Ghosts in the Machine is an exhibition of black & white images hosted by Bower Ashton Library, Bristol, for World Book Night 2022. Contributors were invited to create an image responding to the theme and also to name a favourite ghost story.
These included stories by M. R. James, Shirley Jackson, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Pierre de Ronsard, Fritz Lieber, Toni Morrison, Jan Pienkowski, Pu Songling, Astrid Lindgren, Aoko Matsuda, Stanisław Herman Lem and Daphne du Maurier.
There were 93 spectral contributions from participants in Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, and the USA.
My own contribution, ‘Phantoms’, is one of a series of manipulated pages from The English Catalogue of Books for 1937, edited by James D. Stewart (London: The Publishers’ Circular, Limited, 1938). I nominated Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser.
The exhibition runs from Weds 13th April – Weds 29th June 2022 and the complete set of images is available as a free PDF (scroll down the Ghosts in the Machine page for the link).
(Mark Valentine)
It looks as if M.R. James is still king of the hill, with Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill battling it out for queen. It was good to see Pu Song-li get two votes. Some people fudged the rules a bit, not by picking, say, "Afterward" of "The Lady's Maid's Bell," but the entire collection of "The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton." Interesting art work. A handful of the titles I'd never heard of, and wish there had been a bit of annotaton to accompany each selection.
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