Library Book #1: Incredible Adventures by Algernon Blackwood, 1914 -- "Falling Apart"

In this new series of blog posts, I'll be sharing items I checked out of my local library, including books the librarians get for me from the statewide library system. Today, Incredible Adventures by Algernon Blackwood. 

 

Algernon Blackwood was an English author famous for his tales of ghosts, human-caused horror, and The Weird. He's most famous for his story "The Willows," but he was very prolificBlackwood was well-known in the U.K. as a personality on radio and television. 

Why did I choose this particular Blackwood book? I've read a number of his stories, and I'd heard the ones in Incredible Adventures were extra weird. I like weird so I reserved the book and waited a week or two till it was time for pickup. 

This 1914 volume was so fragile that the librarian wasn't sure if I would want it. I said I would like to take it with me, but having just recently dealt with being asked if I was the person who returned a book with water damage (I wasn't), I asked the librarian to note the condition of the book. She went full-on, as you can see.

 

Fragile yes, but still a treasure. Thank you, Anonymous Donor to the Bowdoin College Library!

 

 

This 1914 book has deckle edges, which you can read about  HERE. Sometimes with these books, it's necessary to use a sharp paper knife to cut apart attached pages if the trimmer didn't come in quite close enough.

 I recently read a short story in which a writer who is courting a young woman is disappointed to find that the copy of his book he previously brought her still has uncut pages. His would-be lover didn't bother to read his stuff. I found a short demo online on how to separate uncut pages, preventing future romantic difficulties.

Click here to see how to cut book pages

My local library hasn't used the date stamp at checkout for years, so it's hard to know if the  last date on the sheet is really the last time the book was checked out before I got it.  I also don't know how many times the book was checked out before the staff attached the current  sheet, which starts with a 1998 date. Someone checked it out right before  Halloween, 2004 (fitting!) and then it has a due date stamp the following summer.  Nothing till the end of 2011. I moved to Maine in 2012, and I'm trying to remember  if the library was still stamping the date in as well as offering a printed slip. I can't recall.

The actual content of the book? Oh, that.

 This particular copy was too fragile for me to really interact with, but some of the content is available online, as are recordings of Blackwood from radio and TV.

Here's Blackwood reading "A Pistol Against a Ghost" for the BBC in 1948.

 

 

 

Blackwood was the host of the popular British television program "Tales of Mystery."

 I got some information about the show from this blog.

Now for some of the material found within the covers of Incredible Adventures: 

 The volunteer reading service LibriVox, for which people record audiobooks of material old enough to be in the public domain, offers an audio version of the first selection in Incredible Adventures, a novella called "The Regeneration of Lord Ernie."

The folks at Project Gutenburg, bless 'em, have put an e-book version online, and it you can find that HERE.

While I prefer a real person to narrate audiobooks I listen to, I will settle for an AI narrator with imperfect inflection, There's such a read-aloud video for "The Damned," another selection from "Incredible Adventures."

That's it for today. Next week? Something else! :)

Note:  I found the image for "Tales of Mystery" at the site Celluloid Wicker Man