Well before Leonard Wolf died in March 2019 at the age of 96, I was planning to write up a Lesser-Known Writer entry on him. I piled his books where I could access them easily, but for various reasons I never finished the entry. So now, before I reshelve his books back to where they belong, I thought I'd post a gallery of the covers of his various weird-related genre work.
His first such book was A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead (1972), which the author himself described twenty-five years later as "a strange book"--a very personal book of its times with social commentary. Nonetheless it led to him doing The Annotated Dracula (1975) and The Annotated Frankenstein (1977). Both annotated editions were revamped as The Essential Dracula (1993) and The Essential Frankenstein (1993). Wolf did other such volumes like The Essential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1995) and The Essential Phantom of the Opera (1996). Wolf also edited some worthwhile anthologies, including the bumper-sized Wolf's Complete Book of Terror (1979), which was significantly abridged, but with a few additional stories, under the same title in 1994. Other anthologies include Doubles, Dummies and Dolls (1995) and Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction (1997). Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (1996), by Le Fanu, was edited and introduced by Wolf as a mass market original from Signet Classics. The reference book Horror: A Connoisseur's Guide to Literature and Film (1989) is selective and not comprehensive. Wolf also published two novels, The False Messiah (1984) and The Glass Mountain (1993).
Here follows a chronological cover gallery of most of these books.
I found Dream of Dracula paperback in a sleazy shop on Hollywood Boulevard in the late 70s and thought it was fascinating. I love the Satty illustrations in Annotated Dracula. I especially love the book he did on Gilles De Rais.
ReplyDeleteThat would be Bluebeard: The Life and Crimes of Gilles de Rais (1980). I've never seen that book
DeleteI saw it in a bookshop in New York and realised it was the same author as the Dracula books. It was the first full length book on De Rais I read and I was hooked after a few pages.
DeleteI encountered "A Dream of Dracula" when it was just published; I was a young boy who loved Barnabas (of "Dark Shadows") and Bela Lugosi's Dracula. Found the book at the Mall and got the parents to buy it for me. An odd book, as mentioned, that introduced me to some "sociology/psychology" I was quite unfamiliar with...it made a deep impression on me. And I snapped up the two original "Annotated" volumes (with some great art) as soon as they came out. Truly loved those books! And still have them all in my library. It's a bit surreal to see his daughter Naomi come up in the news from time to time.
ReplyDelete