Tartarus Press
publishers
Haunted by Books is a paperback of 296 pages
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Paperbacks and ebooks available by Mark Valentine
Essays
Short Stories
The Peacock Escritoire with At Dusk
The Fig Garden and Other Stories
Secret Europe (with John Howard)
Inner Europe (with John Howard)
The Collected Connoisseur (with John
Biography
Haunted by Books
by
Mark Valentine
In Haunted by Books Mark Valentine explores the more curious byways of literature. He presents the author who was always being told he had nearly written a masterpiece, and the genius of the short story who brewed his own cider and lived in a railway carriage.
Then there’s the figure of the 1890s, praised by Max Beerbohm, who liked to wander around London wearing horns and chewing railings, and the young man in the 1930s who tried to sell his poetry door to door.
There are also new angles on key figures: the strange case of Robert Aickman, sailor and philosopher; the book that Sax Rohmer really wanted to write; the enigma of Walter de la Mare’s ‘Seaton’s Aunt’.
And there are literary mysteries; what was the MS in a Red Box? Who wrote Shakespeare’s Gunpowder Plot? What became of Dr Ludovicus? Other essays celebrate neglected writers worth discovering, such as Mary Butts, Claude Houghton, and Vernon Knowles, or offer fresh perspectives, looking at Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s fantasies, Malcolm Lowry’s reading in occult fiction. There are even studies of books that were never written.
Haunted by Books will delight all readers and book collectors who like to leave the beaten path and wander in the wild woods, forgotten lanes and lonely houses of literature.
Containing:
Introduction
Studies of Sad Beauty: Robert Aickman, Philip Steegman & Arthington Worsley
A Dandysme of the Soul: Michael Arlen
Inner Bohemia: The Mystical Fiction of Mary Butts
With Whisperings and Mumblings: Walter de la Mare’s ‘Seaton’s Aunt’
The Stranger Who Opens the Door: The Novels of Claude Houghton
Goodbye, Mr Fothergill: James Hilton’s Knight Without Armour
‘A Demon in Reverse’: Cosnahan’s Magical Influences
Under This Strange Grey Sky: The Fantasies of Vernon Knowles
The Writer in the Railway Carriage: H.A. Manhood
And I’d Be The King of China: The Strange Life of Charles Welsh Mason
Masks in Flanders: Major Morris’ Lost Classic
Offerings to Mercury
Viper in the Temple: The Novels of L.H. Myers
Lost Radiance: The Fiction of Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Jerusalem in England: A Note on the Work of L. Furze Morrish
‘I Walk Through the World’: The Writings of Geoffrey Pollett
Mr Shakespeare’s Gunpowder Plot
The MS in a Red Box
The Mysteries of the Pomegranate: Sax Rohmer’s The Orchard of Tears
Possible Masterpieces: The Novels of J.C. Snaith
The Ultimate Oddness: A Book of Whimsies
Secret Names: The Hermetic Fiction of Peter Vansittart
‘Or Opaline Algol’: A Lost Edwardian Poet
A Small Place of Worship: The Last of the Johnsonians
What Became of Dr Ludovicus: Ernest Dowson & Arthur Moore’s Lost Shocker
Wraiths: Some Lost Poets of the 1890s
The Piccadilly Goat
Reviews of Unwritten Books
Acknowledgements
Reviews:
"The four collections of essays by Mark Valentine published by Tartarus Press in Yorkshire contain some of the best writing on books of the last twenty years. It is unsurprising that his name is not cited alongside Basbanes, Dirda or Gekoski, for Valentine’s chosen subject is, more often than not, the rediscovery of a neglected author or lighting a candle at the shrine of an author who had no wide audience in life." Peter Cooper, The Book Collector, Summer 2022
An interview with Mark Valentine
Copyright Tartarus Press 2024