Hag's Tapestry
by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
In 1984 Rosemary Pardoe through her Cheshire publishing company The Haunted Library issued a booklet containing six of my weird short stories, under the title The Hag's Tapestry. It was bound in green cardstock with a front cover illustration by Wendy Wees, a different illustration on the back cover, & five more interior full page illustrations, one for each tale. I provided an author preface lamenting how many copies of books, including titles vastly more important than mine, that go onto bookshelves never actually to be read. Here are the contents:
- Author's Preface
- Nightmare Circus
- A Mere Tragedy
- Full Moon Tonight
- The Rare Rains
- Excerpt from an Old Journal
- The Uphill Slide
The Haunted Library also issued a booklet of my ghost stories as Harmless Ghosts which constituted the first appearance of my "occult detective" figure Penelope Pettiweather. What the Haunted Library has been most famous for was the long-running periodical Ghosts & Scholars the 20th Century's most significant publication of & about the literary ghost story. Many an author who found his or her way into the most collectible of all modern hardcover editions of ghost stories issued by The Ghost Story Press, Ash-Tree Press, & Sarob Press, were actually the editing discoveries of Rosemary Pardoe whose fiction saw first light in Ghosts & Scholars & associated Haunted Library booklets. To great extent Rosemary Pardoe is the true mother of the Jamesian revival that is in full sway today, as when she began promoting & publishing such works over two decades ago, hers was the only outlet for such tales, & she nurtured & cultivated some of the best modern writers in a traditional vein.
Ghosts & Scholars consisted of ghost stories in the manner of M. R. James, & essays about James & writers in the Jamesian tradition. My own stores are definitively not of the antiquarian tradition so I was never able to break into the pages of Rosemary's magazine, but that she liked my stuff enough to give a few things their own collections certainly took the sting out of not being in the magazine per se, as having been associated with The Haunted Library, with so many authors of merit, is a source of considerable pride.
Rosemary has herself been one of the great neo-Jamesian authors, having published a few such tales under the nom de plume Mary Ann Allen. These stories have been collected in a beautifl hardcover edition as The Angry Dead of which I have copies for sale.
Hag's Tapestry is a whole long while out of print but I have a very few copies stashed away, so visit the Catalog link in the navigation bar below for availability.
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