A Wild Tumultory Library

Read about the most dangerous man in the West; the poem written by a stuffed crocodile; the alchemist called the great-nephew to the Queen of Faerie; aesthetes, dandies, visionaries, antiquaries, fortune tellers and fakirs, forgotten writers and much more.

Mark Valentine’s third collection of essays explores the curious byways of literature and lore in a similar manner to his earlier volumes Haunted by Books and A Country Still All Mystery.

Taking its title from an encounter in Thomas De Quincey’s youthful wanderings, Valentine’s writing shares that author’s delight in the arcane, the recondite and the obscure.

Containing:

• Introduction
• ‘He Saw the Absolute Coming through the Door’: Rex Warner’s Allegories
• Through the Spaces of the Dark: G.W. Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost
• The Palace of Isis: A Note on Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kôr’
• Call for the Colonel: The Crime Novels of Philip MacDonald
• Dusty Cathedral: The Piquant Thrillers of Edwin Greenwood
• Pagan Mysteries in the Novels of P.M. Hubbard
• Dorian by Candlelight
• Narcissus of the Nineties: The Poems and Prose of Richard Le Gallienne
• A Most Surprising Book: John Davidson’s Earl Lavender
• Always Gaping at Weeds: Frank Kingdon-Ward, Himalayan Plant-Hunter
• Perceval Landon’s Book of Shadows
• J. Milton Hayes: The Green Eyed Yellow Idol Man
• The Seer of Simla
• The Craziest Road of All: E.H. Jones and The Road to En-Dor
• Some Books on Tea Cup Reading
• Three Dandies of the Thirties
• ‘A Rather Beautiful Refuse’: Mayvale by H.E. Clifton and James Wood
• The Ephemeral is the Eternal: Sidney Hunt, Avant Garde Pioneer
• Of an Antiquary
• ‘A Crocodile Truly’: The Poet of St Bertrand De Comminges
• ‘The Rare, the Choice and the Curious’: A.N.L. Munby’s ‘The Comte de Marnay’
• Echoes of Saumur
• Scottish Gothic: Lord Kilmarnock’s Ferelith
• Modern Ghosts: The Macabre Fiction of L.P. Hartley
• The Ancient Art: The Tales of A.E. Coppard
• ‘Great-Nephew to the Queen of Faerie’: A Note on the Grindletonians
• At the Club of Bad Books: Dylan Thomas & John Davenport’s The Death of the King’s Canary
• The Pierrot on the Shore: Robert Walmsley’s Winged Company
• The Peterley Mystery
• Zodiacs in Britain
• The Return of the Grail
• Beyond Tradition and Dream: Three Forgotten Authors
• At the Sign of the Black Pterodactyl: George Hay and Books of ‘Some Other Dimension’
• Through the Three Choir Shires: A Holiday Among Bookshops
• Acknowledgements

Limited to 350 signed copies