Thursday 19 January 2012

Another dustjacket intact!


I previously discussed the rarity of finding Montague Summers' The vampire, his kith and kin (1928), dust jacket intact. This scarcity also applies to its companion tome, The vampire in Europe (1929). 

Last night, I stumbled across one Weiser Antiquarian Books' website. They're selling it for a cool US$350.00 (left).

It has a prestigious link, too: it's 'From the collection of English bibliophile and Aleister Crowley scholar Nicholas Bishop-Culpeper (1942-2011)'. A little more about him here.

As it happens, Summers knew Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). But the extent of their relationship varies depending who you ask. For instance, Rosemary Ellen Guiley states:
Their exact relationship remains unknown, for neither said much publicly about the other. Their friendship was well known, however. Summers privately confided his interest in Crowley, and collected a huge dossier of magazine and newspaper clippings about him. He told Lance Sieveking, a Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) hero and important figure with the BBC who knew Crowley, that everything about Crowley should be preserved because he was "one of the few original and really interesting men of our age."1
Meanwhile, in the same book, Gerard P. O'Sullivan notes 'they were not friends, but acquaintances, and dined together only twice'2, adding '[Charles Richard] Cammell, one of Aleister Crowley's several biographers, was the man who brought Summers and Crowley together to dine at his flat in 1938'.3



1. M Summers, The vampire, his kith and kin: a critical edition, ed. JE Browning, The Apocryphile Press, Berkeley, Calif., 2011, p. xxii. Introduction by Rosemary Ellen Guiley.

2. ibid., p. xliv. Prologue by Gerard P. O'Sullivan.

3. ibid., p. lii.

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...