Felix John Taylor

Illustration, three layers of two hills; a wolf howls in bottom layer, above him, six rabbits are dancing, above them, stands a blue-trunked tree with a magpie perched atop it. The magpie is holding a trumpet or horn type megaphone and wears pink boots. On the second hillock, there is a fox and a rabbit, the background is a grey sky with white clouds.

Hello Friday.
🖼️ Yuri Vasnetsov

Write down maybe ten broad questions you can imagine your examiners asking; then sit down and type out some answers

new blog post about what happened when Aleister Crowley tried to seize the Golden Dawn's headquarters, and what W B Yeats did about it: felixtaylor.org/yeats-vs-cro...

Current task at work: try to repair this Yeats collection for a student.

N EIL PHILIP is a poet and folklorist. Among his books are The Watkins Book of English Folktales, The Cinderella Story, The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse, and The Tale of Sir Gawain. His Horse Hooves and Chicken Feet: Mexican Folktales won the Aesop Award of the American Folklore Society. Neil lives in the Cotswolds, and a stream sacred to the Hwicce goddess Cuda rises in his garden to flow down her valley. He loves cats, books, and wine. You've devoted your life to studying myths and folk tales. What drew you to it? Why would you say this is important? I think telling stories is the root of our humanity. We are all doing it all the time, whether we realise it or not. Folk tales in particular hold up a mirror to ourselves. It's why they have survived. As the hero or heroine, by going through deadly perils and achieving impossible things, discovers their true self, so do we.

Very sad to read of the passing of folklorist and poet Neil Philip. He was fascinating to talk to, and always kind and supportive.

When I interviewed him for issue 12, he quoted William Blake: “This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity”.

The 1908 edition of "Poems" by W. B. Yeats has an amazing gilt design on the front by Althea Gyles, full of occult symbolism.

Gyles was in The Order of the Golden Dawn with Yeats who described "a strange red-haired girl all whose thoughts were set upon painting & poetry"

Sylvia Townsend Warner's OPUS 7 is dedicated to her uncle, Arthur Machen.

#booksky

A sad truth, but the man had a deep antipathy for anything resembling leftist politics

Yes! And age is no excuse, but M was in his seventies by that time

To add to this, according to the Harman biography the Machens were very uneasy on discovering that STW and Ackland were a couple... Also disapproved of their communist leanings

“A Glimpse of H. P. L.” (1945) by Mary V. Dana Sensible of the slowness with which the Old Corner turns over its stock, (they still have a 2-volume Gay’s Poems which they had years ago on Empire St.!) I cashed your money order & saile…

This week on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, we continue our look at women's memoirs of Lovecraft with "A Glimpse of H.P. L." (1945) by Mary V. Dana.

deepcuts.blog/2026/01/10/a...

I've had zero time for writing blogs recently, so I cheated and cobbled one together using photos of Nicholas Hawksmoor Churches taken last winter: felixtaylor.org/half-a-dozen...

From an old book called The Haunted Omnibus/Great Ghost Stories of the World. These are the only others I found good scans of, for Afterward by Edith Wharton, The White People by Arthur Machen. Lynd Ward, the artist, also did an edition of Frankenstein.

A cataloger at the Morgan on cataloging, book curses, and the need for a controlled vocabulary term so we can describe and find said curses.
📜📚

Painting of a figure walking through the snow carrying a Christmas tree.

The Christmas Tree, Emil Czech (1903)

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival Magic Arts and the Occult Revival

Publication date 19th March!
uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen. Dover paperback edition, 1986.

Tom Paulin's 1986 LRB piece on Yeats' letters is a glass of champagne - both dry and sparkling. Look at these 3 sentences! "The impulse dissolved in helpless love..." What a writer he was.

A linocut illustrated block of a horned woman in profile with a strange Pagan letters at the base of the composition and a stark woodland background.

G is for ‘The Great God Pan’ in my #folkhorroralphabet published in 1894 by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. The story is complex but I’ve focused on the character Helen Vaughan; a woodland dwelling deviant and daughter of the mythological God Pan.

matpringleillustration.bigcartel.com/product/folk...

Hedgehog amongst autumn leaves by roots of trees, painting.

Hedgehog, Jane Dignum.

Gawsworth, not Galsworthy! I've heard Francis Ford Coppola is apparently Redonda's Duke of Megalopolis

A vintage illustration of several dormice in a tree. Six dormice, specifically the common or hazel dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius), are shown climbing on the branches of a tree or bush. The mice are gathered around a woven nest, with one dormouse partially inside it. The branches are covered with green and brown leaves and clusters of dark berries. The image is a detailed, 19th-century watercolor illustration by Dr. Edward Adrian Wilson.

Dormice, Edward Adrian Wilson, 1910.

Yeah, I think you're right... It's a shame, they would have got on

Why do you think HPL never tried to contact Machen?

A little post about The Unicorn, a magazine that ran for two or three issues in 1895, and published H G Wells and almost (but not quite) Arthur Machen: felixtaylor.org/the-quest-fo...

Can’t decide what to buy on Prime Day?

Try: absolutely nothing, and then go support indie bookstores instead 📚

Who were C L Moore's influences? What pushed her into writing the early pulp tales?

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fantasy-th... This is on the 23rd, if you live in or near Oxford and have a long lunch break to fill

Cover of an early edition of Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat. Black and white photograph of a church set within a yellow border with the title and author's name in red lettering.

"There was a whole world of underground activity [in the period that birthed Lud Heat]. Those first years of the 70s were the best for it, because so much of the 60s had been taken up by psychedelic gangsters and chancers”'

#IainSinclair’s Lud Heat At 50

buff.ly/x4m4wMR