The Violet Books Catalog
Titles Edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson:
The 'GRIM MAIDS' Series
of American Mistresses of the Macabre
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Brown, Alice: THE EMPIRE OF DEATH AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES. British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 2003. First Edition. Hardcover limited to 500 copies. As New in dustjacket.American Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. Edited with introduction on the life of Alice Brown by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. SIGNED by Jessica.
The great trinity of New England genre writers consisted of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, and Alice Brown. Each wrote just enough supernatural fiction to fill one solid volume each. Alice Brown's weird tales were most varied, in that she was not restricted to the regional ghost story exclusively.
Among her stories we may count the ghost story "There and Here" but with lesbian undertones unexpected of a Victorian era tale, and "Old Lemuel's Journey" a regionalist tale but with time travel instead of a ghost. Many of her ghost stories move away from the New England genre entirely, as do the horrific "The Flying Teuton" wartime sea haunting, the eerie and mystic sea adventure "Golden Baby," and the horrifying mystic tale of "The Island" which also takes place at sea.
"The Empire of Death" is in particular a high point, an Arthur Machanesque tale of the first world war too disturbing for any magazine editor of its day. A young German soldier upon death on the battlefield drags the spirit of an American soldier (his pre-war friend) with him upon a terrifying ghostly journey, a story as sorrowful as it is terrifying and just.
There are eleven weird tales in all, previously scattered thinly amidst many collections, with some of them never before collected at all (i.e., "Old Lemuel's Journey," "The Man Who Wanted to be Safe," and "Envoy Extraordinary"). There is in addition an addendum of Alice Brown's weird poems ranging from her fantasy of "Pan" to such ghostly vignettes as "The Ghost Speaks" and "They Return" to the visionary "Descent into Hell."
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Dunbar, Olivia Howard: THE SHELL OF SENCE: COMPLETE GHOST STORIES. Uncasville, CT: R. H. Fawcett, 1998. First Edition, hardcover, As New in dustjacket. Limited to 400 copies.Gorgeously illustrated by Wendy Wees with book design by Rhonda Boothe. Rhonda and Wendy's contributions have resulted in a book of unusually refined physical appearance.
Edited with an Introductory essay by Jessica Amanda Salmonson "The Psychological Ghost Stories of Olivia Howard Dunbar" which can be read here at the website for free. Book is SIGNED by Jessica.
A leading "magazinist" of her day, Olivia Howard Dunbar's ghost stories were never previously gathered into one place. Her tales though American are reminiscent of such Brits as Oliver Onions or May Sinclair, due to their psychological depth.
The tales are "The Long Chamber" "The Sycamore" "The Dream Baby" and "The Shell of Sense." Additionally, there are two non-fiction essays by Dunbar.
One is on the nature of the literature "The Decay of the Ghost in Fiction" which she wrote before writing any of her own, and that essay serves as an Author's Preface. The other is "The Present Status of the Ghost" about persisting belief in them, serving as Author's Afterword.
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Jewett, Sarah Orne: LADY FERRY AND OTHER UNCANNY PEOPLE. British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 1998. First Edition, hardcover, As New in dustjacket, limited to 500 copies.Jewett's complete ghost storied gathered for the first time. Edited with an Introduction "Sarah Orne Jewett and the Ghost Story, with a special note on her influence on H. P. Lovecraft" by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Preface by Joanna Russ. SIGNED by Jessica, whose introduction can be read on-line for free.
Sarah Jewett is regarded as the foremost New England regionalist writer after Nathaniel Hawthorne, who influenced her own writings.
But "serious" and scholarly lit-crit types have overlooked her ghost stories as unimportant, though Sarah herself claimed some of these as her own choices for her best work.
Among the tales is the tale of a hideous longevity and of ghosts "Lady Ferry," the witchcraft tale of "In Dark New England Days," and a tale of grim Death who comes to live in a gloomy old house, "The Gray Man."
Other of these ghostly tales are: "The Sorrowful Guest" "The Captains" "Captain Littlepage and the Waiting Place" "The Green Bowl" "The Landscape Chamber" "The Foreigner" "Beyond the Toll-Gate" and "The House that Ran Away."
Price AUTOGRAPHED by editor: $85.00 postpaid
Pangborn, Georgia Wood: THE WIND AT MIDNIGHT: COMPLETE GHOST STORIES. British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 1999. First Edition, hardcover, As New in dustjacket, limited to 500 copies.Never before collected ghost stories by the mother of science fiction writers Mary and Edgar Pangborn. Edited, with Introduction by Jessica Amanda Salmson. Preface by Patricia McKillip.
The book is SIGNED by Jessica, whose introduction "The Uncanny Stories of Georgia Wood Pangborn" can be read on line for free. There's also a review to check out, by "rbadac," that focuses on a single short story: "Georgia Wood Pangborn's "Bixby's Bridge."
Compared in her day to Algernon Blackwood, Georgia Wood Pangborn was once a household name, in days when a new issue of a major monthly magazine filled the sort of home entertainment requirements that television fulfills today. But fame predicated on magazine appearances can be ephemeral, and after she mysteriously stopped writing, her fame evaporated, and her ghost and weird stories were never before collected into book form.
Her mysterious disappearance was a family secret maintained throughout her two children's lives, in that she ended up permanently hospitalized for mental illness, which will be found as a subject of several of these stories of women just released from or still incarcerated in madhouses. Her reputation as a leading American author of the severely macabre has slowly been reinstated.
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Spoffard, Harriet Prescott: THE MOONSTONE MASS AND OTHERS. British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 2000. First Edition. Hardcover limited to 500 copies. As New in dustjacket. American Victorian weird tales not previously collected. Edited with an introduction on Spoffard's life and works by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. SIGNED by Jessica.Jessica's monograph "The Uncanny Beauty of Her Eyes" introduces this large collection divided into two sections. The main section, "The Moonstone Mass and Others," has ten ghostly novelettes, followed by a small section, "The Empty Room and Others," with 14 weird poems.
Some of these stories have never been reprinted from their magazine appearances, and this is the only edition just of Spofford's weird tales. "The Moonstone Mass" is told in the manner of Poe and is one of the finest weird tales of Victorian America.
You'll also encounter a living portrait gallery in "The Godmothers"; ghosts of "Black Bess," "The Strange Passenger," "Six by Seven" and "D'Ourtre Mort"; the science fictional "Ray of Displacement" and "The Magnetic Patient."
Addition you'll experience the vampire spirit of "The Conquering Will"; what may be the first haunted automobile tale, "The Mad Lady"; and her best known often anthologized horror classic "The Circumstance" which inspired the dustwrapper illustration by Deborah McMillion-Nering.
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Vorse, Mary Heaton: SINISTER ROMANCE: COMPLETE GHOST STORIES. British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 2002. First Edition, hardcover, As New in dustjacket. Limited to 500 copies. Sophisticated ghost stories not previously collected from pre-1920s magazines. Edited, with an introduction by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. SIGNED by Jessica.Vorse was born in New York, but raised in Europe. When young she became an artist with a studio on the Left Bank in Paris, later a literary bohemian in Greenwich village. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players promoting Eugene O'Neill; she was the central figure of the Manhattan "A" Club which was a hang-out for art radicals from Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser; and first editor of the labor magazine The Masses.
As a socialist, she met personally with Lenin and Trotsky and rode on Kalinin's propaganda train. As a pacifist she risked her life serving in the Red Cross, and was nearly arrested by the Germans in WWI, who feared anyone who spoke so many languages must be a spy. But she took her only gunshot wound not in the European theater, but while reporting from American strike lines, into whose front rank of women and children police thought nothing of firing at will in service to industrialists. Quite the adventuring woman.
And she wrote splendid ghost stories, these having never before been gathered from leading magazines early in the 20th Century. The tales are "The Heart of the House," "The Second Wife," "The Mirror of Silence," "The Pavilion of Saint Merce," "The Other Room," "The Madelaine" and "The Halfway House."
Her novelettes were thrice included in Year's Best Short Stories, and she was twice selected for Prize Stories and the O Henry Memorial Award, including for the gritty ghostly tale of a fishing village and of the jealous ship "The Madelaine." "The Halfway House" is one of the finest American ghost stories ever penned.
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