To launch the forthcoming Silver Age Books publication of "The Arthur Conan Doyle Weirdbook", edited by Rafe McGregor, Oxfam Books and Music Moseley will be hosting a night of Conan Doyle-related terror at the Prince of Wales pub, Alcester Road, Moseley Village, Birmingham, on Saturday 17th July starting at 7.30pm. There will be dramatised readings from the anthologised stories in the new book, some interesting books for sale as well as some even more interesting ones to be won. All proceeds will go to Oxfam, and the only admission fee is that you bring one decent book as a donation to the shop. Moseley's newest and best, and only, bookshop will also be exclusively stocking "The Arthur Conan Doyle Weirdbook" as part of Oxfam's Bookfest.

"A Dark Stranger" by Julien Gracq

W.J. Strachan's translation of the French writer Julien Gracq's novel Un Beau Tenebreux seems to be no longer in print, and this 1951 first English edition is now quite scarce. Set in a Brittany seaside town, "A Dark Stranger" ponderously tells of a charismatic stranger and his lover, who captivate the imaginations of the other guests in a hotel where he goes to stay, until it becomes clear that his indifference to his huge losses at the local casino are merely a prelude to a suicide pact.

Inspired by Vigny's poem 'Les Amants de Montmorency', Un Beau Tenebreux was written while Gracq was interned in a German prisoner of war camp during the second world war, although it is set in the 1920s. After the war, Gracq lived something of a double life: under his real name of Louis Poirier he led an utterly respectable existence as a teacher of creative writing at a lycée in Paris, until his pupils grew suspicious, decided to spy on him outside the classroom, and discovered that their teacher was in fact one of the most celebrated surrealist writers.

He was also self-consciously an anachronistic writer who refused to allow any of his novels to appear in paperback; originally they were all published in France with the pages uncut. A staunch opponent of the publicity and media hype that began to surround literary celebrities in the 1950s, when he died in 2007, he had politely turned down three invitations from President Mitterrand to dine at the Élysée. He won, and turned down the Prix Goncourt in 1951. He was quoted as saying, "A writer is one who writes instead of talking, who reads rather than making public appearances, who meditates at home rather than droning away about himself on TV." There are very few writers today who could make such a claim without hypocrisy.

We are currently selling "A Dark Stranger" on Ebay with a starting bid of £5.00:

Click here to visit the Ebay page

Book of the Day: "The Romance of Natural History" by Philip Henry Gosse

Philip Henry Gosse was not your average Victorian clerical amateur natural historian. For one thing, after having experimented with religious communal living in Canada, and with Wesleyan Methodism, he finally settled with the Plymouth Brethren, an eccentric dissenting sect who emphasised the Second Coming of Christ.

As a natural historian, he is best remembered for one of the most infamous intellectual failures of the nineteenth century. In his "Omphalos", Gosse attempted to marry the Biblical account of the age of the Earth with the evidence of contemporary geological research which suggested that the world must be many times older. The Omphalos Theory ("Omphalos" is Greek for "navel"), Gosse argued that just as the first man Adam would have been made by God with a belly button, although he had no need for one, equally God would have created the rock strata complete with fossils. His ideas met with critical scorn and sold poorly. Two years later in 1859, Darwin published "The Origin of Species" and "Omphalos" was quickly forgotten.

Nevertheless his reputation seemed not to have suffered overmuch: by 1861 he published "The Romance of Natural History" which became a best-seller. Having failed to impress his intellectual peers with "Ompholos", he enjoyed vastly more success as a populariser for the less discerning reading public.

Some of what Gosse termed "Romantic zoology" consists of what would now be termed cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, specifically those considered mythological by mainstream zoology: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and so on. In his section on "The Marvellous" Gosse reports on frog-falls and tree-dwelling fish, and the Contents page lists such interesting headlines as "Blood Showers Traced to Butterfly Discharges", "Mermaids in Shetland" and the "Hybernation [sic] of Swallows" (Gosse believed that a minority of swallows, in accordance with ancient popular belief, probably did hibernate during the winter: he was wrong).

His approach is summed up in the Preface:

THERE are more ways than one of studying natural history. There is Dr Dryasdust's way ; which consists of mere accuracy of definition and differentiation ; statistics as harsh and dry as the skins and bones in the museum where it is studied. There is the field-observer's way ; the careful and conscientious accumulation and record of facts bearing on the life-history of the creatures ; statistics as fresh and bright as the forest or meadow where they are gathered in the dewy morning. And there is the poet's way; who looks at nature through a glass peculiarly his own ; the aesthetic aspect, which deals, not with statistics, but with the emotions of the human mind, surprise, wonder, terror, revulsion, admiration, love, desire, and so forth, which are made energetic by the contemplation of the creatures around him.

In my many years' wanderings through the wide field of natural history, I have always felt towards it something of a poet's heart, though destitute of a poet's genius. As Wordsworth so beautifully says,

" To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Now, this book is an attempt to present natural history in this aesthetic fashion. Not that I have presumed constantly to indicate like the stage-directions in a play, or the " hear, hear ! " in a speech the actual emotion to be elicited ; this would have been obtrusive and impertinent ; but I have sought to paint a series of pictures, the reflections of scenes and aspects in nature, which in my own mind awaken poetic interest, leaving them to do their proper work.

"The Romance of Natural History: Second Series" By Philip Henry Gosse is currently for sale by Oxfam Books and Music Moseley at eBay: http://bit.ly/98ABUk, for the price of £50 (or make us an offer)

Book of the Day: "The Hunter's Arcadia" by Parker Gillmore

"Listen, and I will give you my reasons for encouraging a love of field sports in those youths that emigrate. Excitement of some kind they must have; so the choice is between the nearest canteen, where drinking to excess and gambling on credit are rampant, or to shooting, fishing and hunting. In pursuit of these last mentioned the sojourner returns home to his unattractive shanty too tired and too hungry to again go forth, yet invigorated and strengthened by his exercise. In the pursuit of the former, property, wealth, and reputation are soon alike lost. Believe me, your boys, when away from paternal control in foreign lands, must have excitement; and the excitement derived from the chase is much healthier than that inhaled in a pot-house."

Thus Parker Gillmore, in his Preface to "The Hunter's Arcadia" justifies his love of field sports. A Captain in the British Army during the Crimean War and in China, he was a prolific hunting writer, author of "Great Thirst Land", "A Ride Through Hostile Africa", "The Amphibian's Voyage", Gun, Rod and Saddle" amongst other titles.

In "The Hunter's Arcadia he writes in great detail about the wildlife of South Africa he has observed, and in most cases dispatched with No.5 shot bought from Messrs. Kynoch and Co. of Witton, Birmingham. There is something almost comical about the way Gillmore describes his victims in such careful detail, often accompanying them with quite beautiful illustrations, before inevitably knocking them off. In describing the rufous-backed batelour eagle, he writes:

"Its powers of flight are something marvellous, and this may well be imagined when I state that its wings protrude far beyond its tail. It is only to be found in Africa, and in the locality in which we then were it is the most common of the birds of prey. Morning and evening it can be seen sailing in the heavens at an immense height, its wings apparently motionless, until a victim attracts its attention, when the velocity of its descent is probably unrivalled by any bird of prey. During the heat of noon it rests occasionally upon a rock, more generally upon a tree, but its wariness is so great that it is almost impossible to get within shot of it."

However, one individual was clearly not quite wary enough, and pays the ultimate price for interfering with another bird that Gillmore had his eye on:

"To save the pauw, the gallant eagle had to be knocked on the head, which was a sad necessity..."

I refrained from looking up the "game" animals bagged by Gillmore to see whether any of them are now endangered species, or worse.

Harder to smile at are Gillmore's descriptions of the Africans he encounters, and sometimes employs, during his time in Bechuanaland (now Botswana), but for a British colonial hunter in the late nineteenth century perhaps one is unjustified in expecting anything more enlightened. As a piece of cultural history it is certainly instructive: Gillmore's casual, often brutal, assumptions of racial superiority must have been one of a thousand such narratives that wormed their way into British readers' minds and into our collective image of "Darkest Africa".

"The Hunter's Arcadia" is currently for sale on Ebay for the price of £80.00 (or a close offer):

http://bit.ly/aq7FpS

Book of the Day: "Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England" by William Le Queux

William Tufnell Le Queux (1864-1927) could justly claim to have invented the spy novel as a genre. He wrote 150 novels of international intrigue, and is now best remembered for several jingoistic novels in which he warned in the most strenuous terms of the danger of England's invasion by the Kaiser's Germany in the two decades before the actual outbreak of the Great War. "The Invasion of 1910" (1906) was probably his most successful effort in this vein, selling over a million copies after having been serialised in the Daily Mail.

"Spies of the Kaiser" (1909) mines this same vein of anti-German feeling that was so profitable in the early part of the 20th Century, although this later work was claimed to be reportage rather than fiction. Le Queux was convinced that hundreds of pro-German traitors were at work amongst the unsuspecting British population, and the plate illustration to this original edition shows an Edwardian spy-mistress busy at her radio equipment, broadcasting England's military secrets to a German warship looming menacingly in the bay behind her.

Apparently many of his readers were convinced of the truth of these allegations too, and not merely the readers of the Daily Mail. Historian Nicholas Hiley, in his introduction to a later edition explains that the book had such a radical effect on the political class that it played a major part in the establishment of MI5.

Le Queux was himself an odd character who could boast diverse achievements: a flying enthusiast, he officiated at the first British air meeting at Doncaster in 1909, was honorary consul for San Merino and as an early radio ham broadcast music from his own station. During the First World War he was convinced that he was the target of several German assassination plots but his pleas for special police protection failed. However in this case his life did not imitate his art, and he survived the first world war to write an autobiography full of bizarre inventions ("What I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks", 1923).

Our copy of "Spies of the Kaiser" was published by Hurst & Blackett, London. Hardback pocket edition (20x110x165mm) with no jacket. 320pp, blue cloth boards, blindstamped with H&B loge to front & "Fry's Breakfast Cocoa" to rear. Undated but is probably around 1912. Condition: Very good+. Contains one black and white plate illustration. Original editions of Le Queux's works are becoming increasingly scarce, particularly in such condition.

Currently for sale at Oxfam Books and Music Moseley. Price: £75.00.