Hopefully the following observations will prove useful to those wishing to collect the stories or adaptations of Montague Rhodes James.
Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary [1904]
Contents:
Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, Lost Hearts, The Mezzotint, The Ash-tree, Number 13, Count Magnus, ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas.
All early editions of this book are covered in light brown hessian cloth and feature black titles to both front cover and spine. The first edition has yapped edges which fold over across the text block like an old prayer book, together with rear advertisements dated November 1904. This first edition should cost about five hundred pounds in very good condition. However, later reprints which are identical save for the yapped edges are easily procurable for a tenth of that. The key thing is to ensure that the book possesses the all-important four full page illustrations by James McBryde (only the frontispiece should have a tissue guard). Because the brown cloth is prone to soiling and splitting along the external spine edges, my advice would be to opt for a bright copy of a later edition rather than a shabby copy of the first. The font size employed is large and the page margins are generous; watch out for carelessly opened pages, which may have caused tears or even some loss. It is very unlikely that this edition was produced with a dustwrapper.
GSOAA was reissued in a smaller ‘cheap edition’ format in 1910, featuring green boards and black titles. Although the four McBryde plates were omitted, the book was published with a pictorial dustwrapper by Holloway, a popular illustrator of the day who also designed the wrapper for Bram Stoker’s collection Dracula’s Guest. This edition is not uncommon and as the font size is quite large, making it a very good option for collectors on limited budgets. However, obtaining a copy in dustwrapper is very difficult, although occasional copies do turn up which feature a section of the front panel mounted to one of the front endpapers. The illustration depicts Dennistoun being attacked by the hellish creature described in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’.
GSOAA has gone through numerous paperback editions but the only one I can recommend is the 1953 Pan edition which features an attractive illustration by Carol Wilton to the front cover.
More Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary [1911]
Contents:
A School Story, The Rose Garden, The Tractate Middoth, Casting The Runes, The Stalls Of Barchester Cathderal, Martin’s Close, Mr Humphreys And His Inheritance
This second M.R. James collection is covered in blue cloth and features black gothic titles to spine and front in addition to the attractive design of a swooping bat. It went through numerous editions before being reissued in smaller cheap format. It is quite possible that it was published with a matching dustwrapper but none have been recorded. The true first edition probably features no rear catalogue because several stated first editions possess catalogues which date through the autumn and winter months of 1911. This suggests that the book was rushed out before catalogues were ready but that when they became available they were added (the previous volume GSOAA had been published very late in 1904, perhaps too near Christmas to capitalise upon potential sales, so it is reasonable to assume that M.R.James and his publisher Edward Arnold wanted to ensure that MGS was available from early autumn). Copies in reasonable condition should cost around the £250 mark.
In 1912 an edition marked ‘second impression’ was published possessing December 1911 catalogues to the rear. Clearly these two early impressions satisfied immediate demand because the third impression did not follow until 1916.
MGS is more durably bound that its predecessor so a collector should have little trouble in picking up a decent copy for a reasonable price. However, the cloth is prone to soiling and locating a bright copy is rather difficult. The page edges are untrimmed so be wary about the careless opening of pages, which may have caused tears. The paper in this edition is good quality but can fox quite easily. The cheap edition is bound in paper-covered boards and whilst these are easier to keep clean, they can chip at the extremities. The paper used in this cheap edition is also of the type that can brown easily. However, both the earlier and the cheap editions possess large fonts so reading is easy on the eye.
If anyone has a copy of either the larger first editions or the later cheap edition in dustwrapper, please send me a line and send me a scan as I would be very interested to see what it looks like.
Again, the best paperback version of MGS is the 1955 Pan edition, which features another splendid illustration to the front cover by Carol Wilton.
A Thin Ghost [1919]
Contents:
The Residence At Whitminster, The Diary Of Mr pointer, An Episode of Cathedral History, The Story Of A Disappearance And An Appearance, Two Doctors
It would seem that after GSOAA and MGS that James’s publisher Edward Arnold decided to produce less ostentatiously large volumes; either that or perhaps materials were in short supply after the Great War. ATG is markedly smaller in size than it’s predecessors, which has often resulted in booksellers believing it to be a less significant small format edition, and pricing it accordingly. However, it is a genuinely new collection of ghost stories. All editions were produced in identical format: dark grey cloth with blue lettering to both spine and front cover. In addition, there is an attractive spider’s web design to the front board. Only the first impression was published in 1919; all other subsequent impressions were dated from 1920 onwards. All page edges were trimmed but as with MGS, the book does not possess any illustrations or plates. None of the various impressions possess adverts or catalogues. The font employed is large but this book has the narrowest page margins of any original James collection.
Perhaps because of its perceived slighter size, this is the least valuable of James’s collections, which is good news for the collector. It is also the most durable of James’s original collections, so try to insist upon a very good copy with only minor wear. A first impression is worth somewhere around the £100-150 mark with later identical impressions fetching £25-50, which represents great value for money.
The book was issued with a now very rare dustwrapper which mirrors the front cover design. The dustwrapper is off-white with red titles. Copies in dustwrapper are notoriously rare and are worth several times more than an ordinary first edition.
No paperback editions of ATG were published.
A Warning To The Curious [1925]
Contents:
The Haunted Doll’s House, The Uncommon Prayer-book, A Neighbour’s Landmark, A View From A Hill, A Warning To The Curious, An Evening’s Entertainment
AWTTC is a more substantial volume than its predecessor ATG and is bound in fawn cloth with brown titles printed to spine and front cover (the latter boxed). It went through numerous impressions in the same year, suggesting that either demand was high or that the first impression print run was too low. There are no adverts or catalogues in the book. The page edges are neatly trimmed along the top edge but the other two are more roughly cut. The font is reasonably sized and the page margins generous. AWTTC was published in a very attractive and ultra-rare dustwrapper which features an illustration by Gilbert James depicting a corpse swinging from a gibbet as glimpsed through the occult binoculars which are described in the tale ‘A View From A Hill’.
The first edition is worth circa £150-250 depending on condition, with later identical impressions procurable for £25-50. Copies in dustwrapper are extremely rare and are worth several times more than the first edition.
AWTTC was not published in separate paperback form although Ruth Rendell edited an anthology by that name many decades later.
Wailing Well [1924]
This privately-published single ghost story is the rarest item in the Jamesian canon and as a consequence poses a huge dilemma for the collector: is it worth spending £500 on one ghost story? It is handsomely produced and features an attractive design to the title page (again, the hanging-man image so highly favoured by both M.R. James and E.F. Benson). It was produced in a limited edition of 157 copies with just 7 copies signed by the author. Pre-internet, values were simply unknown because the book surfaced so rarely and had never made a high profile appearance at auction. For that reason its value has actually tumbled from the £1000-1,500 it had been achieving in the mid 90s, and with the global adjustment of prices occasioned by the internet, it has settled down at the circa £500 mark for an unsigned copy.
As the story is reprinted in the Collected Ghost Stories any collector on a budget would quite probably opt for that far more affordable option. Undoubtedly ‘Wailing Well’ is a handsome and desirable book, but bearing in mind that a collector could procure bright early copies of all of James’s original collections for the same price that this one slender tome is worth, it is difficult to justify.
Signed letters
Letters signed by M.R. James are quite uncommon but are by no means rare. He was a very busy man who communicated with a great many people during the course of his work. The vast majority of letters which surface are however concerned with tedious and non-ghostly matters. These typically sell for anywhere between £50 and £250 depending on the length and subject matter. Far less common however are private letters – those sent to close friends or family – or any which reference ghost stories. These would obviously be worth more. A large number of letters written by James and sent to his ‘adopted’ niece Jane McBryde were published in the intriguing volume Letters To A Friend [1956]. Although these have obviously been edited and carefully selected, they do possess some insights to the ghost stories. It is reasonable to suggest that intimate letters between James and James McBryde exist (the two were romantically involved up until the latter’s marriage) but equally probable that these have been destroyed.
Collected Editions
In 1931 M.R. James’s preferred publisher Edward Arnold published The Collected Ghost Stories Of M.R. James which featured all of the stories from the previous four volumes, to which was added a small handful of previously uncollected tales (including ‘Wailing Well’). This large book is bound in jet black cloth with gold titles to the spine only. The rare John Case dustwrapper features an ‘art nouveau’ design of sand spiders scurrying across the front cover. During the 1930s it went through various almost identical reprints before being scaled down in size as a cheaper edition with a plain dustwrapper, a format which reigned for three or four decades until the spate of new James collections in the 1980s and 1990s.
The first editions from the 1930s have a large font which makes for a pleasing read. Copies are very reasonably priced at anything between £10 for a later impression to circa £75 for a bright first. Copies in dw are obviously worth several times more.
Wordsworth produced cheap paperback and hardback editions of the collected edition in the 1990s which is perhaps the cheapest and most sensible way to access the great majority of James’s work, featuring suitably spooky illustrations on the front covers by the popular Victorian artist J.Atkinson Grimshaw. At the other end of the scale is the very expensive Ashtree Press collected edition of 2003 A Pleasing Terror, which in addition to the collected stories, includes a large number of ephemeral extras which are of dubious interest. Aside from the price, the two biggest problems with this edition are its tiny font size, which makes reading a less than pleasurable exercise, and its editorial bias, which treats James as a figure of veneration. There is no objective critique of James’s work, which renders this supposedly definitive work a curiously flawed affair. Collectors who just want the ghost stories would be far better off with the original editions or the collected omnibus, whilst those who want James’s work analysed must look elsewhere for the ‘psychological profiling’ that we have now come to expect from literary critics. A Pleasing Terror is more of a celebration and validation of Ghosts & Scholars and The Ghost Story Society’s many years devotion to the Jamesian cause rather than a definitive edition. In fact, the book is not dissimilar to an Elvis ‘Greatest Hits’ Box Set.
Other Related Books
There is a large format illustrated edition of selected tales published under the Tiger Books imprint; although this looks a handsome book, the illustrations are of a very mild and disappointing nature. Peter Haining produced a similarly sized compendium entitled M.R. James’s Book of The Supernatural which is something of a curate’s egg collection. He reprints James’s hitherto uncollected final story A Vignette alongside tales by Erckmann-Chatrian and references to Jamesian obscura which are sometimes interesting and sometimes highly dubious. For example, Haining incorrectly locates a church pew which he argues may have inspired James’ story about the fictitious Barchester Cathedral, and he makes many other similarly erroneous claims. Whilst Haining’s interest in supernatural fiction cannot be questioned, he often gets his facts wrong in both this and a large number of other books.
Collecting the magazines and journals in which James’s work originally appeared is a very laborious but inexpensive hobby. The hardest by far to procure are the Eton ephemerals. The most interesting are probably those that were illustrated. Lost Hearts in the Pall Mall Magazine is not difficult to locate – in a bound volume, that is – but the illustrations are rather insipid and twee, portraying the orphan Stephen as a ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ type. I quite like the 1930s abridgements which appeared in Pearson’s because of their excellent illustrations by Abbey. (James disapproved of the slight abridgements but decided not to complain because of the generous royalties.) These magazines are however quite rare, especially in their original wrappers.
Undoubtedly James contributed other as-yet unattributed articles and stories to various Eton and Cambridge journals; for example, it is likely that he authored The Ghostologists In Conclave which appeared in The May-Bee in 1884, a Cambridge journal edited by students, as first identified by The Haunted River in the first issue of Weirdly Supernatural [2001]. This amusing satire lampoons veridical accounts of hauntings and psychic manifestations, and the author of the piece employs the Jamesian trait of mimicking women and the under-educated.
Audio Readings
Although several audio recordings of James tales have been produced the definitive readings are those ofthe late Michael Hordern. Three separate collections were released by Argo, each one comprising two tapes. When you listen to them it is almost as if M.R. James were reading them himself. They are out of print and copies can only be found on Ebay or similar where they sell for circa £10-20 each, but be wary of pirate copies. However, they have never been released on CD and they only include half of James’ ghost story output.
In 2006 Craftsman Audio Books released the first installment of a comprehensive two-volume CD collection read by Andrew Collings. Reggie Oliver acted as project consultant (with yours truly being generously credited for my meagre input). These finely-packaged items are of course more expensive than the pirated MP3 compilations one can buy on Ebay but in terms of quality they represent very good value.
The late BBC researcher Sheila Hodgson scripted several plays in the early 1980s in which James features as a sort of psychic detective. The plays are based upon fragments of unwritten tales referenced elsewhere by James in his piece Stories I Have Tried To Write. These have never been formally released and the only copies which are known to exist were taped by fans at home. I have a half dozen which vary in sound quality, but The Boat is easily my favourite, featuring as it does a very sinister use of sound. Others include The Lodestone and Turn, Turn, Turn. The stories were later fleshed-out into stand-alone short stories and published by the Ash-tree Press, but I much prefer the originals. * If anyone has copies of any of the Hodgson radio plays and would like to discuss a mutual swap, please contact me.
Film and Television Adaptations
Although ITV adapted M.R. James in the 1960s for a series called Mystery & Adventure, no copies exist in the public domain, and private collectors are very loathe to part with what might be unique and unlawfully-owned film reels. A trailer for one of these was however recently shown at film festival.
In the late 60s the BBC produced an adaptation of Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You for its Omnibus series. This black and white dramatization was directed by Jonathan Miller who later claimed it was intended as an essay on James rather than a faithful rendering of the original story. He depicts Professor Parkins as a repressed intellectual whose self-imposed alienation from both the ‘real world’ and his own primitive emotions leads to a shattering mental breakdown. It’s a powerful piece which manages to create a suitably spooky ambience. Purists hate it, partly because they fear psychological investigation into the James psyche, and partly because Miller has been unfaithful to the original. But I have no hesitation in saying that you should definitely procure a DVD if you can. However, be warned that are errors in the accompanying sleeve notes, and the added extras - Ramsey Campbell’s views on M R James and a reading of one of his own tales – are decidedly lacklustre.
During the 1970s the BBC adapted several James tales as part of their Ghost Story For Christmas output. Unfortunately only A Warning To The Curious is available on video or DVD. Like all James adaptations, it varies significantly from the original, but it still manages to capture a frightening atmosphere. The best of these adaptations are Lost Hearts and The Stalls At Barchester. The dramatization of The Ash-tree is the least satisfying. I have them on video tape but few collectors are willing to pass on their only copy. Pirate copies occasionally turn up on Ebay for quite staggering prices, but they are obviously illegal homemade copies, so beware.
In the 1950s the film director Jacques Tourneur produced Night Of The Demon, based upon James’s tale Casting The Runes. This is a superb horror film and an undisputed landmark in British film history. Once again great liberties are taken with James’ original tale but the basic plot still remains. Rumours that a portmanteau film of James stories was being scripted started in the late 1990s after the film rights were sold for a rumoured £20,000. However, nothing actually appeared.
Elsewhere the creation of the new digital channel BBC4 resulted in the creation of ‘Ghost Story Night’ and spawned the production of two new James ghost dramas - A View From A Hill and Number 13 - which were premiered successively at Christmas 2005 and 2006. However, despite being reasonably well-made, both fell far short of their 1970s predecessors. It would appear that the BBC were nervous about taking risks so produced films which were intended to possess the broadest possible mainstream appeal. The absence of a bold creative vision was obvious. Similar mistakes were made with the The Haunted Airman, an adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Haunting Of Toby Jug which failed miserably to deliver anything of its promise.
Nothing has been planned for Christmas 2007.
Nothing
A note on collecting M.R. James