He was the Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and one of the great medievalists of his age, and he wrote these to be read aloud by candle at Christmas to a room of friends who had asked for something to frighten them. That is why they work. Nobody is trying to be literary. A man who spent his life in cathedral libraries simply put down what he knew was in them, and then put something else in there with it.
His people are scholars and collectors and clergymen. They are careful, comfortable, faintly smug, and their curiosity is the trap. A man buys a scrap-book off a frightened sacristan in a Pyrenean town and takes home what was folded inside it. A tourist finds a bronze whistle in the turf of a ruined preceptory and blows it to see what happens. A guest is given a hotel room that is not on the plan of the hotel. An engraving of a country house changes between one look and the next, and goes on changing while men stand round it with a magnifying glass.
Part one is the eight stories of 1904. Canon Alberic's Scrap-book. Lost Hearts. The Mezzotint. The Ash-tree. Number 13. Count Magnus. Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, with the Abbot's cipher set out on the page for the reader to work at alongside the man in the story.
Part two is the seven of 1911. A School Story. The Rose Garden. The Tractate Middoth. Casting the Runes, which puts a slip of paper into a stranger's hand and starts a clock. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, told out of an archdeacon's own diary as the whispering in his house gets worse. Martin's Close. Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance, and the yew maze nobody in the county will talk about.
Fifteen stories, both collections entire and unabridged, with the author's own preface to each. Everything he is famous for is in here, and so is the reason a hundred years of writers have been copying him since.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 246 pages, printed on 60# cream stock. Both collections are bound as one volume under their own part openers, in the order James published them.
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.
