Arthur Machen – The Endless Bookshelf

October commonplace book

current reading :

— Paul McAuley. Loss Protocol. Gollancz, [2026].
Near future novel of an England that seems almost familiar and yet the fundamentals have changed after political and climate shocks. Winters is warden of a nature reserve on the estuarine island of Cynsea, sociable enough but with his own reasons to seek solitude. McAuley is good at constructing alien worlds, never better ; and the deep dreamers, ecological activists whom government agencies would gladly classify as terrorists, are suitably creepy. I can’t find the island in my 1955 3 Miles to 1 Inch Road Atlas, but I know it’s there, somewhere downriver from Maldon.

(One afternoon twenty years ago I went cycling, along the peninsula between the Blackwater and the Crouch, through fields out to the primitive church of St. Peter at the sea.)
Books wait for the reader. I have had this since May but only now have I started in : not sure where this is going, happy to be going there.

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My next book, forthcoming from Suntup Press (Fall ’27), is a new edition of two classic novellas by Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan & The White People, with an original essay as afterword. The book will be printed letterpress to the high standards of Suntup Press with original new illustrations, stone lithographs by Wales-based artist Flora McLachlan. The afterword will also include a reproduction of the original frontispiece by Machen’s friend Herbert Jones, intended for 1894 edition but never used by John Lane. This is exciting news, the book will be beautiful !

https://suntup.press/the-great-god-pan-the-white-people/

N.B. The book sold out upon announcement (17 October).

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I have been enjoying Now Voyager, a new illustrated journal presenting international topics and some unusual perspectives, already in its fourth issue https://www.nowvoyager.com

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And it’s October, which means that Michael Swanwick is scattering the leaves of another dark tale, Autumn’s End, at his website

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/10/autumns-end-part-1-of-31.html

The other day, I received an envelope from Dragonstairs Press :

— Michael Swanwick. October Leaves [2010]. [Dragonstairs Press, 2026]. With a new afterword by the author. Edition of 48.

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It’s October, and that means the the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair will be upon us before long : Friday 6 through Sunday 8 November at the Hynes Convention Center, 900 Boylston Street. Your correspondent will be in booth 413 (Cummins), so come say hello. And drop me a note if you would like a pass.

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recent reading :

— Charles Olson. Call Me Ishmael. A Study of Herman Melville [1947]. City Lights, [n.d., ca. 1968].
Amazing book ! A poet’s intense account of climbing the pinnacle of nineteenth-century American prose fiction. Rigorous and visionary and compelling.

— Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels. Garden City, New York : Doubleday, Page, 1917.
A whimsical classic of the used book trade, a tale of itinerant bookseller Mr. Mifflin and his horse-drawn bookshop, and how the sister of a distinguished author makes a snap decision to leave the farm and go on the open road as a bookseller. (There is a whisper of that brief chapter in The Wind in the Willows where, between boating and motor cars, Mr. Toad takes up a canary yellow horse caravan.) With a practical demonstration of the bookseller’s cost code system, with purchase prices in cents ! A nostalgic picture of a vanished world.

news & notes : mid-May

on Hampstead Heath, May 2026

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This sign, suggestive of Arthur Machen, seen in the Museum Tavern.

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Blue plaque for Robert Aickman in Gower Street.
/ seen along the way but not shown : John Galsworthy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ottoline Mortell, D. H. Lawrence, Leigh Hunt, Constable, and others

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on Hampstead Heath, May 2026

In London for the Firsts antiquarian book fair at the Saatchi Gallery (14-17 May). Come say hello (Cummins booth A10).
https://www.firstslondon.com/

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bronze plaque for Andrew Marvell (1621-78), on a wall in Highgate

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current reading :

— Jean-Paul Sartre. Les Mots [1964]. Gallimard / Folio, [January 2026].

After the young Jean-Paul’s mother falls asleep while reading to him :

. . . c’était le livre qui parlait. Des phrases en sortaient qui me faisaient peur : c’étaient de vrais mille-pattes, elles grouillaient de syllabes et de lettres, étiraient leurs diphtongues, faisaient vibrer les doubles consonnes ; chantantes, nasales, coupées de pauses et de soupirs, riches en mots inconnus, elles s’enchan-taient d’elles-mêmes et de leurs méandres sans se soucier de moi : quelquefois elles disparaissaient avant que j’eusse pu les comprendre, d’autres fois j’avais compris d’avance et elles continuaient de rouler noblement vers leur fin sans me faire grâce d’une virgule.

/ file under : boys and their mothers

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— Camille de Toledo. L’internationale des rivières. Un recit de l’avenir. Verdier, [février 2026].

Arthur Machen, Eleusinia, 1881

Arthur Machen’s first book, Eleusinia, by a former member of H. C. S., is a sequence of poems celebrating pre-Christian mysteries in the Athens of the young author’s imagination. The pamphlet was printed in Hereford in 1881, and is known from one copy preserved at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The copy is from the collection of Charles Parsons (Yale class of 1912), who was one of the lenders to the Harry Marks exhibition in 1923. Eleusinia was not, however, exhibited in 1923, for at the time it was still in the author’s possession. But by 1926 his circumstances had changed, and when it happened that one of the American collectors with whom Machen had been corresponding was visiting London, Machen agreed to receive him and to sell his copy of Eleusinia. The picture above shows the pastedown with the Charles Parsons ’12 gift bookplate, and above it is the signature of Arthur Machen’s father John Edward Jones Machen, M.A., Llanthewy Rectory, 1881. Machen’s father paid for the printing of the book, and in his copy he pasted a clipping, a tactful, encouraging press notice, identified as by “Lewis Sergeant Esqre in Hereford Times”. Lewis Sergeant (1841-1902) was a journalist and author and a close friend of the Machen family ; Machen stayed in his house in Turnham Green when he first came up to London. On the flyleaf opposite is the author the inscription at the time of the sale, “For Charles Parsons from Arthur Machen, Melina Place, London, June 26th 1926”. Parsons saved his correspondence with Machen, and the receipt (shown below) is preserved in the files at Beinecke (Gen MSS 256, Box 1 folder 3).

Eleusinia is fully digitized and available here : https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10516628

Nearly a hundred years on, the copy at Beinecke is still the only known copy of the book : a typescript at Brigham Young and a manuscript at HRC are fair copies prepared at the behest of Fytton Armstrong ; Princeton and Stanford appear to have photostats or photocopies of the Yale copy. I am very pleased to have been able to examine this book, and acknowledge the courtesies extended to me on my visit.

Readercon 33, July 2024

It’s July, so that means Readercon! Once again!

I’ll be there in Quincy, Mass., Friday through Sunday 12-14 July, and if you are there you will see me wandering about, and occasionally at fixed locations, according to the following schedule.

Friday 12 July 2024
6:00 p.m. (Salon B) The King of Elfland’s Daughter at 100 (moderator)
8:00 p.m. (Salon B) Book Club : Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong trilogy

Saturday 13 July 2024
6:30 p.m. (Blue Hills) Reading : “John Z. Delorean, Drycleaner to the Queen of Elfland” (new work)

Sunday 14 July 2024
12:00 p.m. (Salon A) The Manuscripts of Arthur Machen (talk)

Copies of The Private Life of Books, A Conversation larger than the Universe, and other publications of Temporary Culture will be on hand. Come say hello if you see me.

recent reading : end of december 2023

current reading :

— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].

recent reading :

— Michael Swanwick and Sean Swanwick. Father Winter. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 120.
Five short shorts on snowy topics, including “My Dad Is an Astronaut” by Sean Swanwick.

— Arthur Machen. The House of Souls [1906]. Tartarus Press, [2021].

— Michael Cisco. Weird Fiction. A Genre Study [2021]. Palgrave Macmillan, [POD: 19 July 2023].
“The beauty and tranquillity of a place are no sign at all of safety, as might once have been true in pastoral literature.”

— Moncure Biddle. A Christmas Letter. Charles Lamb. December 25, 1938. Moncure Biddle & Co., 1938.
An old favorite, partly adapted from Hazlitt.

— Ernest Hilbert. Storm Swimmer. Winner 2022 Vasser Miller Prize in Poetry. University of North Texas Press, [2023].

Peak Machen II : ‘I have not had to wait until I am dead !’

One hundred years ago, on 11 December 1923, Arthur Machen wrote a letter to a young American fan. The letter becomes more interesting with a little context. In the autumn of 1923, New York bookseller Harry F. Marks issued his catalogue 11* and sent out invitations to a display of manuscripts and books of Arthur Machen. The background to this exhibition is notable. In 1922, Machen’s old friend and publisher Harry Spurr had brought manuscripts, proofs, and unpublished materials over to America and sold them to Harry F. Marks, who ran a well-established business for the New York carriage trade, and to Walter M. Hill of Chicago, another book dealer of national reputation. As John Gawsworth notes in The Life of Arthur Machen, “Marks who sold the pick of his collection by private treaty before issuing his 1923 catalogue still had some forty priced items to dispose of there at a total price of some $3,000. [. . .] the ‘boom’ was on”. **

The Life of Arthur Machen transcribes a letter dated 15 October 1923 that had been reproduced as pages three and four of the invitation :

Dear Mr Marks,
You tell me that you are holding an Exhibition of my books and manuscripts at your place in Broadway, New York. I hope your citizens will be interested.
But I cannot help thinking of a visit that I paid this last summer to my old home Llanddewi Vach Rectory in Monmouthshire. I left in September 1887; and had not been there since. The orchards that my father planted had grown into a wood; nothing else was much changed. But the old place brought back to my mind the old days, the days when, quite unknown and solitary, I worked night after night at The Chronicle of Clemendy in the room that looked out on those orchards and above and beyond them to Bertholly on the slope of Wentwood.
It is a far cry from the room at Llanddewi Vach to the Broadway Exhibition.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Machen
12, Melina Place
London N.W.8

Machen was characteristically diffident about what New Yorkers would make of his work, but the letter from Machen illustrated above shows that the exhibition resonated with some visitors. The recipient of the letter was New York lawyer and bibliophile George Franklin Ludington (1895-1949, Johns Hopkins 1916, Harvard Law 1920), who had written a wistful fan letter to the author after his visit to “a little book dealer (but by no means an inconsequential one) of this city”. Ludington retained a draft or fair copy of his letter, in which he mentions that in his youth in rural Maryland he had “climbed through the brambles that foot of the Hill of Dreams”, and then concludes with a supplication for the secrets bestowed upon Machen by A. E. Waite or others.

Machen’s response is gracious and tricky and illuminating, and then takes a curious meander into the literary undergrowth. I know the name Coventry Patmore, and so do perhaps a half a dozen others, too; but it is a curious recommendation :

Transcribed in full:

12, Melina Place
London NW8
Dec. 11, 1923

Dear Mr Ludington

Many thanks for your kind letter of appreciation. I am glad to hear that you were interested in the Marks Exhibition. I am more fortunate than many writers. I have not had to wait until I am dead!
There is no initiation from without ; that is, there is no secret society that can impart anything worth hearing. The only initiation is from within, so that you have almost as much as I do, having read “Things Near & Far”.
But I would recommend to any one whose mind is within these lines to read Coventry Patmore’s “Religio Poetae” & “Rod, Root, & Flower”.
With my thanks & best wishes
Yours sincerely

Arthur Machen

“The only initiation is from within” is prime Machen, a generous and spontaneous response to a young worshipper. Ludington seems not to have attempted to continue the exchange and just this one glimpse remains from a century ago.

* Catalog of rare and choice books, first editions of modern authors, etc. Charles Dickens first editions including the renowned Lapham-Wallace copy of the Pickwick papers. Also the most important collection of first editions and original manuscripts of Arthur Machen ever offered. New York: Harry F. Marks, 1923. Goldstone & Sweetser 76b.
Not seen, but noted from the bibliographer’s copy held at HRC (Call no. Z 8230 H355 1923). The Machen items are nos. 202-248. [Images courtesy of HRC.]

** John Gawsworth. The Life of Arthur Machen. Edited by Roger Dobson. Friends of Arthur Machen / Reino de Redonda / Tartarus Press, 2005. Pp. 286, 300, 304.

The chapter endnotes record some of the prices in those far off days, including the manuscript of The Three Impostors at $775. By way of comparison, Marks Catalogue No. 4 (1919), presenting an abundance of curiosa, had listed a finely bound set of Casanova’s Memoirs, now for the first time translated into English (1894), at $250 without mention of Machen as the translator; a similarly bound set of the twelve volumes, with addition of the note [by Arthur Machen], appears in the 1923 catalogue at $200, where a fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript Book of Hours was priced $140. In 1925, Marks moved from lower Broadway to west 47th street and was the U.S. agent or distributor for the Black Sun Press.

Thanks to William Hutcheson who offered me the letter earlier this year.

N.B. This account picks up some threads from an earlier post, Peak Machen : 1923.

Addendum, 14 December: sometimes serendipity brings forth new information. Here is a clipping from the New York Tribune for a Thursday in December 1923 (likely 6 December):

This is a report of the exhibition at the Marks bookshop that prompted Mr. Ludington to write Machen. One can infer that Marks had sold most of the Machen manuscripts by this date. The Charles Parsons collection is now at Yale : it includes the manuscript of “The Garden of Avallanius”, known to us as The Hill of Dreams (Beinecke GEN MSS 256, Series I).

Readercon 32 : a brief report

Very happy to have attended this year’s Readercon, held 13-16 July in Quincy, Mass. I arrived on the Thursday evening after a research visit to the American Antiquarian Society, and during the course of the weekend saw many old friends and acquaintances (including a couple of unexpected surprises), met a couple of people whom I had only known from correspondence, and made a few new friends. I am

one who found the convention masking policy (generally observed inside the con areas) and ventilation precautions most reassuring. I ate my meals out of doors (or went down into Quincy to eat al fresco). The hotel patio was a good place to sit down and see who showed up, and the weather was warm but clement until a deluge began on Sunday morning.

I was much encouraged by the decision to include the panel on Arthur Machen in the twenty-first century, Machen’s Legacy in Modern Horror & Fantasy, which I had proposed on a dark winter evening. It was very well attended and with such a knowledgeable group of panelists the conversation was so lively we ran out of time before there was any space for questions.

Arthur Machen panel at Readercon 32. Photo by Paul Witcover. From left : Michael Dirda, The Joey Zone, Michael Cisco, Elizabeth Hand, Henry Wessells (moderator)

Chris Brown’s Field Notes from the End of the World was an illustrated talk on nature writing in dystopian fiction, a good glimpse of some of my friend’s predilections and wild thinking, firmly grounded in the concerns of his Field Notes newsletter. Who else but Chris would consider Neuromancer from this perspective? I attended the interviews with the guests of honor: Jeff Vandermeer in conversation with his wife Ann, and Justina Ireland interviewed by Arley Sorg, lots of intelligent fun. I had not known of Justina Ireland before coming to Readercon, and found the panel on the author’s works to be exemplary in its mix of fact, interpretation, and enthusiasm. The panel in memory of Maureen Kincaid Spiller, a conversation between Graham Sleight and Romie Stott of Strange Horizons, was also very good. Of course there were time conflicts on panels & readings that I had to miss, testimony to rich multistream programming.

The book room felt a bit of a ghost town, with few antiquarian or older books, but I bought six new books (a few of them shown above) including one by Ireland (Rust in the Root) on the basis of the panel, and one by a member of a panel I moderated.

I have reached the age of insouciance, knowing that I am much older than many of the attendees and that our interests often diverge, but I had fun and will plan to attend next year. [HWW]

Readercon 32, July 2023

It’s July, so that means Readercon! Once again!

I’ll be there in Quincy, Mass., Friday through Sunday 14-16 July, and if you are there you will see me wandering about, and occasionally at fixed locations, according to the following schedule.

Friday 14 July 2023
7:30p.m. (Blue Hills) : Reading (new work)

Saturday 15 July 2023
11:00 a.m. (Salon B) : Arthur Machen’s Legacy in Modern Horror & Fantasy (moderator)
2:00 p.m. (Salon A) : The Enduring Legacy of Jules Verne (moderator)

Sunday 16 July 2023
11:00 a.m. (Salon A) : Speculative Memoir (moderator)

Copies of The Private Life of Books and other publications of Temporary Culture will be on hand. Come say hello if you see me.

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commonplace book — late spring 2023

“happy as always in the faculty of finding infinity round the corner of any street, within five minutes of anywhere”

— Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (1924)

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On Defining Genre

The problem with defining a genre — science fiction, for example, or fantasy — is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.

— Michael Swanwick, Brief Essays on Genre (2023)

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“de la doctrine des hommes comme de l’eau, qui n’est iamais plus belle, plus claire & plus nette qu’à sa source”

— Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627)

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“But I knew that I always enjoyed looking back on things more than actually doing them.”

— George Sims, The Terrible Door (1964)

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Hazelnut cake for the Avram Davidson Centenary Garden Party

Peak Machen : 1923

signature of Arthur Machen

In 1923, a century ago, Welsh author Arthur Machen was at the height of his literary reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been a long path from his “horrible” juvenile poem Eleusinia (1881) and such early books as The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884) and the numerous translations of the 1880s and early 1890s. But with The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895), Machen produced a small group of supernatural tales that shocked upon their first appearance and then proved to be enduring. The other great work written in the late 1890s, The Hill of Dreams, Machen’s “‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the soul” depicting the aesthetic visions of young Lucian — and the tensions between pastoral and urban life — remained unpublished until 1907. Literary success was never easy for Machen and indeed he spent an interval as an actor with a provincial repertory company before returning to literary journalism and newspaper work, during which he created a modern myth of the first world war, The Bowmen. This is the barest outline of Machen’s career, and more detailed accounts can be found in Mark Valentine’s 1995 monograph or The Life of Arthur Machen, John Gawsworth’s biography (begun during Machen’s lifetime but published only in 2005). But that is to get ahead of things.

In 1923, Machen had many books in print: the year before, his edition of the Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (1894) had been reprinted in twelve volumes, and Far Off Things, a collection of wartime columns from the London Evening News, entitled “Confessions of a Literary Man” and recounting his hard apprenticeship in the 1880s and early 1890s, had been published. In 1923, his London publisher, Martin Secker, brought out another volume of autobiography, Things Near and Far, and a new work of fiction, The Secret Glory, as well as a signed large paper edition of The Hill of Dreams (the latter on blue paper, illustrated at top and below). In 1923, Henry Danielson published a Bibliography of Machen’s works through 1922, with retrospective “annotations” on each work by Machen, and with a deluxe issue signed by Machen. Secker published the Caerleon Edition of the Works of Arthur Machen in nine volumes dated 1923; in New York the enterprising Alfred A. Knopf brought out an attractive series of Machen’s books: The Hill Of Dreams, The Three Imposters, Far Off Things, The House of Souls, Things Near and Far, and Hieroglyphics; with others to follow in 1924: Dog and Duck, Ornaments in Jade (signed by the author), and The London Adventure. It really was peak Machen.

What else was going on at this time? It’s useful to look at Machen in the context of other books published and contemporary literary currents around 1923. One notable work of fantasy was William M. Timlin’s The Ship That Sailed to Mars, illustrated by the author; lush and imaginative, it had little in common with Machen’s themes. The Club Story and the told tale showed itself alive and well with Sapper’s The Dinner Club; and master of the uncanny Algernon Blackwood published his curiously incomplete autobiographical work, Episodes before Thirty. Aleister Crowley’s The Diary of a Drug Fiend was fiction rooted in the author’s own experience: transgressive, but again in a manner unlike Machen’s. If Ornaments in Jade, Machen’s sequence of prose poems, seems almost a harbinger of modernism, such was the conservatism of English letters that it is to the early modernism of Baudelaire that these point.* When one considers works such as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and the sudden emergence of the modernist aesthetic (in both minimalist or encyclopedic modes), it becomes quickly apparent that Machen achieved his greatest popularity at a moment when the world changed. “By the time he was rediscovered in the 1920s he was near retirement and no longer capable of producing high-calibre material” (SFE). This position of being somewhat at odds with the dominant modernism points to an explanation of the near obscurity of Machen’s work well into the 1980s when a revival of interest in the writings began, with the formation of an Arthur Machen Society, and later the Friends of Arthur Machen.

As a bookseller, I had three Machen items of great interest, sold long ago: the manuscript of his late essay “The True Story of the Angels of Mons” (1938); an extended autograph quotation from The Hill of Dreams (almost certainly written out for a collector in the mid 1920s); and a signed photograph of Machen in costume as Doctor Johnson from a film shoot circa 1922, which was reproduced as the dust jacket illustration when the Friends of Arthur Machen and Tartarus published The Life of Arthur Machen. His is a household name only within the literature of the fantastic now, but the books are more readily available and sometimes read. Machen’s work is always worth exploring.

* In fact, as I learn from reading The London Adventure, the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade were written in the 1890s, more or less at the same time as The Hill of Dreams.