We're kicking off the new year with a very special title in a short run
limited edition...
Writer, legendary bookseller and cricket enthusiast Timothy d’Arch
Smith steps up to the crease with The Stammering Librarian, the
long–awaited followup to his famed 1987 anthology, Books Of The
Beast.
Another diverse collection of erudite essays all told with forensic detail,
tenderness and an acerbic wit, The Stammering Librarian 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.
