Tea and Gargoyles

In Tea and Gargoyles, Mark Valentine explores fiction that seems to hover on the edge of the uncanny, including work by Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, Gladys Mitchell and Walter de la Mare. He also discusses the more unusual and obscure metaphysical thrillers of the mid twentieth century.

Another essay looks at books that are rarer still: the imaginary titles conjured up in fiction which often, however, seem strangely familiar. His enjoyment of the recondite continues with a delight in a forgotten Edwardian nonsense poet and a shadowy relic of the 1890s, in old board games, and in the esoteric music and journals of the 1970s.

Valentine also celebrates the menagerie of seventeenth-century book-sellers’ signs, an old book about a town populated by bears which has a bookshop open all night, and the book¬shop detectives who uncover even more places to find books. The collection concludes with joyful accounts of book-browsing expeditions in the Marcher country.