On the Trail of an Early Lost Dunsany Publication

Lord Dunsany's first known publication was an eighteen-line poem, "Rhymes from a Suburb," which appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine for September 1897. It is signed "Edward Plunkett" because the title of "Lord Dunsany" did not pass on to him (Edward) until the death of his father in 1899. ("Rhymes from a Suburb" was republished as an attractive broadside by Pegana Press in 2009, for ordering information see here, and scroll down the page.) 

But recently I came across a new-to-me reference to what appears to be another very early publication. It comes in a letter from 1897 by Dunsany's uncle, Horace Plunkett (1854-1932), to Lady Betty Balfour. It reads:

See in the next Homestead, or September Pall Mall Magazine, p. 135, some lines by a nephew of mine, aetat 18. They are a happiness to me. If you knew the boy and his parents you would marvel at the product of his brain. He has a talent for chess and for upsetting things. He can draw a nightmare, but that he can write simple and rather musical English is a revelation which gladdens the avuncular heart. (quoted in Horace Plunkett: An Anglo-American Irishman (1949), by Margaret Digby, p. 152)

We don't have the exact date of the letter (beyond 1897), and young Edward Plunkett would have turned 19 on 24th of July 1897. Since Horace give the page number of the September Pall Mall Magazine, it was evidently already published (perhaps in August), and The Irish Homestead was a weekly newspaper founded in 1895 by Horace Plunkett (and edited by others). So, evidently the next issue after this letter was written was to have something in it by "Edward Plunkett." This would likely be circa August to October 1897. I don't have easy access presently to The Irish Homestead to look for it. Perhaps someone reading this does, and can look for whatever it is and share the result, which I'd be happy to post here. 

Dunsany's Lost Tales Volume 4

Pegana Press has recently published the fourth volume in their series of fine press booklets of "Lost Tales" by Lord Dunsany.  (I wrote the short Introduction for this one.)  It comes in paperback and hardcover versions, printed and bound by hand. The Pegana Press productions are elegant works of art.

This booklet contains nine stories, eight previously unpublished, and one previously unreprinted.  The three longer stories date from the last decade of Dunsany's life, while the rest are fables of the sort as those found in Fifty-One Tales (1915).  Dunsany was a master fabulist, so it's a great attraction to see more of his work in this area. 

This edition also has as a color frontispiece a previously unpublished work by S.H. Sime:

The Sime frontispiece: art from 1925.

For more details and ordering information, visit the Pegana Press website. 

A Visit with Pegana Press

Mike and Rita Tortorello run Pegana Press from their home near Seattle, Washington. I have written about their Dunsany publications before (here and here).  I’m pleased now to offer a brief Q&A with Mike about how they got started with Pegana Press. I also recommend that you browse around their website, which has lots of photos and text describing their operation and publications more fully.  (Click on the photos to enlarge them.)

Tell us a bit about yourselves:

Well, when we're not printing or binding books we have other businesses we run. Rita is an energy medicine practitioner and is also deeply involved in Permaculture design, trying to create a self-sustaining environment here on our property.

I have an audio production studio and engineer and record music, which is what my formal training and career has been. I've begun to combine my interest in books and recording sound by creating an audiobook of Lord Dunsany stories, The Vengeance of Thor, that are a blend of music, narration and radio drama woven into the tales, really fun and satisfying to do.

How did you get started in the fine press field?

That grew out of collecting nice books and gradually growing more curious about how they were made. Knowing about and reading William Morris had a lot to do with it because of his printing at Kelmscott. That led me to a Roycroft edition of a Morris book and I explored the printing career of Elbert Hubbard. I was also collecting Clark Ashton Smith at the time and tracked down some of the letterpress chapbooks that Roy Squires had printed in California and that was a big eye opener as well. Strangely, I had talked with Squires years before this and bought Kai Lung and Lord Dunsany first editions from him as a bookseller without knowing that he was a well respected printer in the Fantasy/Supernatural field.

Around this time, a local college was offering letterpress printing and bookbinding classes and Rita encouraged me to take one. I found the process extremely interesting and satisfying and began to get curious about the different printing presses and their function. At some point I just decided to go for it and buy a press and begin printing. I started with a broadside of Lord Dunsany's first published poem Rhymes From A Suburb. I then ran into some information about other works by Hope Mirrlees, the author of Lud-in-the-Mist, and discovered she had written a long surrealist prose poem Paris in 1919 that was now almost totally forgotten. It had been printed by Virginia Woolf and exhibited extremely interesting typesetting to support the text. I spent a year printing it, measuring and duplicating the spacing from scans of the original.

Tell us about your interests in fantasy literature, and how that developed.

Well I suppose growing up in the late 60's and early 70's my exposure to comics (and having them mailed to me) and fantasy based cartoons may have been the start. I somehow (like many of us) found paperbacks, primarily the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series put together by Lin Carter. This introduced me to many of the authors which in turn led to many other authors and collecting began in earnest. I was also exposed to the wildly fantastic progressive rock music happening in the early to mid 70's, Yes and Genesis and the amazing artwork and lyrics going on. At some point I began looking at hardbacks rather than paperbacks in bookstores and began seeking finer editions; being in Spokane at the time there was never much to see in rare fantasy books though so I began to purchase through catalogs. I moved to Seattle to work in a recording studio and walked into a used bookstore that had an almost complete collection of Lord Dunsany first editions, books I had only dreamed of, that was a day to remember!

Why Dunsany?

Dunsany is my favorite author, an amazing man and a visionary who wrote much of his work with little, if any editing. He wrote almost nonstop, and there are stories of his scattered everywhere that haven't seen the light of day. He cared about the design of his books and also had custom bindings done for himself so I think it's appropriate that his work has a beautiful vehicle to carry it.

I began with the grandiose idea (since shelved) of doing a deluxe velum version of The Charwoman's Shadow which would have taken almost 3 years of typesetting by hand to complete but I had contacted the Dunsany Estate for permission and established a dialogue with Lady Dunsany. At some point I ran into a list of uncollected Dunsany stories and began to track down the magazines they had been published in and that started the Lost Tales series of books. Lady Dunsany is very supportive of craftsmanship and art and has been extraordinarily kind enough, with the Curator's invaluable assistance, to provide us with unpublished stories and rare artwork from the Castle.

Part of what I try to do with Pegana Press is add to the canon of fantasy with something lost, rare or unusual as opposed to just redoing what has been done before. I think it's important to share these Dunsany gems to those who will appreciate them.

Describe the development of a book idea over time, from conception to publication.

I usually come at each book from a different direction. I begin by choosing an author or work I'd like to have in my library and that no one has else has done. Then I have to decide on the design and physical structure of the book to determine what kinds of paper and type will be used. One of the Clark Ashton Smith books we did utilized Golden Rectangle proportions for everything and we used an ancient looking Lokta paper from Nepal as endpapers, I really wanted the book to feel prediluvian in nature and magical as the stories are about Necromancers in Poseidonis. The Lovecraft Edition was based on the proportions of a James Branch Cabell book I own that I really like the look and feel of. I also do chapbooks that require less structural decisions. After the design concept is clear in my mind, I start thinking about art and how to get something cool for the book. The great thing about the internet is it allows me to have worked with artists in Germany, Fiji and France to realize some of these books.

From here the real work begins of typesetting each letter by hand and then laboriously printing a page at a time. This is where our books are totally unique in the genres of Fantasy and Supernatural, no one else that I know of is doing fine edition letterpress like this. All the paper and materials are cut by hand. Once printing is done all the sheets are folded by hand and Rita begins the sewing and binding. All the binding and sewing is done by hand. Some of the binding is also done by Ars Obscura in Seattle. From there it's a matter of marketing the book and finding collectors interested in what we do, a full time occupation by itself.

Any authors you want to do but haven’t got round to yet?

There are so many, Robert W. Chambers, E.R. Eddison, Ernest Bramah, Donald Corley, William Morris, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Eden Phillpotts. I still have more unpublished Lord Dunsany to get through as well. I'm just finishing a Fritz Leiber chapbook so he's off the short term board.

I also like to hear from people what they think I should print, I thrive on feedback and enjoy finding out what they want in their own libraries.

Thanks, Mike!

Dunsany's MEN OF BALDFOLK

Last year Pegana Press issued the fourth volume in its series reprinting, and publishing for the first time, rare stories by the classic fantasist Lord Dunsany. I’ve previously written about the first three volumes, as Dunsany’s Lost Tales.

This volume, The Men of Baldfolk and Other Fanciful Tales, is not designated as part of the “Lost Tales” series, but in many ways it represents a continuation. The book presents nine stories/essays and one poem, all by Dunsany, and as frontispiece, a color illustration by S.H. Sime. The poem, “At Sunset,” is reprinted from Dunsany’s collection Wandering Songs (1943). 

Of the stories/essays, four were previously published: “Gondolas” (The Saturday Review, 26 September 1908); “Pens” (The Saturday Review, 13 March 1909); “The Cup” (Punch, 16 June 1948); and “A Taste for Strategy” (Weekend Magazine, 1 October 1955). 

The five previously unpublished stories are, by date of composition, “The Book of Flowery Tales” (written 25 July 1917); “The Tale of the Men of Baldfolk” (written 14 December 1925); “The Vengeance of Thor” (written July 1929); “Absurd” (written late 1939); and “The New Look” (written late 1953). 

The Sime illustration is reproduced from the original artwork at Dunsany Castle. This illustration previously appeared in The Graphic, Christmas 1926, where it illustrated the Joseph Jorkens story, “The Abulaheeb.”

The Graphic, Christmas 1926

Like the three volumes of “Lost Tales,” this is a miscellaneous collection, without a common theme or organizing principle. I read the book slowly, one or two tales a day, with a gap of a day or more between readings. Thus I was able to savor the stories more than if I gulped them in a single sitting. My favorite tales are “The Book of Flowery Tales,” which is most like the classic Dunsany stories written before 1920, being a struggle for mastery of the world between the Wise Men of the North and the Wise Man of the West; and the title story, “The Tale of the Men of Baldfolk,” a short tale of two wise men, one a poet, the other a man who burns the first’s man’s poetry.  A sardonic decree alters their roles in an unexpected way.

Of the other tales, “The New Look” shows Satan’s view of creation, and in “The Vengeance of Thor” the weakened Norse gods have a reunion. “Absurd” tells of a ghost named Hurrip who worries about judgment. “The Cup” is a kind of moody joke-story. All of the tales are worth reading. 

The presentation in book form is stunning. This volume is hardcover only, in an edition of eighty copies, with a black cloth backstrip with a label giving the title and author, and elegant boards covered in a design of flowers with a green background (see illustration at top). All in all a beautiful example of fine press work. Mike and Rita Tortorella should be commended for such beautiful and appealing work.  

For further details see the publisher’s blog, and look around at their other offerings. 

Dunsany's Lost Tales

Three letter press booklets of Lost Tales by Lord Dunsany have appeared from Pegana Press, and I’d like to give some account of them here.  They aren’t quite uniform, and the stories range from the beginning to the end of Dunsany’s writing career. Bibliographical details are incomplete.  A few tales are lost gems; most are capable and interesting stories.  Most are previously unreprinted; a few are previously unpublished. All three booklets are fine examples of letter press craft. There are hardcover and paperbound versions; I have the paperbound ones (see illustrations).

Lost Tales Vol. I (2012). Limited to 128 numbered copies.

Introduction by Michael Swanwick. Includes ten tales by Dunsany previously published between 1909 and 1915. [Contains: “Romance” The Saturday Review, 29 May 1909; “The Heart of Earth” The Saturday Review, 24 July 1909; “The German Spy” The Saturday Review, 10 August 1912; “Exchange No Robbery” The Saturday Review, 19 October 1912; “The Way of the World” The Saturday Review, 23 November 1912; “The Little Doings of Demos” The Saturday Review, 23 November 1912; “The Return of Ibrahim” The Saturday Review, 27 December 1913; “How Care Would Have Dealt with the Nomads” The Saturday Review, 27 December 1913; “Our Laurels” The Saturday Review, 28 November 1914; “The Eight Wishes” The Saturday Review, 6 March 1915.]

The Emperor’s Crystal and Other Lost Tales Vol. II (2013). Limited to 92 numbered copies.

Introduction by Darrell Schweitzer. Includes nine tales by Dunsany, eight previously published between 1915 and 1920, with one published for the first time. Also, there is a previously unpublished fantastical drawing by Dunsany, dating from 1904-1908, printed as the frontispiece. [Contains: “The Greatest Painter in the World” The Smart Set, April 1915; “A Walk in the Wastes of Time” The Smart Set, October 1917; “The House of the Idol Carvers” Vanity Fair, November 1917; “Cheng Hi and the Window Framer” The Smart Set, November 1919; “Researches into Irish History” Vanity Fair, November 1919; “The Loyalist” Vanity Fair, November 1919; “The Golden City of Joy” Vanity Fair, December 1919; “The Emperor’s Crystal” T.C.D. [Trinity College Dublin], 3 June 1920; “The Secret Order” previously unpublished, written spring 1909]

 

Lost Tales Volume III (2014). Limited to 80 copies. 

Unsigned foreword.  Includes seven tales by Dunsany, four published between 1910 and 1951, three previously unpublished. A frontispiece reproduces an illustration by S.H. Sime, originally published with some Jorkens tales by Dunsany in The Graphic, Christmas 1926. [Contains: “Jetsam” The Saturday Review, 25 June 1910; “Sources of Information” Punch, January 1945; “A Go-Ahead Planet” previously unpublished, written late 1952; “A Tale of Roscommon” previously unpublished, written 1954; “The Greek Slave” previously unpublished, written January 1940; “A Talk in the Dusk” Tomorrow, July 1951 as “A Talk in the Dark”; “Fuel” Rhythm, October 1912.]

For further details see the publisher’s website, and look around at their other offerings.