Available Now: Obsolete Spells: Poems and Prose from Victor Neuburg and the Vine Press
Good Morning!
Yet another book returns to us from the printers... this time it's
Obsolete Spells: Poems and Prose from Victor Neuberg and the Vine
Press, edited by Justin Hopper.
For too long Victor Neuburg has been a curious footnote in the lives of others, specifically Aleister Crowley and Dylan Thomas, but now it’s time to consider, and appreciate, him on his own merits. Justin Hopper collects texts, poems and plays published by Neuburg's Vine Press in the 1930s. It's a substantial collection, with a long biographical introduction by Justin, a foreword by Richard McNeff a wide range of Vine Press poems, plays and texts, both complete and abridged.
You may be familiar with Justin's work from his previous book The Old Weird Albion (Penned In The Margins), or his wonderful album with Sharron Kraus and The Belbury Poly, Chanctonbury Rings (Ghostbox), a collaboration that continues in part here with the supplementary album Swift Wings, an eight-track CD of Neuburg’s poems set to music by Kraus and Hopper for inclusion with the special edition of Obsolete Spells.
Obsolete Spells is available in two
editions:
Hardback Special Edition £45.00:
- Comprising one of 300 copies
of the hardback edition of the book; an 88pp chapbook of Runia Mcleod’s
1947 feminist SF drama Wax, and an eight-track CD album of
Neuburg’s poems, Swift Wings, set to music by psychedelic folk
musician Sharron Kraus and Obsolete Spells editor Justin Hopper.
Standard Paperback Edition: £16.99
Thanks,
Jamie & Mark
Strange Attractor Press
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
Available Now
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.
