By Michael Dirda / The Washington Post
For some time now, my favorite essayist has been an English writer named Mark Valentine. In fact, the now antiquated term “bookman” more aptly describes the multitalented Valentine. Besides essays, he also writes elegantly eerie or criminous short stories, some about an occult investigator known as the Connoisseur; he’s produced the single best monograph on the mystical Welsh man of letters Arthur Machen; and he oversees the journal Wormwood: Literature of the Fantastic, Supernatural and Decadent.
Book collecting, though, lies at the center of Valentine’s life. A literary prospector, he unearths curious and eccentric novels, delves into the careers of half-forgotten authors, and spends holidays making serendipitous discoveries in out-of-the-way provincial bookshops. “A Wild Tumultory Library” — the title derives from a phrase by Thomas De Quincey — chronicles some of those discoveries and is just as enthralling as its predecessors, “Haunted by Books” and “A Country Still All Mystery.” Against all reason, I devoured this latest collection in one night, unable to stop myself. Actually, that’s not quite true. I did pause occasionally to search online for some of the titles Valentines writes about so infectiously.
As a result, I now own John Davidson’s campy 1898 novel “Earl Lavender,” featuring an Aubrey Beardsley frontispiece in which the hero is shown being whipped by a half-naked dominatrix. I’ve tracked down four thrillers by P.M. Hubbard, each laced with hints of the pagan and occult. I currently await delivery of a larky 1930s novel called “Frolic Wind” by one Richard Oke, whom contemporary reviewers likened to Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh. And I’m still deciding on the right edition of E.V. Jones’ “The Road to En-Dor,” the true account of how two World War I soldiers used a Ouija board and some fake seances to escape from a Turkish prison.
Fortunately for my pocketbook, I already owned Rex Warner’s allegorical thrillers “The Wild Goose Chase” and “The Aerodrome,” the collected stories of A.E. Coppard and L.P. Hartley (the latter best known for the opening sentence of his novel “The Go-Between”: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”), Edwin Greenwood’s gallows-humored shocker “The Deadly Dowager,” and Philip MacDonald’s brilliant first mystery, “The Rasp.” Because of the internet, first editions of these books are just a click away, but Valentine spent 30 years searching dusty shops for Lord Kilmarnock’s ghostly novel, “Ferelith.” The 1903 first remains scarce, but there’s now a Valentine-introduced Nodens Press paperback.
But how, you may wonder, do the essays in “A Wild Tumultory Library” work their bibliophilic magic? Say that Valentine hears about a curious-sounding book, perhaps “The Hours and the Centuries” by Peter de Mendelssohn. “I remember my delight,” he writes, “when I at last found a copy in a Suffolk cottage bookshop” and “at a very modest price.” The novel, he continues, “is set in France, in a decaying clifftop city, to which inhabitants from many ages seem to return, for it is a sort of time-slip story. But what matters most is the unusual atmosphere of the book. I have found other copies since and given them to friends, and all are agreed about that peculiar tone of the book, which I can best describe by saying it is like the days when summer slowly gives way to autumn.”
After that last phrase, how could anyone not want to read “The Hours and the Centuries”?
“A Wild Tumultory Library”
By Mark Valentine
Tartarus Press. 280 pages. $45.
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