James Doig and the Australian Weird

Over the last decade and a half, James Doig has quietly shown himself to be the premiere authority on classical Australian weird fiction and fantasy. I've enjoyed his anthologies, and the single-author collection by Ernest Ferenc (whose work also appears in multiple anthologies), not to mention Doig's own excellent fiction (ten stories) in the Sarob Press volume Friends of the Dead (2015).

Last summer I learned of a new (to me) anthology from 2019, and after acquiring it I made for my own reference a table of contents to the five anthologies (plus the Ferenc collection), so I could more easily recall which stories appeared in which book. I thought I'd share with Wormwoodiana my contents listing and title index. 

At least one book (Australian Nightmares, 2008) is currently unavailable, and the listing for the others oddly do not come up at Amazon.com via a search by Doig's name (though they do at Amazon.co.uk). Yet the Amazon.com links do come up if you search via bookfinder.com. I have no idea why. 

Books:

Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction, ed. James Doig
    Mandurah, W.A.:  Equilibrium Books, 2007
    [n.p.]: Borgo Press, 2013
    [Contains: “Introduction”;  “The Spirit of the Tower” by Mary Fortune;  “Little Luiz” by B.L. Farjeon; “The House by the River” by G.A. Walstab; “The Ghost from the Sea” by J.E.O. Muddock; “Spirit-Led”, “A Haunt of the Jinkarras” and “The Boundary Rider’s Story” by Ernest Favenc; “Cannabis Indica” by Marcus Clarke; “Norah and the Fairies” by Hume Nisbet; “The Ghost-Monk” by Rosa Praed; “Lupton’s Guest: A Memory of the Eastern Pacific” by Louis Becke; “A Colonial Banshee” by Fergus Hume; “A Strange Experience” by A.F. Bassett Hull; “A Bushman’s Story” by Frances Faucett; “The Death Child” by Guy Boothby; “The Jewelled Hand” and “The Vengeance of the Dead” by Lionel Sparrow; “The Cave” and “The Forest of Lost Men” by Beatrice Grimshaw;  “The Cave of the Invisible” by James Francis Dwyer; “Where the Butterflies Come From” by William Hay; “The Vampire” by W.W. Lamble; “Hallowe’en” by Dulcie Deamer.]   

Australian Nightmares: More Australian Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. James Doig
    Mandurah, W.A.:  Equilibrium Books, 2008
    [Contains: “Introduction”;  “Acknowledgements”; “The White Maniac: A Doctor’s Tale” by Mary Fortune; “The Silent Sepulchre” by Charles Junor; “What the Rats Brought” and “On the Island of Shadows” by Ernest Favenc; “The Odic Touch” by Hume Nesbit; “Told in the ‘Corona’s’ Cabin. On Three Evenings” by J.A. Barry; “The House of Ill Omen” by Rosa Praed; “A Thing of Wax” by Morley Roberts; “The Prophetic Horror of the Great Experiment” and “The Precipitous Details of the High Mountain and the Three Skeletons” by James Edmund; “The Strange Case of Alan Heriot” by Lionel Sparrow; “The Blanket Fiend” by Beatrice Grimshaw; “The Phantom Ship of Dirk Van Tromp” by James Francis Dwyer; “The Pledge” by Helen Simpson; “The Watch” and “The House That Took Revenge” by Vernon Knowles; “The Story of the Waxworks” by Rosaleen Norton; “The Undying One” by Roger Dard.] 

Australian Ghost Stories, ed. James Doig
    Ware, Hertfordshire:  Wordsworth Editions, 2010
    [Contains:  “Introduction”; “The White Maniac:  A Doctor’s Tale” by Mary Fortune;  “Spirit-Led” by Ernest Favenc; “A Haunt of the Jinkarras” by Ernest Favenc;  “The Mystery of Major Molineaux” by Marcus Clarke;  “The Bunyip” by Rosa Campbell Praed; “Lupton’s Guest: A Memory of the Eastern Pacific” by Louis Becke;  “The Haunted Pool: A Tale of the Blue Mountains” by Edward Wheatley;  “A Colonial Banshee” by Fergus Hume;  “The Devil of the Marsh” by H.B. Marriott Watson;  “The Accursed Thing” by Edward Dyson;  “The Third Murder: A New South Wales Tale” by Henry Lawson;  “The Death Child” by Guy Boothby;  “A Strange Goldfield” by Guy Boothby;  “Sea Voices” by Roderic Quinn;  “The Cave” by Beatrice Grimshaw;  “The Cave of the Invisible” by James Francis Dwyer;  “Hallowe’en” by Dulcie Deamer.]

Australian Hauntings: Colonial Supernatural Fiction, ed. James Doig
    Mandurah, W.A.:  Equilibrium Books, 2011
    [n.p.]: Borgo Press, 2013
    [Contains:  “Acknowledgements”; “Introduction”; “Jerry Boake’s Confession” by Ernest Favenc; “The Track of the Dead” by Ernest Favenc; “Blood for Blood” by Ernest Favenc; “In the Night” by Ernest Favenc; “A Strange Occurrence on Huckey’s Creek” by Ernest Favenc;  “The Wraith of Tom Imrie”by William Sylvester Walker; “Hulk No. 49” by J.A. Barry; “Miss Crosson’s Familiar” by Rosa Praed; “The Ghost of Brigalow Bend” by “Wanderer”; “The Spectre of the Black Swamp: An Overlander’s Story” by Edwin M. Merrall; “Chronicles of Easyville” by Patrick Shanahan; “Point Despair” by H.B. Marriott Watson; “A New Species” by Robert Coutts Armour; “De Profundus” by Robert Coutts Armour; “The Story of the Stain” by Sophie Osmond; “The Sorcerer of Arjuzanx” by Max Rittenberg; “The Queer Case of Christine Madrigal” by A. E. Martin, “The Hollmsdale Horror” by A. E. Martin; “The Pythoness” by Helen Simpson; “The Evil That Men Do” by Patience Tillyard.] 

 

Ghost and Mystery Stories, by Ernest Favenc, ed. by James Doig
    [n.p.]: Borgo Press, 2013
    [Contains: “Introduction”;  “My Story”; “The Lady Ermetta; or, The Sleeping Secret”; “The Medium”; “The Dead Hand”; “Jerry Boake's Confession”; “A Haunt of the Jinkarras”; “The Last of Six”; “The Spell of the Mas-hantoo”; “Spirit-led”; “The Ghost's Victory”; “Malchook's Doom”; “The Red Lagoon”; “The Track of the Dead”; “Blood for Blood”; “In the Night”; “The Ghostly Bullock-bell”; “My Only Murder”; “An Unquiet Spirit”; “The Boundary Rider's Story”; “A Strange Occurrence on Huckey's Creek”; “The Unholy Experiment of Martin Shenwick, and What Came of It”; “Doomed”; “The Mount of Misfortune”; “The Blood-debt”; “On the Island of Shadows”; “The Haunted Steamer”; “The Girl Body-stealer”; “M'Whirter's Wraith”; “The Land of the Unseen”; “What the Rats Brought”; “The Kaditcha: A Tale of the Northern Territory”; “Bibliography”.]

Beyond the Orbit: Australian Science Fiction to 1935, ed. by James Doig
    [n.p.]: Wildside Press, 2019
    [Contains:  “Introduction”; “What the Rats Brought” by Ernest Favenc; “The Land of the Unseen” by Ernest Favenc; “The Instrument” by H.B. Marriott Watson; “Lost Wings” by Beatrice Grimshaw; “The Social Code” by Erle Cox; “Beyond the Orbit” by Robert Coutts Armour; “Take It as Red” by Robert Coutts Armour; “After 1 Million Years” by J.M. Walsh; “The Gland Men of the Island” by Max Afford; “The Inner Domain” by Phil Collas; “The Bluff of the Hawk” by Desmond Hall and Harry Bates; “The Reign of the Reptiles” by Alan Connell; “Dream's End” by Alan Connell.]

    

Contents, alphabetically by author:

Max Afford
“The Gland Men of the Island”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)

Robert Coutts Armour
“Beyond the Orbit”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)
“De Profundus”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
“A New Species”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
“Take It as Red”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019) 

J.A. Barry
“Hulk No. 49”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
“Told in the ‘Corona’s’ Cabin. On Three Evenings”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Louis Becke
“Lupton’s Guest: A Memory of the Eastern Pacific”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

Guy Boothby
“The Death Child”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)
“A Strange Goldfield”
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

Marcus Clarke
“Cannabis Indica”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

Phil Collas
“The Inner Domain”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)

Alan Connell
“Dream's End”  
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)
“The Reign of the Reptiles”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)

Erle Cox
“The Social Code”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)

Roger Dard
“The Undying One”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Dulcie Deamer    
“Hallowe’en”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

James Francis Dwyer
“The Cave of the Invisible”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)
“The Phantom Ship of Dirk Van Tromp”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Edward Dyson
“The Accursed Thing”
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

James Edmund
“The Prophetic Horror of the Great Experiment”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
“The Precipitous Details of the High Mountain and the Three Skeletons”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

B.L. Farjeon
“Little Luiz”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

Frances Faucett
“A Bushman’s Story”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

Ernest Favenc
“Blood for Blood”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Blood-debt”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Boundary Rider’s Story”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Dead Hand”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Ghost's Victory”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Ghostly Bullock-bell”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Girl Body-stealer”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“Doomed”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“A Haunt of the Jinkarras”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Haunted Steamer”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“In the Night”
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“Jerry Boake’s Confession”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Kaditcha: A Tale of the Northern Territory”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Lady Ermetta; or, The Sleeping Secret”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Land of the Unseen” Beyond the Orbit (2019)  
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Last of Six”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“M'Whirter's Wraith”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“Malchook's Doom”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Medium”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Mount of Misfortune”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“My Only Murder”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“My Story”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“On the Island of Shadows”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Red Lagoon”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Spell of the Mas-hantoo”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“Spirit-Led”
    Australian Gothic  (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories  (2010)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
 “A Strange Occurrence on Huckey’s Creek”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Track of the Dead”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“The Unholy Experiment of Martin Shenwick, and What Came of It”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“An Unquiet Spirit”
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)
“What the Rats Brought”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)
    Favenc, Ghost and Mystery Stories (2013)

Mary Fortune
“The Spirit of the Tower”
    Australian Gothic  (2007)
“The White Maniac: A Doctor’s Tale”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
    Australian Ghost Stories  (2010)

Beatrice Grimshaw  
“The Blanket Fiend”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
“The Cave”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)
“The Forest of Lost Men”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
“Lost Wings”  
    Beyond the Orbit (2019) 

Desmond Hall and Harry Bates
“The Bluff of the Hawk”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019)

William Hay
“Where the Butterflies Come From”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

A.F. Bassett Hull  
“A Strange Experience”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

Fergus Hume
“A Colonial Banshee”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

Charles Junor
“The Silent Sepulchre”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Vernon Knowles
“The Watch”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
“The House That Took Revenge”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

W.W. Lamble
“The Vampire”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

Henry Lawson
“The Third Murder: A New South Wales Tale”
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

A.E. Martin
“The Queer Case of Christine Madrigal”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)
“The Hollmsdale Horror”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Edwin M. Merrall
“The Spectre of the Black Swamp: An Overlander’s Story”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

J.E.O. Muddock
“The Ghost from the Sea”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

Hume Nisbet
“Norah and the Fairies”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
“The Odic Touch”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Rosaleen Norton
“The Story of the Waxworks”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Sophie Osmond
“The Story of the Stain”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Rosa Campbell Praed
“The Bunyip”
     Australian Ghost Stories (2010)
“The Ghost-Monk”
    Australian Gothic (2007)
“The House of Ill Omen”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
“Miss Crosson’s Familiar”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Roderic Quinn
“Sea Voices”
    Australian Ghost Stories  (2010)

Max Rittenberg
“The Sorcerer of Arjuzanx”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Morley Roberts
“A Thing of Wax”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)

Patrick Shanahan
“Chronicles of Easyville”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Helen Simpson
“The Pledge”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
“The Pythoness”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Lionel Sparrow
“The Jewelled Hand”
    Australian Gothic  (2007)
“The Strange Case of Alan Heriot”
    Australian Nightmares (2008)
“The Vengeance of the Dead”
    Australian Gothic  (2007)

Patience Tillyard
“The Evil That Men Do”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

William Sylvester Walker
“The Wrait of Tom Imrie”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

J.M. Walsh
“After 1 Million Years”
    Beyond the Orbit (2019) 

G.A. Walstab
“The House by the River”
    Australian Gothic (2007)

“Wanderer”
“The Ghost of Brigalow Bend”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

H.B. Marriott Watson
“The Devil of the Marsh”  
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)
“The Instrument”  
    Beyond the Orbit (2019) 
“Point Despair”  
    Australian Hauntings (2011)

Edward Wheatley
“The Haunted Pool: A Tale of the Blue Mountains”
    Australian Ghost Stories (2010)

The Ghost of Greville Lodge

I recently watched The Ghost of Greville Lodge, a film made in 2000. It's a moderately well-done ghost story centering on a young teen who goes to stay with his (previously unknown) great uncle at a country mansion.  Past events (of sixty years earlier) play out on the boy, centering on the ghost of another young boy. The film was interesting enough, so that I wondered if the source-book, a young-adult book by Nicholas Wilde called Down Came the Blackbird (1991), might be better. In short, it's not, but it makes for an interesting comparison.

The teen in the book is much more of a delinquent, and the "ghost" is not a ghost, but a series of shared dreams of the past. As reframed for the film, the plot works rather better with the ghost. Here, unusually, the translation from book to film seems to be for the better.

There is little available on the author Nicholas Wilde (on the web, his accomplishments are conflated with at least one other Nicholas Wilde, an American who worked as a location manager in the film industry in the 2000s). On the dust-wrapper of the US edition of Down Came a Blackbird he is described as "a teacher in Cambridgeshire, England." On the dust-wrapper of his first book it notes that he was educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge, that he is an avid collector of children's books and Victorian toys, and that he is a German scholar and obsessive Wagnerite.

Some bibliographical sleuthing reveals that he published some other children's books, three dealing with highly-charged friendships between two boys.  These include Into the Dark (1987), Death Knell (1990) and Eye of the Storm (1995; retitled in the US The Eye of the Storm). His first book was the comical Sir Bertie & the Wyvern: A Tale of Heraldry (1982), followed by Huffle (1984), the latter illustrated by the author.

Readers of Wormwoodiana will possibly find more interesting the fine press 1991 reprint, illustrated by Nicholas Wilde, of Edmund John's The Flute of Sardonyx (1913), a slim collection of Uranian verse. Here are a few illustrations. More can be seen at the Old Stile Press website here. 

 

Nicholas Wilde's last book was published in 1995, and after that I find no certain trace of him. 

The Master Sinner

There is a small sub-genre of letters-from-hell books. The most well-known of these is doubtless The Screwtape Letters (1942), by C.S. Lewis. But previous to Lewis there were two others that Lewis at least knew about. Breve fra Helvede by M. Rowel (the pseudonym of Valdemar Adolph Thisted) appeared in Denmark in 1866, with English translations to follow, including an 1884 one, as Letters from Hell,  with a preface by George MacDonald. Lewis is known to have read a part of this volume, leaving the whole unfinished. An earlier similar volume was Infernal Conference: or, Dialogues of Devils (1772) by John Magowan. I included extracts from each of these two books in my anthology Tales Before Narnia (2008). The Magowan book was, to me, the more interesting of the two. 

Not long after Tales Before Narnia was published, I learned of another similar book, The Master Sinner, by "A Well-Known Author." It was published by John Long in February 1901. The "Author of The Master Sinner" published a second novel, unrelated to the first, entitled The Curse of Eden (John Long, November 1901).

The Master Sinner is a sort of cynical response to books by Marie Corelli, like The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and (especially) The Master-Christian (1900). It tells of two friends, poor philosophers Anthony Grigg and Thomas Trelawny, who make a pact that whoever dies first will communicate to the other the facts about various eternal things. Trelawny dies suddenly, and Grigg receives two letters, a year apart, beginning on the anniversary of his friend's death, fulfilling the bargain, and telling him of the misrepresentation on earth of Hell and its ruling presence. In the second part of the book, Grigg reads his friend's diary, and then his own, with highlights by Satan about each of them wrecking another person's life. Trelawney made up for his mistake and so "earned" a place in "good" Hell (Trelawny describes hell as a good place, contrary to earthly understanding). The question is, can Grigg do the same?  The story is melodramatic, and has some nice descriptive passages.It keeps one reading through to the end. 

The Master Sinner has long been erroneously attributed to Herbert Vivian (1865-1940), even according to various library catalogues. This misattribution began early. In the section of "Table Talk" in The Literary World for 22 March 1901, there appeared the following:

The authorship of 'The Master Sinner', a new series of 'Letters from Hell', recently reviewed in these columns, has been unofficially fathered upon Mr Herbert Vivian, the former editor of The Whirlwind, and the prospective editor of The Rambler. There may be other claimants. 

The following lines, by an anonymous author, were picked up in the Strand:

The Hell-marked Christian was the first;
  He raved and Stormed and holloaed.
Next on the scene Corelli burst--
  The Master Christian followed.

Then for spell the lord of hell
  In peace could eat his dinner;
But not for Long, who seized his prong
  And raised the Master Sinner. 

The actual author of The Master Sinner was Wilfred Keppel Honnywill (1871-1909), the son of a clergyman, Rev. John Blake Honnywill (1824-1883) and his wife Anne Jane Montague nee Stephenson (1839-1901), born at Sompting, Sussex. He was educated at King's School, Sherborne, and served in the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marines, before briefly owning a newspaper and turning to literature. Besides the two pseudonymous novels, he published only one other book, Irene and Other Poems (1900), as by W. Keppel Honnywill. A large inheritance following his mother's death in 1901 led to the abandonment of literature, which was furthered by alcoholism and eventually followed by suicide.  In the late morning of 21 September 1909, Honnywill jumped from a bridge above Farringdon Street, Holborn, fracturing his skull on impact. He was 38 years old.

A Novel of Dorset Witchcraft

 

Bachelor’s Knap (1935) by Eric Benfield is a novel with supernatural elements that seems to have evaded much notice so far. It was published by Peter Davies, who had a distinct taste for the macabre. An artist goes to a remote Dorset village to paint, staying at the local inn. There is a rambling old thatched cottage standing apart down a hollow way, but something keeps spoiling his attempts to paint it.

It proves to be the home of a witch. Her practice is a mixture of practical, down-to-earth folk wisdom and a psychic attunement to certain spiritual currents. Warily, he gets to know her and they become lovers.

And then in one remarkable necromantic scene she visits her previous, dead lover in the churchyard, raises his decaying body and releases him from her influence, since she is now committed to another. We are all set for a novel of dark occult deeds.

This is not exactly how it develops, though there are other glimpses of the supernatural: there are suggestions of thought-reading, precognition and an awareness of vital forces at play on individual fates. However, the novel also concerns itself with the economic and political realities of rural life. 

One plot strand concerns a farmer’s eviction of an agricultural worker because of his socialist views: the witch and the artist give him shelter. Another describes the secretive world of the Purbeck marble workers, a trade carried on in the same families for centuries. We see their difficult, risky work.

In another scene, a friend of the artist, a Communist organiser, incites the village men to take over the pub for a night, ejecting the landlord, and enjoying free beer. His hope that this will lead to a broader insurrection does not materialise and he has to go into hiding to evade the local constable. There is a strange, visionary denouement as he flees over the cliffs.

Benfield’s writing has a certain plain, rugged integrity to it, though dialogue is not a strong point: conversations are often a bit staged, and not natural-sounding. The novel seems to be aiming to reveal the secret, sinister life of a seemingly pleasant, secluded village, in the manner of T F Powys. The protagonist artist is a bit too passive to hold centre stage, though, and the structure often feels diffuse, as if the author wasn’t sure if he wanted to focus on rural hardship or uncanny folklore.

However, the novel ends with a raw and intense folk magic ritual at an ancient earthwork, the Cuckoo Pound, where the witch draws to her a dark stranger who exudes a black light. This being becomes her supernatural lover. The artist knows he is no longer needed, and departs the village: “He had been allowed to see something of the power of the countryside.” Beyond all the mortal machinations of village life there is a primeval force remorselessly at work.

A 2003 feature on Benfield by Patrick Wright at the Open Democracy website noted that “Benfield had actually started out as a quarrier and stone-worker at Worth Matravers, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. By the late 1920s, the stone trade was dying, squeezed by the war-sped advance of concrete, and Benfield, like other Purbeck quarriers, was reduced to hacking out birdbaths or stone squirrels and owls for suburban gardens and the tourist trade.”

However, as Wright describes, Benfield also turned his hand to modernist sculpture and to writing. He was the creator of an anti-war monument at Woodford Green commissioned by Sylvia Pankhurst, which was controversial in its time. 

His other books include a guide to Dorset; a booklet about the Dorset hill fort Maiden Castle (the subject of a novel by John Cowper Powys); Purbeck Shop (1948), about the stoneworkers, and at least one other novel drawing on the Dorset quarrying culture, Saul’s Sons (1938); and some crime fiction. He also wrote an autobiography, Southern English (1942).

(Mark Valentine)
 

Through a Looking Glass Darkly

Through a Looking Glass Darkly is a re-imagining of Lewis Carroll's work by rare book dealer Jake Fior, who specialises in 'Alice' material, which draws on the supernatural and mystical elements in Carroll's imagination. The Victorian author's library, Fior notes, included shelves of books on magic and speculative thought. 

This variation on the book takes an older version of Alice through an occult landscape involving elements from the history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 

The new volume also explores the strange synchronicities and discoveries encountered during the re-creation of the book. 

The book includes unpublished illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, whose previously unknown 'Alice' chess-board Jake Fior found, and new coloured versions by Kate Hepburn of the classic Alice artwork.

It is available in a special signed edition limited to 125 copies, bound in midnight-blue silk cloth with the top edge hand decorated in silver and with certain pages perfumed by Roja Dove. There is also a trade edition. 

(Mark Valentine)

Sphinxes & Obelisks

Sphinxes & Obelisks is a new volume of essays on rare books and recondite subjects. All the pieces are previously uncollected and many are new or revised.

 

The books discussed include an interplanetary fantasy by a Welsh squire, a timeslip novel by the priest-poet once thought to be the original of Dorian Gray, an occult thriller about the rivalry to possess an ancient grimoire, and an overlooked work about the revival of Roman paganism in a quiet English village.

 

Other essays discuss Tarot in the 1950s, fashionable wear for ghosts, the rich history and mythology behind the Saracen’s Head inn sign, and a book-collecting expedition to the West Country.

You will also discover why Queen Victoria demanded to see the disembodied head of a Sphinx, the slight flaw with the idea of racing cheetahs at the White City, how Apocalypse was announced at a Somerset railway station book-stall, and how to play the game of Cat-at-a-Window.

The hardback first edition, available from Tartarus Press, is limited to 300 copies. 

(Mark Valentine)