Friday 4 February 2011

Machen in Penguin 'The White People and Other Weird Stories'

Another exciting piece of news on the Machen front last year was that an edition of Machen's work was coming out in Penguin Modern Classics in 2011. This was discussed at the Abergavenny AGM.

Obviously this is a real indication of Machen's status over sixty years after his death. S.T. Joshi has been pressing Penguin to do this for years and it follows his excellent editions in Penguin of the works of Lovecraft, Blackwood, M.R. James and Lord Dunsany. The negotiations for the book have been noted on S.T. Joshi’s blog at stjoshi.org:

3 March 2010 – I have now indeed received a definitive offer from Penguin to edit an Arthur Machen volume for Penguin Classics. I have tentatively titled it The White People and Other Weird Stories, and the following items will be included: “The Inmost Light”, “Novel of the Black Seal”, “Novel of the White Powder”, “The Red Hand”, “The White People”, “A Fragment of Life”, “The Rose Garden”, “Witchcraft”, “The Bowmen”, “The Soldiers’ Rest”, “The Great Return”, “Out of the Earth”, and “The Terror”.

The volume will be annotated by Joshi and will have a foreword from Guillermo del Toro which will be interesting. The previous Machen Penguin volume Holy Terrors
appeared in 1946 in the classic orange livery. This was I believe the last of his books that Machen saw produced in his lifetime.