"Denizens of the archives have driven themselves into sweet oblivion by pursuing false leads down cold trails to dead ends, by amassing bulging but frequently useless dossiers, and by probing dull monographs . . . yet sometimes there comes a great notion." "A Shiver in the Archives" by Gale E. Christianson
Jack Finney's second novel, The Body Snatchers , was first serialized in shortened form in Collier's magazine in three parts, from 26 November to 24 December 1954. The full novel appeared as a pocked-sized paperback original from Dell, on 1 February 1955. The first hardcover edition came out in England from Eyre & Spottiswoode on 16 September 1955. The novel was filmed as Invasion of the Body…
Peter Haining (1940-2007) was a hugely prolific editor of single-author collections and multi-author anthologies, many of which appeared to dig up lost or forgotten stories by famous authors. Alas such items were usually frauds--Haining would, for example, take some forgotten story by one unfamiliar author, and attribute it to a more well-known author, complete with falsified bibliographical…
In 2014, Otto Penzler published Bibliomysteries: An Annotated Bibliography of First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World of Books, 1849-2000 . It's a useful book when one is hungry to read a bibliomystery, for the entries often give a sentence or two about the relevant book or story to whet one's appetite. Thus, recently, I found this entry: Frederick Irving Anderson's short story "The…
"Can you not see that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale…
In January 2019, I posted on this blog "'All Fled, All Done': Redux on Robert E. Howard's Famous Couplet" , which mostly sorted out the inspiration of Howard's famous couplet as coming from a poem by Viola Taylor (later Viola Taylor Garvin). I reproduced the publication of the poem from 1912, and noted that it had probably first appeared in The Westminster Gazette . In 1926, Taylor/Garvin dated…
I think I have happened upon a lost Charles Williams poem. At least, after a cursory look in prominent sources on Williams, I find no mention of it. I found it in an original compilation by Harry H. Mayer, Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE The Lyric Psalter: The Modern Reader’s Book of Psalms (Liveright, 1940). Mayer notes in his short foreword that: The poems of this book have all…
So I see that there is a crater named Tolkien near the north pole of Mercury. What about Lessingham?
Lord Dunsany visited the United States five times, the final three times in the 1950s when he went to California. There he stayed with friends, including Hazel Littlefield Smith, who lived in Palos Verdes Estates, a coastal town established in 1923 as a planned community to the south and west of Los Angeles. According to the 1950 US Census, its population was less than two thousand people (though…
In the early 1920s, G.P. Putnam's Sons became Dunsany's publisher on both sides of the Atlantic. Most of the books had different dust-wrappers in each territory (and the US books were accordingly printed in the US). The London office utilized new art by Sidney H. Sime, first on the limited editions (discussed in Part 1of 2, see here ). Putnam's gradually acquired the rights to the collections of…
William Hope Hodgson married Bessie Gertrude Farnworth in Kensington, London, on 26 February 1913, and the newlyweds soon settled in Sanary, Var, on the south coast of France. First they stayed at a villa called Les Mimosas, but by July they had settled in the nearby Chalet Mathilde, where they would remain until after War broke out in August 1914, when around October they removed to England.…
S.H. Sime's full-page illustrations for the books of Lord Dunsany run from The Gods of Pegana (1905) through My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936), some of which were produced in glorious photogravure. But in the 1920s, after Dunsany had secured G.P. Putnam's Sons as his publisher on both sides of the Atlantic, the London office celebrated Sime's work in ways no previous publisher of Dunsany's had.…
It must have been in the late 1970s that I read Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (five novels, plus occasional shorter pieces collected in The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain in 1982). I liked them, but wished they were a little less juvenile. Soon afterwards I also read his early novel, Time Cat . (This was before I declared the subgenre of cat fantasies verboten.) And I think I read a…
In 2023, Jonathan R. Eller edited and published a thick volume Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury , which I'm just getting around to reading.* Not much on the Tolkien and C.S. Lewis front, but there is one interesting and relevant exchange. Russell Kirk wrote to Bradbury on 12 September 1967, asking: have you been influenced at all by William Morris, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis,…
In 1917, the John W. Luce Company of Boston published a "Gift Edition," a boxed edition of six volumes of his early stories. One set he inscribed (probably during his 1919 US tour), and it was put up for auction by Swann Galleries in 2011. Their catalog entry here shows the handwritten poem by Dunsany that he inscribed in The Gods of Pegana . I transcribe it here. In a dream I must have gone, In a…
[updated 8 September 2024] Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published by Alfred A. Knopf of New York on 18 September 1964. The first UK edition was published by George Allen & Unwin in November 1967. The text of the book was altered in 1973 by Roald Dahl himself. [A companion article documenting the differences can be found here .] Between 1964 and 1973, the Knopf edition…
Updated 5 November 2023 Some months ago I consulted Walter Rigdon's Notable Names in the American Theatre (1976), and in a list of "Premieres in America" I found an unexpected reference to a theatrical performance of A Voyage to Arcturus in New York in 1970. It reportedly took place on March 4, 1970, at the Theatre Genesis, at 10th & 2nd in New York City (p. 188). That's all the information that…
Chance brought me to view a copy of an anthology Great Stories of Sport (1931), edited by Thomas Moult. Scanning the contents I was surprised to see E.R. Eddison's name, with an eleven page piece titled "The King Wrestles with Goldry Bluszco"--it is self-evidently a section from The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Actually it is the bulk of chapter two of that book, "The Wrastling for Demonland." The…
In his posthumous;y published A Diary (1907), William Allingham (1824-1889), a friend of William Morris, recorded on [Tuesday] 13 June 1882 a discussion he had with Morris: Walking with William Morris from the Society of Arts to Bloomsbury last Friday, we talked, among other things, of believing or not believing in a God, and he said: "It's so unimportant, it seems to me," and he went on to say…
Only a few specifics might be changed: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE The world you were born into is going nuts. Just check around you if you think I’m wrong. People stand and watch while women are knifed to death in the streets; church-going boys from good homes take down rifles and butcher pedestrians en masse ; kids call their parent square, and they’re right; parents call…
The Literary Digest was a weekly American magazine published by the Funk & Wagnalls Company of New York. It began in 1890, and by mid 1937 it was evidently stumbling, for in February 1938 it folded. One of its editors in the 1930s had responsibility for a filler column called “What’s the Name, Please?” This editor, Charles Earle Funk, wrote to various prominent or up-and-coming people with names…
In 1981, William Gibson was three years away from publishing his award-winning first novel, Neuromancer . He had published an early story ("Fragments of a Hologram Rose") in 1977; and would have four more appear in 1981, including "Johnnie Mnemonic" and "The Gernsback Continuum." At the time, Rick Coad was publishing a fanzine entitled Space Junk , and for issue 6 (1981) Coad solicited…
From Pearson's Weekly , 4 July 1907: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE “Guy Thorne” (C. Ranger Gull), the author of “When It Was Dark” I chose my pen-name of “Guy Thorne” in the following way and for the following reasons: Some four or five years ago I had written a good many novels under my own name. These novels were not at all concerned with religious matters. They were ordinary…
From Pearson's Weekly , 4 July 1907: "Dick Donovan" who is busily writing a splendid series of stories that will start shortly in Pearson's . Many years ago I was asked to write a series of detective stories to be published in a widely-read journal with which I was then associated. I was not particularly anxious to undertake the work, and imposed a condition that if I did the articles must appear…
Merritt holds a pitchfork: "Ready for the Critics"! Happy holidays.
Roger Dean (b. 1944) is a British artist perhaps best known for his album covers, especially those for the band Yes. I knew that he did at least one Tolkien-related illustration, a painting of Gollum, done at the suggestion of a friend. It's a bit dark (in appears in Views , published in 1975), but I rather like it.