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Schalken the Painter, and other Halloween tales
This YouTube video - very murky in both vision and sound - is probably the only chance currently to see Schalken the Painter, Leslie Megahey's atmospheric adaptation, broadcast in December 1979, of the...
View ArticleNone so fast as stroke
An out-take from the Maxwell Gray work: I just ran into a MG reference in a 1923 article, Curious Mistakes in Good Stories, which concerns sporting bloopers in novels.Ouida's classic hero, who rowed...
View ArticleMore Wight literary miscellany
Dave Parker's very browsable Isle of Wight Nostalgia site has some transcripts from the 1948 Ward Lock Guide. The introduction has a section on literary references, which I thought worth annotating in...
View ArticleMagic Merganser metafiction
While checking out one of the titles in the previous post, William Black's 1877 Madcap Violet (Internet Archive madcapviolet01blacgoog), I ran into a comment in William Lyon Phelps's litcrit collection...
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"The Baby was an anachronism"
Mirrored from A Wren-Like Note, as potentially of geeky interest:A while back I mentioned the versatile and prolific Scottish writer Andrew Lang - see Andrew Lang: a sampler - and in particular his...
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Mysterious superwhatevers #3
Emily at the excellent Ephemeral Curios, which largely focuses on biological curios, just commented in response to Mysterious superfruit #2 with another good example of advertising using weird...
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A Wren-like Note: launch imminent
An update: A Wren-like Note, my biography of Maxwell Gray, is now finished and uploaded to the publisher, and I'm expecting a proof copy at the beginning of December. All being well, the book will go...
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Dean Maitland locations
Cross-posted from A Wren-like Note:While I managed to source most of the Maxwell Gray books as e-texts on the Internet, I did want a print copy of The Silence of Dean Maitland, and was pleased to find...
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Mysterious superwhatevers #4
Yahoo! advertising has showcased another rich crop of biological oddities, this time drawn from a mix of plant and animal kingdoms. I say "oddities", but they're not - eggs and seeds are commonplace...
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Blurb.com: impressed
Should any readers be thinking of self-publishing, I want to share a recommendation for Blurb.com. I decided a while back to self-publish A Wren-like Note, in strong part because I wanted it to happen...
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Nooks and crannies - an ill-fated housing boom
click to enlargeThis is the cover of a pleasant booklet, Isle of Wight: Forty-one camera studies of the nooks & crannies, bays & chines of the garden isle, produced by the Photochrom Company of...
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To Brixham
Would you believe, we've been down in Devon for around 18 years, and had never been to Brixham?We finally went on Monday. It could scarcely be easier from Topsham: a straight-through train along the...
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Sporting mistakes
A few posts back - None so fast as stroke - I mentioned a reference to Maxwell Gray in the 1923 article, Novelists' sporting blunders, which concerns sporting bloopers in novels. I just managed to hack...
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A Wren-like Note: officially launched
Just to make the news official: my biography A Wren-like Note: the life and works of Maxwell Gray, went ahead with the planned launch on December 3rd. The sales page is now online - here - and gives a...
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Fake Topsham on Mystery Map
The ITV two-part programme Mystery Map aired recently: see Mystery Map: Ben Shephard and Julia Bradbury talk ghosts, UFOs and weird happenings. The second episode looked potentially of interest, as it...
View ArticleBabylon is Fallen
Just purging some bookmarks, I rediscovered Ted Chiang's SF story Tower of Babylon, brilliantly imagining the practicalities of building of the Tower of Babel. This in turn reminded me of Alasdair...
View ArticleBookmark purge
One of an occasional purge of bookmarks that I've found very interesting, but not sufficient to build a blog post around.Red Letter Days of my life (1892, volume 1 / volume 2), the memoirs of Cornelia...
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Paignton Pier fire explained?
While browsing pamphlets this afternoon in the excellent Topsham Bookshop, I couldn't resist taking a photograph of this picture in an old guide to Paignton, showing the 1919 pier fire, chiefly because...
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London Devonian Year Book 1913-1915
A while back I looked at the London Devonian Year Book 1910-1912, a compilation of the annual publication of the London Devonian Association, edited by Richard Pearse Chope. As I said then, the whole...
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Crofton House, Titchfield
View Larger Map - the site of Crofton HouseJohn Ptak's blog Ptak Science Books has an interesting category History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things, and this applies very well to the site of Crofton...
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