Obsolete Spells
Poems & Prose from Victor Neuburg & The Vine Press
Edited by Justin Hopper
304 pp.
148mm x 210mm
Hardback and Paperback Editions
£45 / £16.99
ISBN: 9781913689261

Due 16-05-2022

Hardback special edition includes an 88 pp. chapbook edition of Wax: A Drama of Evolution by Runa Macleod, and Swift Wings, a 21 minute CD of new arrangements by Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus.

Victor Neuburg had two claims to fame: he discovered Dylan Thomas, and
Aleister Crowley once turned him into a camel.

Obsolete Spells presents another side of Neuburg, through his own
earthy-yet-diaphanous poems and the strange books of the Vine Press,
a hand-operated imprint he ran from his West Sussex cottage between
1920 and 1930.

As a printer and publisher, Neuburg acted as a conduit for bohemian writers
and arts luminaries, and those dedicated to experimental living: Peter
Warlock set his words to music, singer Marian Anderson lived in his spare
room, and he was a fixture at his local utopian free-love community, the
Sanctuary. Through it all, he turned the handle on the Vine Press, publishing
books of nature writing and folksong; neo-pagan poems and utopian
philosophy; hymns to Old Gods and paeans to love and wonder.

Obsolete Spells offers selections from every Vine Press book, including texts
by Neuburg and many others, most of which have been out of print for a
century. Introductory essays by editor Justin Hopper, a foreword by Richard
McNeff and an afterword by Margaret Jennings-White (daughter of author
Rold White) round out this unique glimpse into a lost literary idyll.