In 1921 a lecturer at Columbia who had just written the first serious study of the supernatural in English fiction went looking for the best ghost stories of her own time, and put fifteen of them in one book. This is that book entire, with her introduction still at the front of it.
Her argument is that the modern ghost had got worse. The old shade moped in a corridor and rattled something. The new one reads the papers, keeps up with the sciences, travels, and takes an interest in you. A hundred years on, the argument holds up better than it has any right to.
The stories she chose are the ones that stuck. Algernon Blackwood's The Willows, two men camped on a shifting island in the Danube where the bushes lean the wrong way, which Lovecraft called the finest weird tale in English. W. F. Harvey's The Beast with Five Fingers, a dead man's hand that will not stop writing. Ambrose Bierce, three men and a knife in a locked house. Wilbur Daniel Steele's keeper's wife out on Seven Brothers light, a story about weather and a woman that gets colder the longer you look at it. And Poe's Ligeia, and a will that refuses to lie down.
With them: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman on a shadow that appears on a wall in a house of grieving sisters. Robert W. Chambers on a Breton skull buried in the wrong grave. Andreyev's Lazarus, back from the tomb and saying nothing. Anatole France, Fitz-James O'Brien, Olivia Howard Dunbar. Arthur Machen's The Bowmen, reprinted until England believed it had happened. Myla Jo Closser's dogs waiting outside the gate of heaven. Richard Le Gallienne's orchard singing in French. And a Maupassant of four pages that does not need a fifth.
Fifteen stories and the editor's introduction, complete and unabridged, in the order the volume of 1921 printed them. The French and Russian pieces are carried in the translations the 1921 volume used, and the translators are named in the front matter, as are the permission acknowledgments that book printed.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 266 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
