The Ink Spectre

Just sold this copy of the September 1914 edition of The Strand magazine on eBay for a pretty penny. Sorry to see it go, but I do have it in a six-monthly volume (but without the cover of course). The illustration is by Frank Wiles.

I’ve been Powerpuffed! You can do the same at http://www.powerpuffyourself.com/

Separated at birth - Kylo Ren and mad Pharoah Akhenaten.

Press Baron Frankenstein. Apart from the specs, the mad baron and Murdoch have little between them.

Three illustrations by Errol Le Cain for ‘The Lotus and the Grail’ by Rosemary Harris, published in 1974.

Three illustrations by Lawrence Scarfe from ‘Three Ghosts’. Pinched from the excellent literary blog http://callumjames.blogspot.co.uk/

'Woman With Skeletons' by Gustav Mossa.

Two paintings by Odd Nerdrum.

Backgrounds by Kay Nielsen for Night on a Bare Mountain, for Disney's Fantasia.

The frontispiece illustrations to the 1848 edition of Charles Dickens's 'The Haunted Man or The Ghost's Bargain' and, below, a scene from a dramatisation of the story put on at the Adelphi Theatre in London.

http://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/howard-carter-mummy-adventure/

Bookplate belonging to an Italian bibliophile, Enrico Vannunnci.

Lord Byron's description of the Black Friar, one of the ghosts haunting his family home, Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. According to his biographer, Thomas Hood (himself the author of a poem called 'The Haunted House'), Byron glimpsed this apparition himself on one occasion.

I'm reading 'Uncle Silas', a Gothic novel by J S Le Fanu. I find that the family in the story have the surname of 'Ruthyn'. Le Fanu was a Dublin man but his niece Rhoda Broughton, a lesser-known novelist, was born in Denbigh. I wonder whether Le Fanu ever visited his Denbighshire relations and borrowed the name of a town he may have visited during his stay? Ruthin (Welsh spelling, Rhuthun) is five or six miles away from my home in Flintshire.

The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten, compiled by Jeffrey Cakirk.

My slightly tatty copy of the 1910 edition of the John Silence stories by Algernon Blackwood. I bought it off eBay some years ago, unaware of the exciting bookplate it contained. It formerly belonged to A J A Symons, author of the groundbreaklng biography The Quest for Corvo. Mount Lebanon was Symons's childhood home in Battersea. As early as page 5 of his own biography, written by his brother Julian, it is stated: 'he professed a great admiration for Poe, for Algernon Blackwood ... and in general for all artists who dealt romantically with macabre themes.' I can't believe the founder of the First Editions Club would have been satisfied with a 1910 edition of John Silence (it was first published in 1908), so this may have been the copy he owned as a youngster, the reading of which may have encouraged him to further explore Blackwood's works. It's probably passed through a number of hands before reaching me but I am delighted to now be the one to own it.