 3s 6d  Ch. ed.  Jan 1938 3s

More Famous Trials [edited by the First Earl of Birkenhead]
            Hutchinson, [July 1938]  3s 6d 
1001 Wonderful Things [edited by Walter Hutchinson]
            Hutchinson, [July 1935]  3s 6d   Ch ed. 2s. July 1936 

A Century of Popular Romances [edited by Gilbert Frankau]
            Title announced, but probably became A Century of Love
The Holiday Omnibus for All Seasons
The Holiday Omnibus for Christmas
            Both apparently subsumed into The Holiday Omnibus 

I'd pick these as the six essential volumes of the Hutchinson series, for those especially interested in the weird genre:

A Century of Creepy Stories (1934)
The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories (1934)       
A Century of Horror [edited by Dennis Wheatley] (1935)
A Century of Ghost Stories (1936) 
The Evening Standard Second Book of Strange Stories (1937) 
A Second Century of Creepy Stories [edited by Hugh Walpole] (1937)I 

I also find the Gawsworth-edited anthologies of considerable interest.   

The Age of Genius, by David Lindsay

Some fifteen or so years ago, I discovered an article "The Age of Genius" by one David Lindsay, published in The Gentleman's Magazine for December 1896. Was it by the David Lindsay whose first book was A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), published after he had turned 44?  I was hesitant to ascribe it so, for in December 1896 Lindsay would have been a mere 20. Yet the article touches on a few things we know interested him--the nature of genius, and Beethoven, who is mentioned among the greatest of masters in the final paragraph. Also its process of tabulation might have been second nature to Lindsay even at that age, for he had already worked for a firm of insurance underwriters for several years. Mark Valentine's recent post detailing that novelist David Lindsay submitted novels for publication in 1902 and 1908 show that Lindsay was active in writing much earlier than Arcturus, so I thought to revisit this article. I still think we can't say for certain that it was written by the author of Arcturus, but here it is for all to consider. 

The Age of Genius

David Lindsay 

The glories of our birth and state
             Are shadows, not substantial things; 
There is no armour against fate :
         Death lays his icy hands on kings.

Thus says the old song,* and emperor and beggar, warrior and poet, all men, be they great or lowly, have to vanish sooner or later from the face of the earth. We have only a few years’ lease, and, when our time has expired, we must quit. Even genius is not exempt from this, and any glory it may sow must generally be reaped after death.

But this is not now the point to be considered. We would rather put a question—one of a not uninteresting nature:— “Whether genius is long-lived?”

At first hearing, one says “no,” and this emphatically; for has it not been a well-known truth, from the earliest infancy of civilisation, that brain-power is incompatible with health? Was not Achilles offered the choice either of undying glory, coupled with an early death, or of long life and inglorious ease? He could not have both. One cannot possess the crown of laurels as well as the crown of snowy locks.

If we wish to become octogenarians, we must lay aside all ambition. We must rise with the sun and lie down with the sun. We must be careful, very careful, in our diet; must give our bodies so much exercise and so much recreation. We must be frugal in all our desires. But, above all other things, we must keep our minds as much as possible out of sight.

So we have been taught to believe; though we now beg leave to contradict the whole theory, for it is erroneous. In order to prove which, let us turn from empty words to solid facts.

The subject may best be considered by stating the ages of a few of the most distinguished men, representing all types of genius, who have enriched the world during the last three thousand years with their power and excellence of mind.

And let us first take the “man of blood.” The following are amongst the greatest names celebrated in the annals of war and conquest—for manslaughter also fosters genius:—

These have been chosen with strict impartiality, and the figures may be taken as representative of the whole class of renowned warriors, ancient and modern. It will be observed that nearly 60 per cent. of the above reached the Biblical standard of “three score years and ten.”

Statecraft is half-sister to War, and she is entitled to enrol under her banner many of the names already mentioned, which properly belong, however, to the foregoing list. Classification is always difficult. The following are well known in history:— 

To these must be added the two most celebrated of all living statesmen, Gladstone and Bismarck, both well over their eightieth year.

Let us now turn to Science and Philosophy:—

Note that, of all these men, whose brains were worked to their very fullest, no less than 63 per cent. managed to complete their seventy years.

In the next division let us include, for the sake of convenience, literary men of all classes—historians, essayists, novelists, poets, dramatists, and others:—

There is no comment to make here. Some few, we see, died early—Chatterton, the boy-poet, put an end to his existence when only seventeen years old—a good many died late, and about the same number died in maturity.

Music next claims our attention:—

This does not bear out our theory: it would rather seem to prove that music is really the gift of the gods, for “those whom the gods love die young.”

In the Fine Arts we find :—

One of these at least grew to a hoary old age, and he not the least distinguished among them. It is a far cry from Art to Religion, but let us take a peep at the gallant little band of Reformers:—

 The following are among those who have left behind them something more than a mere name by which to be remembered, for it is owing to them that we enjoy many of the luxuries and comforts—nay, necessities—of life. Let us, therefore, be grateful to the enlightened body of inventors, discoverers, and their kin:—

Here, as before, no comment is needed.

We do not for one moment pretend that the foregoing catalogues of names are exhaustive, but they are representative, and so will answer our purpose.

Summarising, we shall now get at the following analysis:--

So that almost one-half of the greatest geniuses the world has yet seen have attained and passed the great age of 70 years!

Most of the best work of these men, however, has been done at a comparatively youthful age.

Hannibal won his most decisive victory when he was 31 years old; Henry V. fought the battle of Agincourt at 27; Edward III. that of Cressy at 33; Napoleon that of Austerlitz at 36.

Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” made its appearance when he was 39; Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!” when 36; Carlyle’s “French Revolution” when 42; Johnson commenced his “Dictionary” when 38. On the other hand, “Paradise Lost” was not given to the world until Milton was 59; and Cervantes was only one year younger when “Don Quixote” was published.

Sir Christopher Wren lived to see his ninetieth birthday, but he was less than half that age when he started building St. Paul’s Cathedral; George Stephenson invented the locomotive when he was 38; Harvey discovered that blood circulated when 38; Jenner put forward his theory of vaccination when 47.

What, then, are the laws that control the age of genius? Why should a Keats die at 24 and a Chaucer at 72? Why should philosophers and men who look deeply into the heart of things, and who would naturally be supposed to wear out their vital energy more quickly than other men—why should these be longer-lived than musicians?

To this latter question there is an answer. It is not until after long years of technical training and brain-working that such men as Leibnitz and Descartes blossom out into all their glory of genius; and there are doubtless many great thinkers even now in our midst who may some day astonish the world by the brilliancy of their teachings—but they may first die. With music it is different. Beethoven, while yet in his early infancy, showed unmistakable signs of his natural abilities; when he was a mere youngster he composed works which, to this day, will stand on their own merits. It is the same with every great musician. Granted that he live to reach early manhood, his fame is secured. And, at the time when all Europe is ringing with his praises, his science-loving brother is toiling in obscurity, not to step forth into the light of popularity for maybe another quarter of a century, or perhaps not at all, for in the meantime, as we have said, he may die. 

It is true that the very greatest masters of all do not usually live out their normal length of days: Napoleon, Cromwell, Shakespeare, Beethoven—none of these passed into old age. But it is hard to define the term “genius.” If we are to limit it to some score of men, we must then, perhaps, consider that it is incompatible with length of life, If we give the word larger meaning, and honour with it the thousand lesser light who illumine the page of history, why, then, it would seem to be a healthy thing to be a genius.  
 
 
* The quotation from an "old song" (whose first line sometimes reads "The glories of our blood and state") is from scene three of a short play titled "The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses" by James Shirley, published in 1659. The reading giving "birth" in the first line comes from its reprinting in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). [DAA] 

Before Arcturus: David Lindsay's Lost Novels

  

In July 2025 I acquired from James Fergusson Books & Manuscripts an archive of papers related to David Lindsay compiled by the writer Hugh Cecil. He corresponded with Lindsay’s family, friends and admirers, and also interviewed some of them. The collection consists of a dozen or so ring binders full of letters, interview notes, press cuttings and other items.

At first, Cecil may have hoped to write a Lindsay biography, but later he seems to have decided there was no market for this alone, and so he intended to write a book of two parts, one on L.H. Myers and one on David Lindsay, or else a study of ‘David Lindsay & His Admirers’, with specific reference to the writers E.H. Visiak, L.H. Myers and J.B. Pick and the artist Robert Barnes.

‘A book on Lindsay would never sell . . .,’ he wrote to J.B. Pick in 1967, ‘A book on Myers would however . . . and a book on Myers and Lindsay is a possibility – a book in 2 halves.’ His reasoning was that Myers had a more eventful life, and he may have also thought that Myers had more acceptance in the literary world.

Though there is a quantity of research material, a tribute to Cecil’s thoroughness and persistence, there is very little continuous text at all, only notes, so it appears the biography was never written. However, there are several interesting sidelights.

When I began to look through the papers I found an enigmatic reference that seemed to reveal something of importance previously unknown, to me at least, about Lindsay’s career as a writer. At the back of a red binder labelled ‘Writings, Reviews etc on Lindsay’s work by—’,  followed by a list of names, there was a single sheet of typed paper, which began ‘P.S.’ The letter to which it was apparently a postscript did not precede it and was not in the same file, nor was there any indication of the author. But Cecil clearly thought it was important, and all credit to him for finding and preserving this information.

It reads as follows:

P.S. Reading University sent me copy report on Devil’s Tor, which calls it ‘a very ponderous pudding’ and adds ‘The author is a bird of passage and has published with both Methuen and Long.’

            The books submitted to Chatto & Windus were called ‘Altheus’ [sic] and ‘The Confessions of an Egoist.’

            Aletheus [sic] submitted in 1902, Egoist in 1908.

            The first is simply described as ‘an excessively long tale’ and the second as ‘The confessions of an intellectual young man who traces the progress of his mind from rank materialism to an exalted idealism.’ Says it won’t interest the general reader but ‘the book is promising and shows considerable intellectual vigour.’ There is then the comment ‘The book is very well written.’ One wonders, so one does.

With reference to the word ‘Aletheus’ there is a manuscript note, ‘Alethius?’

There are no books with either of these titles in the catalogues of the major libraries. The clear inference from the context was that these two novels were also by David Lindsay and submitted to Chatto & Windus: no other author is named. I wished this was more explicitly stated in the note, but it seemed the most natural reading. If so, this meant that Lindsay wrote at least two earlier novels before the novel thought to have been his first, his masterpiece A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). The first of these would have been when he was about 26, the other when he was about 32.

This inference was reinforced by a point in the Chronology of David Lindsay that Hugh Cecil compiled. Under the year 1919, Cecil notes that Lindsay started his ‘first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus’. But he has then inserted in manuscript the word ‘published’ so that the entry reads ‘first published novel’. This implies Cecil knew there was earlier but unpublished work.

Unfortunately, the Reading University Library document quoted in the P.S. does not seem to be in the Archive. There is a folder of photocopies of contemporary press reviews of Devil’s Tor, but the publisher’s report is not included in this.

I therefore turned to the source cited by Cecil. Reading University’s Special Collections has a major holding of Chatto & Windus papers, which it acquired in 1982 (so the postscript must post-date then). This includes a number of ‘Manuscript entry books’, essentially a log of manuscripts received by the publisher, typically listing ‘Date received, title, author and address for each manuscript received, reader's report number, dates received and returned, note of acceptance or decline, comments.’

With the Library’s kind help, I was able to confirm the manuscript entry book for the period 9 May 1907-13 Jul 1910 includes an entry for David Lindsay on pg. 176, showing that he did submit a manuscript entitled The Confessions of an Egoist to them, and the report was as quoted in the postscript. Also, the manuscript entry book for 25 Jun 1901-26 Aug 1904 has a record of another manuscript, which was presumably Altheus. A later manuscript entry book, for 29 Dec 1926-14 Oct 1929 shows also that he submitted Devil’s Tor to them in 1928 (uncatalogued reader's report number 3575). This was later published by Putnam’s, in 1932, at the instigation of Lindsay’s friend L.H. Myers.

Sadly, for the pre-First World War novels, the manuscript entry book notes are all we are ever likely to know of the readers’ reports. The Library advise: ‘Unfortunately, as Chatto & Windus sent loose paper for salvage to help with the war effort in 1915, we have very few reader's reports before 1915 (only a couple for 1913 and 1914), and there aren't any original reports for the titles that you are looking for . . . [from] 1902 and 1908.’

We may reasonably conclude, though, despite this brief evidence, that there were indeed at least two earlier David Lindsay novels. What happened to them?  Lindsay’s papers were at first mostly in the care of J.B. Pick, his great admirer, and the friend of Lindsay’s wife Jacky, but were later returned to Diana Moon, the Lindsays’ oldest daughter, with the exception of The Witch, since Pick was still working on the version of the novel he edited (1976). Hugh Cecil corresponded regularly with Pick and they became friends, but I have found no allusion to the earlier novels. If Pick had them, Cecil would no doubt have obtained copies: his files do include full photocopies of Lindsay’s A Blade for Sale and of the Christmas play he wrote for his children. We have to conclude, therefore, that Pick did not have them.

Douglas A. Anderson offers a helpful insight into Lindsay’s practice with his manuscripts:

‘Lindsay's habit seems to have been to discard manuscripts once published, or once revised (e.g. the longer versions of Arcturus and Haunted Woman do not exist, nor the original version of Devil's Tor, The Ancient Tragedy).  Of The Witch, there is his working typescript, plus a version of the final chapter of a previous version of the book, most of which has a vertical cross-out over the text, though a dozen or so paragraphs do not. The Violet Apple, however, survived as a clean typescript to be published in 1976. Of his "Sketch Notes' they are reportedly compiled from his notebooks, which he apparently discarded after he compiled the notes.  So if he wasn't able to publish the two earlier novels, or became dissatisfied with them, it would not be out of character for him to discard them.’ 

It is fascinating but tantalising to learn that Lindsay was writing fiction well before A Voyage to Arcturus, which he started in 1919. It gives a different perspective on his literary career. Though it does not in the least detract from the originality and power of his masterpiece, it shows that this did not come out of nowhere. Whether either Altheus or The Confessions of an Egoist were in any sense an early run at the Arcturus theme, we shall, alas, never know. Unfortunately, it seems likeliest these apparent early novels by Lindsay are lost, and we are left only with our wondering and imagining of what they might have been.

(Mark Valentine)

With many thanks to Babs Viejo and Danni Corfield at Special Collections, Reading, and Esmé Bonner of Penguin Random House Archive & Library for their very kind help, and to Douglas A. Anderson for his insights.