Greetings, all --

I'm not reactivating here, but thought some folks would be interested in this site:

[darklybrightpress.com]

Every week, Christopher Tompkins posts pieces Machen wrote for the Evening News, etc. Most of them have interesting topics and a bit of the true Machen style.

Tompkins's Darkly Bright Press has also issued a couple of paperback books of Machen rarities.

If Arthur Machen is a longtime favorite author for you, as he is for me, visit the site, and feel free to post comments. The DB site also features new essays about Machen and related matters. (I might mention my Russell Kirk profile of a few weeks ago.) The site proprietor is very sympathetic to Machen's High Churchmanship, in my view a nice change from the attitude of those who want to think of Machen as the author just of a few weird tales.

DN

The Darkly Bright site is into a series of Weekly Machen postings under the heading "Among My Books."

[darklybrightpress.com]

Machen's literary interests were not confined narrowly to the vein of supernatural horror.

I'm hoping to get hold of what he dubbed "the novel of the year" for 1912, Daniel Woodroffe's The Rat-Trap. From Worldcat, it appears that there is one copy only in American libraries (not the Library of Congress, as one might have expected). I'm not counting on New York University to loan their copy, but maybe I'll be lucky. What qualities in Woodroffe's novel pleased the author of Hieroglyphics? I hope to find out.

Here is the originally-published version -- a rarity! -- of a Machen story itself not at all widely known, "The Little Nations."

[darklybrightpress.com]