HODGSON, William Hope [LOCKE, George]

Tales of Land and Sea

London: Murqi Press, 1984. First, Limited Edition. Square Octavo. #8 of a Limitation of 10 copies only. 22cm. Publisher's black rexine titled in gilt to spine. 95pp. Some very light wear to the corners, a small cosmetic (not structural) crack to the laminate at the base of the front spine hinge, strong and tight; internally clean and fresh, with original 4pp Murqi Press prospectus laid in at the front; signed and numbered to limitation page. A near fine copy.

Well this is a weird one, no pun intended; William Hope Hodgson, basically the human background, along with Algernon Blackwood and Robert W. Chambers, to a foreground that has H.P. Lovecraft standing in a spotlight surrounded by mildly disfunctional fanboys, simultaneously wrote a lot, and not enough.
He had a relatively brief career as a published and popular writer, before being disintegrated by a shell on forward observations during Fourth Ypres in April 1918.
He gave us The House on The Borderland, The Night Land, The Ghost Pirates and others, and created the supernatural techie detective Thomas Carnacki out of whole cloth, for our queasy and uncomfortable enjoyment.
Hodgson ran away to sea in search of adventure as a teenager, and although he eventually found his feet there are more than a few suggestions that he suffered assault and other indiginities as a raw 14 year old apprentice at sea.
He became an advocate for apprentice's rights, and worked actively to increase the safeguards and comforts of young men in unfamiliar and vulnerable positions. He took up body building, advocated for self sufficiency, taught unarmed combat to the Blackburn Police, annoyed the hell out of Harry Houdini by embarrassing him during a music hall performance, and most importantly wrote a number of short stories, poems and novels, mostly in an attempt to keep his head above water, but also because William Hope Hodgson was clearly one of those men for whom 'giving up' is an abstract concept, only entertained by other people who clearly just need the support of someone like him.

He gave us some of the most important weird and supernatural tales in the canon, that's certainly true, but he also wrote a number of truly great sea tales. This book, published in a vanishingly small limitation by the God Emperor of supernatural bookdealers, the mighty George Locke of Ferret Fantasy, contains a number of Hodgson's seagoing tales salvaged from the pages of the Red Magazine between 1912-1916.
Signed and numbered by Mr. Locke to the limitation page, using his Murqi Press imprint (which I'm pretty sure he ran out of the shed in his back garden, which was the bookdealing equivalent of Tutankhamun's Tomb, only more suburban South London), with the intent of preserving tales which otherwise would just be footnotes in a variety of forgotten Edwardian boy's magazines, many of which lasted for only a short run or were so ephemeral you might as well have printed them on cobwebs. Before he died in the trenches, Hodgson wrote to a friend looking forward hopefully to the stories that might be written after experiencing the horrors of war; he never got to write them himself, but there is no doubt that the work he left behind encouraged many of the writers we now consider great, to step in and try to carry on where he could not.

Price: $600.00

Go Back