A Reader of Curious Books: Early Work from the Pages of Walford's Antiquarian Magazine

The work displayed in A Reader of Curious Books paints an intellectual portrait of Arthur Machen as a young man. All of the writer's future themes and favorite subjects can be found in its pages: Christian history and liturgy, folklore, early man, the history of world literature, psychic phenomenon, orthodoxy versus heresy-to name only a few.

For the certified bibliophile, a lover of literary exploration or the merely curious, a collection of this sort justifies itself. The archaic dispatch...