Mark Valentine’s book-collecting began with classic supernatural and fantastic fiction and decadent poetry but soon included antiquities, folklore and the Arthurian legends. The first of these enthusiasms is reflected here in essays on Walter de la Mare, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson and David Lindsay and on lesser-known modern ghost stories. There are also several essays on slim volumes of rare and strange verse.

He also explores the origins of the Red Lion inn sign, the enjoyable wanderings of 1930s antiquarians and ramblers, and the keen weather-watchers behind the irresistible title British Thunderstorms, Continuing Summer Thunderstorms. The author speculates on the secrets behind an interwar listing of obscure periodicals and on the odd finds at a village hall flea market. Readers will find in all these essays a delight in the obscurer byways and an engaging interest in the unlikeliest places.

Contains: ‘Introduction’, ‘ “Our Mortal Longing”: Walter de la Mare and the Modern Ghost Story’, ‘More Modern Ghosts’, ‘ “Wrapped in His Books”: Scholars in M.R. James’ Stories’, ‘ “King Pharaoh”: M.R. James and the Folk-Song Collector’, ‘The Wrong Register: A Wilkie Collins Mystery’, Beyond Arcturus: Collecting David Lindsay’, ‘ “A Writer of Originality and Power”: a Note on J. Mills Whitham’, ‘The Sphinx and the Book Collector: A Note on Norman Davey’, ‘ “The Perfume of a Dying Rose”: Park Barnitz’s The Book of Jade’, ‘The Thunderstorm Collectors’, ‘Devilled Almonds and Doomed Boys: Some Avant-Garde Poetry of 1920’, ‘Rococo Poet on the Rive Gauche: A Note on Ralph Cheever Dunning’, ‘Brooding Youth: Eight Cambridge Saturnines’, ‘Arthur Machen and the Mysteries of the Grail’, ‘Things Temporal, Things Eternal: James Branch Cabell and Arthur Machen in Correspondence’, ‘ “It is Getting Very Late & Dark”: Arthur Machen’s Later Fiction’, ‘Rapt in Secret Studies: Colin Still and the Mysteries of The Tempest’, ‘ “Literary Conjuring”: A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo’, ‘A Home on the Borderland: William Hope Hodgson and Borth’, ‘Time and Time Again: Experiments in Time’, ‘A Landscape Detective’, ‘Wanderers and Wayfarers’, ‘Brittle Gods’, ‘The Joy of Obscure Journals’, ‘English Almanacs’, ‘The Red Lion’, ‘Lost Sovereigns’, ‘Arthur of the Seventies’, ‘Through the Golden Valley to the Dark Tower’, ‘Acknowledgements’