Blackwood Redux

When Mike Ashley published his magisterial biography of Algernon Blackwood back in 2001, I thought it would never be bettered.  But it has been bettered, now, and by Mike Ashley himself. The original edition was Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (the US edition was boringly retitled Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life).

Stark House has just published the first paperback edition, under the original title, but it is not a mere reprint. It is a revision which restores text cut (for reasons of space) from the manuscript before publication in 2001, and it adds new material and revisions based on what Ashley has discovered in the intervening years.  Also, there are a lot of additional photographs in this edition, and I note that the footnotes are now helpfully placed on the same page rather than, as in the earlier edition, grouped together at the end of the book.

Anyone interested in Blackwood will find this book essential.