Castle Bigod and other ghost titles

‘Ghost titles’ is the pleasing term given in book collecting and bibliographical circles to books that were announced but never in fact appeared. I suppose this would usually be because the author had promised a book but was then unable to complete it; or else had completed it, but it wasn’t what the publisher was expecting.

There might also be occasions when the publisher folded before the book could appear and also, I suppose, simple clerical errors about a book that never was. They seem to me to make quite an intriguing field of study – I don’t know that anyone ever has surveyed the subject – particularly because the imagined book naturally would sound even more alluring and interesting than it might have been had it ever materialised.

These spectral volumes are not exactly the same as the unfinished or discarded works to be found in many writers’ literary careers, though there may be some overlap. The essential quality of a ghost title, I take it, is that it must have been thought likely (even in error) to appear, and to have been announced accordingly.

These remarks were occasioned when I was browsing through an old copy of The London Mercury and Bookman for October 1937, which announced itself as the Autumn Books Number and devoted several pages to a listing of books promised by publishers for the forthcoming season.

If you were settling down by your fireside in the Autumn of 1937 and contemplating this catalogue, you could have looked forward to new books from Agatha Christie (Death on the Nile), Evelyn Waugh (Scoop), Michael Arlen (The Crooked Coronet), Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart), Christopher Isherwood (Sally Bowles), Stevie Smith (Over the Frontier) and Edith Wharton (Ghosts).

You could also meditate on evanescence by anticipating The World Ends by the previously unknown William Lamb, with designs by John Farleigh, about an inundation of England: though later you might discover that the publisher was trying to pull the wool over your eyes and the author was in fact Storm Jameson.

Most of the books listed also have a month of publication by them but some have the ominous word ‘Later’. And it was thus that I began to notice the ghost titles. The first one I came across, under Fiction, was Castle Bigod by David Garnett, due from Chatto & Windus at 7/6d. This struck me as an excellent title, derived perhaps from the ruined 12 century castle at the charming small town of Bungay, Suffolk, built by the Bigod family.

But I could not remember any such title by this author, and sure enough there is none in the British Library catalogue. And in fact there was no novel by Garnett in 1937 nor for many years afterwards, until Aspects of Love in 1955. There may well be a Garnett expert who will be able to explain all about Castle Bigod and say whether there is anything left of it, but I think I prefer wondering about it.

The very next entry seemed to offer a further ghost title, Renaissance of Baldridge by William Gerhardi, the witty satirist who influenced Evelyn Waugh. This title I thought not so good, but then Gerhardi, or his publishers, had the habit of changing the titles of his books. Even so I didn’t recognise this one, and sure enough he too did not publish a novel in 1937.

In this case, however, it is only the title and not the book that is ghostly, because it duly appeared in 1938 as My Wife’s the Least of It, and several other possible titles had been mooted before the one finally adopted, as The Modern Novel explains.

The third ghost title that I spotted was The Goat by G W Stonier, due from The Cresset Press. Stonier was later to be author of the Blitz fantasy The Memoirs of a Ghost (1947) and of sundry miscellaneous titles, but not The Goat. There was indeed a caprine title in 1937 but that was Old Goat by Edwin Greenwood, actor, film director, friend of Arthur Machen and writer of picturesque thrillers. This was sub-titled 'A Fantasia on a Theme of Blackmail and Sudden Death'. Did Greenwood's ancient horned creature see off Stonier's goat?

As I explored in an earlier post, Stonier’s fiction was original and thoughtful and it seems a shame that we may have lost an earlier novel or story by him. Would his memoirs of a goat have borne any relation to his memoirs of a ghost? Perhaps we shall never know.

There are doubtless quite a few other ghost titles well-known to enthusiasts of particular writers. However, I cannot pursue them all just now as I should be working on an enthralling novel of the underground, underworld and otherworld, called Change Here for Hades, due to appear – well, later.

(Mark Valentine)