Building the book barricade

The post today brings me a letter from a nutty cousin and another course of books in my office wall.

Victorian sex-and-horror freak Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, a strange, hallucinogenic book of 1907 set in a mystical version of Wales and suburban London, republished by the Library of Wales. Also his 1894 horror, The Great God Pan, republished in the same series.

Yippie jester Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book (I didn't), a 60s revolutionary manifesto: 'a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika'. We should have listened. The link is to the complete text. Hoffman would approve.

Eric Hobsbawm's 1959 history of disorganised 19th-century resistance, Primitive Rebels.


Joseph Campbell's nutty but influential attempt to construct an overarching narrative of all the world's mythologies, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's like Propp meets Jung and they do too much speed.

A new edition of Bert Coombes's 'autobiography', These Poor Hands. I've a Left Book Club edition from 1939, but this is a scholarly one. Coombes claimed to be an adopted Welshman, coming from Herefordshire to become a miner, and it's a classic of industrial writing. Actually, he was from Wolverhampton, and the fiction doesn't stop there (though modern scholarship holds that all memoirs are fictional constructs, as are their authors.

Finally (for today), novelist and academic Angharad Price's O! Tyn y Gorchudd in a rather wonderful parallel text edition - it's translated on the right hand page by Lloyd Jones (a good writer himself and very interesting man) as The Life of Rebecca Jones. The original title translates as O! Tear Away The Veil, which sounds rather good to me, but Jones thinks otherwise. The Welsh edition won the Prose Medal at the National Eisteddfod and Wales Book of the Year, but I bought it because it's been favourably likened to Kate Roberts, for me the greatest short-form writer of the twentieth century.

Try the Welsh language Radio Cymru adaptation here.

Time to go home. Nos da.