Tartarus

Five of the fifteen or so volumes in my library published by the excellent Tartarus Press are shown above. Going from top to bottom, the first was among my earliest Amazon purchases: a 1998 edition, bought when it was new, of Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams. It’s a book that made a deep impression on me when I first read it in my twenties. This copy has been in a slightly distressed condition since a run in with my last-but-one dog. Tartarus have published many of Machen’s works, and have done likewise for Robert Aickman, whose collection Cold Hand in Mine comes next. This is a copy from their 2016 edition. Cold Hand in Mine was the first collection of Aickman’s stories I’d read, initially in a tatty paperback, and it remains my favourite of his books.

Third is a collection of Marcel Schwob’s fiction entitled The King in the Golden Mask (and Other Stories), as translated from the French by Iain White. It’s a 2012 edition based on one first published thirty years beforehand. Schwob, whose work was a notable influence on Jorge Luis Borges, has been a great favourite of mine since I first read a story of his in the Atlas Press anthology The Book of Masks twenty-five or so years ago. Next is one of Tartarus' original publications: N.A. Sulway’s intriguing novel Rupetta, with this, its first edition, dating from 2013. Last is one of two volumes (I do also have the other one) comprising the “complete short stories (and other related works)” by Denton Welch, issued in 2005 under the title Where Nothing Sleeps. As with the two volumes above it, this one’s spine has been sunned a shade or two lighter than when it was new.