Two Rare Collections:
The Short Stories of Thomas J. Vivian,
& Charlotte Beath Brown
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
I'm always looking for books of weird writings which hardly anyone else has noted. I think I first began reading obscure writers way-back-when because of my poverty. An old first edition by a widely collected author is bound to be pricy. But a book just as interesting & possibly twice as rare, but by someone so forgotten they are not in demand, is apt to pop up cheaply. I am also driven by a stubborn refusal to adhere to authors every Joe Blow thinks is great, delighting instead in things old, unique, forgotten.
A discovery found in a local Seattle bookshop is Thomas J. Vivian's Seven Smiles & a Few Fibs (NY: R. F. Fenny, 1900). It's a lovely book with an art nouveau owl on spine & front cover. These are mostly comic tales, including fantasies. For example, "Old Lick's Ghost" supposes that caretakers in insane asylums must themselves become "lunatics" on nights of the full moon.
These tales fall into a whimsical category akin to F. Ansty or John Kendrick Bangs. But one tale, "The Magic Mirror," is a genuine horror story of a cad destroyed by the woman to whom he is unfaithful, by means of an ancient bronze mirror he had given her as token of his affection. Certainly Vivian is no lost genius, & his obscurity is probably deserved; even so, this is exactly the kind of odd volume I love to find.
Yet another aspect of my personal fondness for obscure or forgotten authors are those whose collection(s) contain but a single ghost story. I commonly like the entire book, but it's the discovery of the single ghost story that makes me add it permanently to my collection. An example is Charlotte Beath Brown's The Old Brick House & Other Stories (Boothbay Harbor, Maine: Boothbay Register Press, 1936).
It can't have had a large edition, but quite a few copies are floating about bookstore stocks most affordably, as demand has mainly been around Boothbay Harbor itself, for the regional interest. It seems that more copies are autographed than not, the author having distributed most copies herself.
My copy is almost as-new in its pictorial binding. The tales are mainly based on local traditions, not fantastic, regarding the rugged coast around Boothbay Harbor. Just one story, "The Call of the Cliff," is a fullblown gothic tale of weird omens, a mysterious stranger without a memory, & a haunted cliff overlooking the sea calling out to the protagonist. The story is stylistically dated, but in a manner I found enjoyable, & the climix did not flinch from the story's overall air of doom.
copyright © by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, all rights reserved
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