Hello folks
Our last new title announcement for the year is a very special one.
We've long adored the writing of Timothy D'Arch Smith, since encountering his classic anthology Books of The Beast while still in shorts.
Mark then met Tim – who proved to be as charming and impish as he is learned – in the early 2000s, and asked him to contribute to our first Strange Attractor Journal in 2004.
Now, twenty years later, we're absolutely thrilled to present a new collection, The Stammering Librarian, collated by Tim, along with his old friends Edwin Pouncey and Sandy Robertson.
We're publishing The Stammering Librarian in an edition of 500 high-quality hardbacks, which will be available only via our Greedbag shop.
Books will start shipping in the second half of January. You can pre-order a copy here.
The Stammering Librarian
by Timothy d' Arch Smith
Edited by Edwin Pouncy & Sandy Robertson
HB, £35
192 pp. | 133 x 203mm
Illustrated, index
"In the long–awaited followup to his famed 1987 anthology, Books Of The Beast, writer, legendary bookseller and cricket enthusiast Timothy d’Arch Smith steps up to the crease with The Stammering Librarian, another diverse collection of erudite essays all told with forensic detail, tenderness and an acerbic wit.
Here, among other absorbing topics, he provides further insight into the life and occult writings of Aleister Crowley, the criminal prosecution that resulted in Montague Summers’s translation of The Confessions of Madeline Bavent, an A to Z of naughty public-school slang and the feline mystery behind Thomas Hardy’s heart.
Along the way we are introduced to such memorable personalities as actor, avowed libertine and previous Montague Summers associate Anatole James, Sixties poet Brian Hill, and earlier Uranian poets (both real and mythical) Edmund John and Rev. T. Hartington Quince, M.A.. Elsewhere the autobiographical title essay recalls the author’s early days, including a meeting with “compiler of bibliographies and biographical dictionaries of living persons”, Geoffrey Handley-Taylor. No serious librarian should be without this collection on their shelves."
Timothy d’Arch Smith (born 1936), a well known antiquarian book seller and book collector, is the great-grandson of the popular Edwardian writer “Frank Danby”; his grandfather and aunt were the equally successful novelists Gilbert and Pamela Frankau. His interests are cricket and the nineteenth-century Occult Revival.
Edwin Pouncey is a writer, musician and collector, perhaps best known for his illustration and artwork as Savage Pencil.
Sandy Robertson is an author and music writer whose work has appeared in Sounds, Penthouse, NME, The Lancet, Starlog and many others.
Pre-order The Stammering Librarian