The Drolleries Press imprint

After several freelance projects that entailed formatting books for other writers, I found that I really enjoy bookmaking and decided to create my own imprint, Drolleries Press. For now, I am using Amazon as the platform on which to sell Drolleries Press books. At some point, I hope to learn more about the art of physical book printing and binding, at which point I will likely take over the printing aspects of my imprint as well.

The first Drolleries Press book: Where the Will o’ the Wisp Plays: A Collection of Haunted Lore from the 19th and 20th Centuries

Through ghost stories, essays on the supernatural, and poetic representations of various haunted states, this collection explores the transition from the Romantic to Modernist traditions in the English-language literature of Great Britain, Australia, and the United States of America. These works were originally published between 1800 and 1925. They capture various spiritual, religious, and scientific takes on the supernatural at a time when the English-speaking world was undergoing dramatic cultural changes in the wake of events such as the Industrial Revolution and the first World War. Some of the authors in this collection are quite well known while others are mostly forgotten. Each author provides interesting windows into the spiritual, supernatural, and literary notions of an English-speaking world on the verge of full-fledged modernity. Some pieces shed light on the Halloween traditions we still practice today. Although every essay, poem, and story featured in this collection is worth treasuring, Henry John Congreve’s “The Ghostly Digger” warrants special mention, since this is the first time the story has been published outside its original appearance in the Christmas Day edition of the South Australian Adelaide Observer in 1880. It is a delightful little story that captures the struggles of prospectors during the Australian gold rush.

The pieces in this collection are:

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – On Ghosts
Sir Walter Scott – Letter X from Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) – Faustus and Helena Notes on the Supernatural in Art
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Haunted Houses
Henry Kendall – The Wail in the Native Oak
Christina Rossetti – The Ghost’s Petition
Henry Lawson – The Ghost
Emily Dickinson – Ghosts
Madison Julius Cawein – Will-o’-the-Wisp
Sara Teasdale – The Ghost
Willoughby Weaving – Ghosts
Walter de la Mare – The Ghost
John Lang – The Ghost Upon the Rail, or Fisher’s Ghost
William Douglas O’Connor – The Ghost
Henry John Congreve – The Ghostly Digger
Margaret Oliphant – The Library Window
Oliver Onions – The Ghost
Max Brand – The Ghost