I am the lucky recipient of many books from the British Library and am eternally grateful to them for their kindness and generosity. The majority of them are the glorious Classic Crime series but other gems come my way as well and the other day I received The Haunted Library - classic ghost stories edited by Tanya Kirk whose job title makes me green with envy - Lead Curator, Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900. Just think of all the wonderful and fascinating books and authors this covers.
Her introduction sets the scene perfectly for this collection: "Anyone who has made an evening visit to the British Library's stacks, deep underground in the Euston Road building, can tell you that books have a sort of silent presence.....after retrieval ends and the library assistants go home, checking a reference down there can be eerily quiet....all those hundreds of years of people's voices, their lives and experiences, recorded in books tht have passed through so many hands - the impressions they leave behind mean you never feel totally alone"...
Years ago when I worked in the library system, I used to go down to the stacks in the central library where I was based and on a quiet evening when I was on late shift, which meant I was on duty till 8pm, I found it quite creepy down there and used to get back upstairs into the light and warmth of the main library as soon as possible. This feeling came straight back to me when I read the above paragraph.
All these stories involve a library or books, people vanish from a library, awful things happen to them in a library, evil books exude a powerful influence - you get the drift. This is a wonderful collection. I did make sure I read this in daylight as I remember how I felt on my first (and last) reading of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill - more of which later, which reduced me to a gibbering wreck. So no risks this time.
There are familiar ghost writers here - Algernon Blackwood are two of the most familiar. Then the names of Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth Bowen and May Sinclair surprised me, ditto Dennis Mackail who I know from his novel Greenery Street, which was published several years ago by Persephone and is sheer delight. Not all the stories are dark and scary, there are a couple which are quite funny but I am not going to identify them or give any hints as to the content of this terrific book as I want you to purchase it and read it yourself.
I will just finish off by saying that I was delighted to see the first story is Afterward written by Edith Wharton. She writes marvellous ghost stories and I really urge you to get hold of them and give them a go. I am not recommending any particular imprint, many are available and sure you can get them for your Kindle, but they show another side of this author's genius and I do think she is one. Such a superb writer.
In this story an American couple move into an old house in England and are delighted to hear that it is haunted as they, wrongly, feels it all adds to its charm. They are told "Oh there is one of course, but you'll never know it....well not till afterward at any rate.....not till long long afterward..."
Just bear that in mind and enjoy.......
And of course you really should read this book, if you are brave, by a fireside with the curtains drawn and a howling gale outside. If you can manage it.
