10 Books A Day: #6

Gilden-Fire...Stephen R. Donaldson...Underwood-Miller

The House Of The Wulfings...William Morris....Newcastle Publishing Co., Inc.

Child Christopher And Goldilind The Fair...William Morris...Newcastle Publishing Co., Inc.

The Roots Of The Mountains...William Morris...Newcastle Publishing Co., Inc.

The New Oxford Book Of Literary Anecdotes...ed. John Gross...Oxford University Press

Ghost Story...Peter Straub...Coward McGann Geoghehan

Dragons Of Fantasy...Anne C. Petty...Cold Spring Press

The Dragon Path: Collected Stories Of Kenneth Morris...ed. Douglas A. Anderson...Tor

All The Mowgli Stories...Rudyard Kipling...Junior Deluxe Editions

Godhanger...Dick King-Smith...Crown Publishers Inc.

The Best Of Jules Verne: Around The World In Eighty Days, The Clipper Of The Clouds, Journey To The Center Of The Earth...Castle Books

H. G. Wells: The Time Machine, The Island Of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The First Men In The Moon, The Food Of The Gods, In The Days Of The Comet, The War Of The Worlds...Heinemann/Octopus


Gilden-Fire is of course an edited-for-space section of The Illearth War, published on its own; I include the picture of the cover because it's the only image of ur-viles I've ever seen and the only way I can picture them. The William Morris books I must admit I've always found impenetrable. I think it may have something to do with the dense and blocky typeface. I have these copies because of 1) their importance to Lewis and Tolkien, 2) their importance to the history of Fantasy in general, and 3) they were cheap as dirt. The anecdote book is an edition of one of my favorite browsers, inferior to the old one edited by James Sutherland, in my opinion. Ghost Story is the only book that ever actually spooked me. Anne C. Petty and Douglas A. Anderson are both familiar names to me from the works they wrote on Tolkien; Anderson produced the annotated edition of The Hobbit. The Kipling is a great compilation; it includes the story of Mowgli (rather hard to find) when he is grown up and working as a forester in Her Majesty's Service. One of my great memories as a boy is sitting out under the pecan tree in our front yard one summer, reading this book and waiting for the mailman to come. The Verne and Wells are "inherited" copies. They were left behind by the previous owners of this house. How anyone can simply leave books behind is incomprehensible to me. I can only surmise disaster and great perturbation of mind.