Dreads and Drolls

Dreads and Drolls Arthur Machen This volume contains sixty studies, mostly from real life, each of which, by its capacity for inspiring terror or causing amused wonder, qualifies as the ‘Dread’ or ‘Droll’ of Arthur Machen’s general heading. ‘To be able so to tell the bare truth that it seems a magnificent lie’ is the qualification which has attracted Machen to the most outstanding of his narrations. When Dreads and Drolls was first published in 1926 it contained twenty-nine articles reprinted from London’s The Graphic. We have great pleasure in more than doubling that number by including all of his contributions from that magazine. To ‘The Euston Square Mystery’, ‘The Adventure of the Long-Lost Brother’ and others we have been able to add ‘A Castle in Celtic Myths’, ‘A Pretty Parricide’, ‘One Night When I Was Frightened’ and many more. There is a tendency towards the re-telling of notable eighteenth-century crimes among these ‘Dreads’ and ‘Drolls’, but Machen also manages to illuminate such a wide range of subjects as the Holy Grail, the ‘Little People’ and cookery. In this entertaining and diverse collection of essays, Machen manages to show how little human nature has changed through the centuries. We can admire Machen, in the words he uses to commend Grimaldi, as a man with an ‘admirable scent for mystery and capacity of creating it’. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

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