Revivification

I know it's been a long time, but I have been working away behind the scenes at producing the next set of Whisky Priest Books. Coming soon... the long-promised science-fiction of Anthony Trollope! The autobiographical writings of Ambrose Bierce! The piss-take of Victorian literature by Arnold Bennett! And more...

Karin Michaëlis: The Dangerous Age

I first came across mention of this Danish masterpiece in 500 Great Books by Women, one of those big round-ups of somewhat neglected literature that have made me haemorrhage money in second-hand bookshops. Critic Erica Bauermeister had this to say: “At forty-two, approaching that ‘dangerous age’ and determined to eliminate the hypocrisy in her life, Elsie divorces her husband, leaves behind a young potential lover, and retreats to an isolated villa on an island... First published in 1910, [this] is still a shockingly forthright and provocative book."

And it's a bloody good one, too: one of those freakishly modern Scandinavian novels (see also Amalie Skram, Hjalmar Söderberg and the like). Elsie's bitterly honest letters to friends, her ex-husband, and to a potential lover, and her diary entries recording her tumultuous thoughts, her encounters with servants and her failing plans, are quite compelling.

For the cover I used an evocative photo by Olof Werngren: this picture of a woman about to plunge naked into the cold Scandinavian seas reminded me very strongly of Elsie and the evening bathing she does off the shore of her isolated island.

You can get the book at Lulu, Amazon UK and Amazon US (ISBN 978-1445793566). And thus Whisky Priest Scandinavia is off the ground!

And coming soon from Whisky Priest: Anthony Trollope's forgotten science-fiction novel...

Kálmán Mikszáth: Saint Peter's Umbrella

I'm very pleased to announce the first in an irregular but ongoing series of Hungarian classic revivals at Whisky Priest: Kálmán Mikszáth's Saint Peter's Umbrella.

More than a century after his death, Kálmán Mikszáth remains one of Hungary’s most popular writers, but is almost unknown in English translation. Saint Peter’s Umbrella is the most successful and popular of his earlier novels: a tale of two umbrellas—one containing a family fortune hidden in the handle, and the other a venerated relic said to have been used by Saint Peter to protect an abandoned young girl. Or maybe they're the same umbrella? But how could that be?

From Lóránt Czigány's A History of Hungarian Literature (an invaluable companion, originally published by Oxford University Press, but now available online in its entirety here):


[Mikszáth] never missed the latent potential of a good story which fired his imagination ... Of his early novels, St. Peter’s Umbrella (1895) was the most popular and perhaps the best. (Theodore Roosevelt was said to have admired the novel, and visited Mikszáth during his European trip in 1910 solely to express his admiration.) The novel illustrated well the working of Mikszáth’s craft. The umbrella of the title may have been the subject of an anecdote in Upper Hungary, in which it was claimed to have a supernatural origin – St. Peter himself left it behind to protect an abandoned little girl. Thus the local peasants held the object in great veneration. The main line of the story – concerning the treasure-hunt of Gyuri Wibra, whose eccentric father put his fortune in an open bank-draft and hid it in the handle of an umbrella – is welded to the anecdote concerning the ‘celestial umbrella’. The complications arising out of the search for the umbrella provide Mikszáth with an opportunity to work on two different levels – devising an exciting hunt for the inheritance, and at the same time observing the significance, in terms of mass-psychology, of a seemingly worthless object ... Mikszáth excels in creating the background: his countryside is full of well-observed characters, drawn with warm humour.


The cover makes use of an image from an old postcard (the man with the brolley and the suitcase), as well as scans of Hungarian currency from the time of the book.

Get the book at Lulu, Amazon UK or Amazon US. Amazon being amazon, their database shits bricks at the accent marks, rendering him as K·lm·n Miksz·th.

Catalogue

For ease of browsing, the first Whisky Priest catalogue is now available:

Whisky Priest Catalogue 01

Download it here.

Jerome K Jerome: On the Stage-And Off & Stage-Land

Jerome K Jerome is one of the great English humourists, best known for Three Men in a Boat and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. He wrote many novels, stories, essays and plays; the latter grew from his youthful determination to be an actor. For three years he slaved at the lowest rung of the acting world, in a threadbare repertory company in England. Success was elusive, though he encountered numerous peculiar characters, and fell victim to almost every form of scam and con going in the theatrical world.

Fortunately for his readers, in 1885 he was able to turn this experience into a book, On the Stage--And Off, a very funny memoir of these miserable years. It was his first successful book. Several years later, he followed it with Stage-Land, a hilarious guide to the clichés of late-Victorian theatre, with cynical commentary on all of the character types and situations that plagued most plays of the era.

The books can be read online here and here, or you can buy the shiny new Whisky Priest edition, containing both books, here.



The cover of this edition makes use of photos from old turn-of-the-century theatrical magazines. The main photo, of the actors on stage, seemed apt since it looks like a performance of an extremely muddled, ill-conceived play. The Whisky Priest edition also includes the original Stage-Land illustrations, by J. Bernard Partridge. Click for bigger versions.

Ossip Schubin: Our Own Set

The Neglected Books Page is a great site: a wonderful resource for people looking to spend all of their money on out-of-print and forgotten books. It's also where I first learned of Ossip Schubin (real name Aloisia Kirschner), a Prague-born Austrian writer whose Our Own Set is a wonderful social comedy somewhere in the area between Jane Austen, Edith Wharton and early Henry James, but refracted through a prism of decaying, self-absorbed Austrian aristocracy, and set in Rome in 1870. The review at Neglected Books is excellent, but it does give away the end of the story. The book itself is available at the Internet Archive in Clara Bell's fine translation, and it is this version of the text which I used for the new Whisky priest edition.

I was struck by a descriptive passage halfway through the novel, setting the scene for an important plot development. It describes Monte Pincio, where the Austrian exiles and tourists mingle with locals and travellers from other countries.

The scene is now the Pincio — between five and six in the afternoon, the hour when the band plays every day on the great terrace, while the crowd collects to watch the sun set behind St. Peter's. The reflection of the glow gilds the gravel, glints from the lace on the uniforms and the brass instruments, and throws golden sparks on the water in the wide basin behind the bandstand. ... A special set of visitors haunt the shady side of the Pincio; not the fashionable world: governesses and nurses with their charges, and priests ... Separated from these only by a leafy screen the beauty and fashion of Rome drive up and down — the residents in handsome private carriages, the foreigners in hired vehicles of varying degrees of respectability, or even in the humble, one-horse, hackney cab. The crowd grows denser every minute as the stream of Roman rank and wealth swells along the Via Borghese, across the Piazza del Popolo, and up the hill.

This image represented wonderfully by a pair of paintings by American artist Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) of Monte Pincio, teeming with tourists and sightseers. Click for bigger versions.

I wanted to use a detail from the first of these for Our Own Set's cover. As for the font, something with lovely firm, round Os was needed--a medium weight of ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

 Our Own Set is available now at Lulu, and soon from Amazon. More Ossip Schubin titles are planned.

Whisky Priest at the Constant Conversation

The fine blog of the literary magazine The Quarterly Conversation has an interview about Whisky Priest Books which explains some of the thinking behind the creation of the books, as well as details on how you, too, can become a penurious POD publisher. Read it here.