Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith
Edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson
£35
Available in a hardback edition of 500 copies only from SAP.
192 pp. | 133 x 203mm
Illustrated, index
Available mid January 2025
In the long–awaited followup to his famed 1987 anthology, Books Of The Beast, writer, legendary bookseller and cricket enthusiast Timothy d’Arch Smith steps up to the crease with The Stammering Librarian, another diverse collection of erudite essays all told with forensic detail, tenderness and an acerbic wit.
Here, among other absorbing topics, he provides further insight into the life and occult writings of Aleister Crowley, the criminal prosecution that resulted in Montague Summers’s translation of The Confessions of Madeline Bavent, an A to Z of naughty public-school slang and the feline mystery behind Thomas Hardy’s heart.
Along the way we are introduced to such memorable personalities as actor, avowed libertine and previous Montague Summers associate Anatole James, Sixties poet Brian Hill, and earlier Uranian poets (both real and mythical) Edmund John and Rev. T. Hartington Quince, M.A.. Elsewhere the autobiographical title essay recalls the author’s early days, including a meeting with “compiler of bibliographies and biographical dictionaries of living persons”, Geoffrey Handley-Taylor. No serious librarian should be without this collection on their shelves.
Timothy d’Arch Smith (born 1936), a well known antiquarian book seller and book collector, is the great-grandson of the popular Edwardian writer “Frank Danby”; his grandfather and aunt were the equally successful novelists Gilbert and Pamela Frankau. His interests are cricket and the nineteenth-century Occult Revival.
Edwin Pouncey is a writer, musician and collector, perhaps best known for his illustration and artwork as Savage Pencil. Sandy Robertson is an author and music writer whose work has appeared in Sounds, Penthouse, NME, The Lancet, Starlog and many others.
