A View From Corona #17

Jeremy Lassen | July 11th 2005 at 4:20 pm

“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”

- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness

So I was working in the bookstore yesterday, and a customer comes in to return a copy of a book he bought 3 days ago… the recently published Hippocampus Press collection, The House of Sounds and Others by M. P. Sheil. No big deal, the customer indicated that he already had most of these stories in the Sheil’s Arkham House collection, and that he wanted to exchange it. I assented to this request, and the customer began looking for a different book.

The customer goes into the rare books section and pulls out the Tarturus Press edition of Sheil’s novel The Purple Cloud and asks if we have any more copies. I do a quick search, and turn up two(!) other editions of this novel… A new Bison trade paperback, and a used Warner mass market paperback. In addition, the collection that he just returned includes the full text of the novel! Thats kind of odd… having three copies of a relativly obscure novel in stock at any given time. But then the coincidence meter goes off the scale: As I start in on the stack of collectible books that need to be graded and entered into the store inventory, I come across a 1930 U.S. edition of this same title from Vanguard Press!!

Suddenly, it’s a Sheil-palluza. So now I realize I’ve got 4 different editions of this seemingly rare and hard to find book (5 if you include the Hippocampus collection, which contains the novel). This calls for a picture:

Details of the different editions:

• The Tarturus edition reprints the original unrevised text of the 1901 first edition, and reproduces J.J. Cameron’s twenty-four illustrations from the magazine serialization of the same year. Brian Stableford provides a introductory essay, “The Black-and-White Mystery of The Purple Cloud”.
• The House of Sounds and Others is edited by S. T. Joshi. Contains nine essential stories and the novel The Purple Cloud (1901 text).
• The Bison Books edition reprints the author’s own final expanded 1929 version, and features and introduction by John Clute
• I failed to note what edition the Vanguard 1930 edition reprints, but I’d guess it reprints the 1929 text.

If you want to read this novel, the The 1901(I think… It’s not entirely clear… You know how Project Guttenberg is about sources…) text can be found online here:

Further information about Sheil and the Purple Cloud can be found at this site maintained by Alan Gullette.

I think the gods are trying to tell me I should read some Shiel, whom I’ve never read. I know, I know… A giant, and very influential weird fiction writer, and I’ve never read him! Shock! Horrors! And I claim to be some kind of authority on weird/fantastic fiction?! Let me let you in on a secret… I’m not nearly as well read as I pretend to be. But at least I know I’m not well read, and try to make up for it as best I can. The hippocampus collection is going on my hold pile at the bookstore, and the etext of The Purple cloud is getting shunted off to my smart phone/ebook reader.

I’d appreciate any feedback you might have on what your favorite Shiel piece is, and why.

Until Next time…estai kai Samos ammos, eseitai Daelos adaelos

Filed in Editorials. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.