Pixie Pool: A Mirage of Deeps and Shadows

I discovered this book via an advertisement. Admittedly, a century-old advertisement. I was looking up some book reviews in the TLS of 30 May 1912, and saw an advertisement for E.G. Swain's Stoneground Ghost Tales (1912), published by W. Heffer & Sons of Cambridge. I already knew and liked Swain's book, so I was intrigued as well by the other book being advertised along with it: Pixie Pool (1911) by Edmund Vale. The blurbs note it as having "beautiful myths" and of having "the same kind of imagination that we find in parts of Algernon Blackwood's Education of Uncle Paul."  Yes, the advertising worked, albeit over one hundred years too late to benefit the publisher, and I set out to find a copy. Easier said than done, but eventually I did procure one.

Pixie Pool: A Mirage of Deeps and Shadows is a collection of eighteen items, plus a short preface by the author. The first and final pieces are poems, but the sixteen items in between are stories.  The book has eight illustrations in inserted plates by one E.R. Herrmann, about whom I can find almost nothing. The illustrations are not especially inspired. 

The presentation of the book (the cover and the illustrations) suggest a bit of twee-ness, but fortunately this is not the case for the tales. "The Master Musician" lives alone and teaches the trees and waters to sing, but he is abducted and taken to entertain the King, and imprisoned when he won't. The Musician strikes a deal with the King whereby he will sing his last song one moonlit night, and thereby he escapes. In "The Last Arrow," an arrow dropped by cupid into a forest grows into a flower of a new and unknown color. The bloom is plucked by a wandering stranger; but the nightingale, having seen the color, and has learned to sing of it. In "The Blue Wave," the cloud and the wind have had five daughters, all waves. One is blue, who is determined that she will love only a human skeleton.  Olemel, in "The Sky Lovers," transforms into a sunbeam in order to wed the Child of the Morning Wave. Complications ensue, but the lovers are aided in reuniting by various insects and animals. One tale is darker than the rest. In "The Shadow," the eponymous character comes to a feast and offers to draw life portraits of everyone, and when he does so all of the portraits show a shadow. Save in one portrait.

In the preface, Vale acknowledges that some (unspecified) materials in the book are reprinted from The Contemporary Review, but no specifics are known. 

Edmund Vale

Edmund Vale was the pen-name of Henry Edmund Theodoric Vale (1888-1969), who was born in Wales and educated at St. John's College, Cambridge. He married Ruth Madeline Hutchings in Dorset in 1924; they had one son and two daughters. He published over two dozen books, most of them nonfiction, on topics from Roc: A Dog's Eye View of War (1930) and The Seas & Shores of England (1936) on to How to Look at Old Buildings (1940), Shropshire (1940) and Abbeys and Priories (1955). The World of Wales (1935) was partially illustrated by his wife. His final book was The Mail-Coach Men of the Late Eighteenth Century (1960). 

In contrast, his first book was a slim book of poetry, Echoes from the Northland (1908), which was followed by Pixie Pool, and then by another collection of poems, Elfin Chaunts and Railway Rhythms (1914).  Pixie Pool is pretty rare, and is not held in the British Library. It is apparently his only published fiction, though in 1927 he had another volume called Tapestry Tales, for which Vale tried without success to get an introduction from John Buchan. The book was never published.