A few of our spookier things in stock!
The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas - in a rather fetching red velvet covered binding. Contains facsimile texts of the scripts of: The Vampire, The Devil's Elixir, The Flying Dutchman, The Castle Spectre, A Tale of Mystery, and Frankenstein. With a substantial introduction by Stephen Wischhusen on London theatres in the early nineteenth century and the production of gothic melodramas. The original contributors are Matthew Lewis, Thomas Holcroft, J. R. Planche, Henry M. Milner, Edward Fitzball.
This is a charming 1823 edition of the Gothic classic The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story by Clara Reeve. Measuring just 12mo, 130 by 85mm (5 by 3¼ inches) in a full leather binding in a maroon morocco. Raise bands to spine with gilt titles and gilt decorative device in remaining compartments. Gilt decorations to front and to back boards. All page edges gilt. Period yellow endpapers. Engraving to title page.
Modern vampires need representing of course, and this is Twilight: Red Edged Special Edition the volume where we first meet Bella and Edward Cullen! From 2007 this is an early special edition. We have a copy of Eclipse from the same red edge series.
Moving onto witches, we can see Pendle Hill as soon as we travel out of Skipton towards the Lakes so here is a very appropriate title on the Lancashire Witches, unusally half-bound in leather by Morell, London. Mist Over Pendle by Robert Neill is the 1951 American edition (3rd impression) of this classic historical novel about the Lancashire Witches has been re-bound into a half calf binding with raised bands to spine, green leather labels and gilt titles. A very unusual copy.
Another modern publishing phenonemon is of course Harry Potter. Harry Potter, A History of Magic: The Book of the Exhibition was produced to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, this is the official book of the once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between Bloomsbury, J. K. Rowling and the British Library combining weird and wonder items from the British Library collection as well as previously unseen items from J. K. Rowling’s personal collection. Includes essays by Steve Backshall, the Reverend Richard Coles, Owen Davies, Julia Eccleshare, Roger Highfield, Steve Kloves, Lucy Mangan, Anna Pavord and Tim Peake, etc. Illustrations by Olivia Lomenech Gill and Jim Kay who have both illustrated Harry Potter books previously.
Up nexts are ghosts and things that go bump in the night. London... The Sinister Side covers all these and more in this city guide with a difference.
Mr Corbett's Ghost & Other Stories by Leon Garfield is in a classic Puffin edition. Many of Leon Garfield's books whether explcitly ghostly or not have the swirling-mists-under-the-gaslamps atmosphere about them. You can browse the master of children's Victorian set historical fiction here.
And finally in the fiction highlights the mistress of the Gothic herself, Mrs Radcliffe. This is all the gothic you'll need in a Folio Society box set: The Complete Works of Mrs Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, Gaston De Blondeville, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne .
And to finish, some non-fiction:
Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic by Rebecca Munford,
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson and
A Dictionary of Superstitions edited by Iona Opie and Moira Tatem.
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All the pictures are of the actual books in stock.
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