LEFT INSIDE: Bookplate Medley

A variety of bookplates today.  The one with Tim Waters' name came from a Sax Rohmer book I got in a large lot of Rohmer books at a Missouri book auction many years ago.  Each book had his name written inside.  This plate was loosely affixed inside a Fu Manchu book and fell out over time.

As for the one in the middle:  I wonder why anyone would bother putting a bookplate in a book without bothering to fill in the blank where a name goes. Defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

 

 

FFB: The Strange Papers of Dr. Blayre - Edward Heron-Allen

Written under the pseudonym "Christopher Blayre" and presented as a series of manuscripts and documents submitted by the academics at the University of Cosmopoli these tales are parody pastiches that ridicule both the florid writing styles and histrionic content of some well known writers of supernatural stories. The titles of ech story hint at who is being ridiculed. There is also a good deal of satire about life in an academic setting.

"The Purple Sapphire" is about the only story that succeeds as a genuine supernatural tale even with its more subtle forms of parody. "The House on the Way to Hell" is outright parody - mostly a send up of stories that talk about lost books. It's a one joke story really that just repeats itself for far too long. "Pupura Lapillus" is, I am sure, a parody of Robert Chambers' writing and tells the story of a history professor who when studying the purple dye in an odd species of whelk is transported back to ancient Rome (the dye was used to color the robes of the nobility then). In "The Demon" a quack physician cares for a woman dying of cancer who miraculously recovers and is thought to be possessed of a demon but it's unconvincing.

Heron-Allen was also a violin maker in his youth

For outright supernatural the best stories are: "The Purple Sapphire" about a jewel stolen from a Buddhist idol and the curse that attaches itself; "The Thing that Smelled" (parody of Michael Arlen story "The Smell in the Library"?) in which a phony medium goes too far with his spook shows and meets a grisly end; and "The Book" which features gruesome apparitions and a cursed book. "The Cosmic Dust" the final story in the collection is sort of a sequel to "Aalila" both of which owe more to SF than the supernatural.

"Aalila" in fact has an eerily similar plot to William Sloane's SF horror novel To Walk the Night. No critics to my knowledge have ever mentioned this, but it is so similar I find it hard to ascribe it to mere coincidence. Sloane must have been familiar with the Heron-Allen's story prior to writing his book.