Fine Books & Manuscripts

[CAXTON CLUB CHICAGO BY THE BOOK]. BATSEL, Hannah, artist. Weirder Than Fiction. Privately printed, 2021. 8vo. Hand–painted carousel pop–up book with vintage stamped paper for the apartments’ wallpaper and inset with real stained-glass windows. “Every miniature issue of Weird Tales references a real issue of the magazine, including the two waiting to be read in the protagonists' mailboxes outside. The stained-glass windows allude to the Weird Tales stories being highlighted; a green-tentacled mass over aligned stars and undulating waves on one side, and a fanged open mouth on the other.” Original red cloth covers hand–lettered in an iconic Weird Tales typeface. “Weirder than Fiction was inspired by entry number 43 in Chicago by the Book, which describes the sci-fi/fantasy pulp magazine Weird Tales. This one-of-a-kind artist book opens into a diorama of two Chicago two-flat apartments across the street from one another; the apartments are visible to each other through the real stained-glass windows embedded in their walls. The apartments' occupants are the book's two protagonists, devotees of Weird Tales who have grown suspicious of each other. One of them, a young man, has been reading the May 1932 issue, which includes the short story The Brotherhood of Blood by Hugh Cave. He has noticed that his neighbor across the way seems pale and sickly, operates only at night, and yowls like some supernatural creature; could she be a descendant of the cursed vampire family from The Brotherhood of Blood, doomed to become a batlike creature of horror on the midnight of her twenty-eighth year? Meanwhile, across the street, the young woman has become paranoid as well; having read the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales, she is tormented by the idea that her neighbor is a deranged cultist just like those described in H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu. She hears him chanting late at night, worshiping a strange idol, and she dares not leave her house lest she be attacked by his fellow cultists. With the benefit of seeing the whole story, the reader can find a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything: the woman is gaunt and nocturnal because she is afraid to go out and buy groceries (that's why her cat yowls so piteously.) The man chants so sleeplessly because he is reciting the Lord's Prayer; he has covered his apartment in crucifixes to ward off vampire attacks. And the ghoulish silhouettes visible through both windows? The man's strange tentacles and bizarre idol are nothing but a potted plant and Virgin Mary statuette. The woman's coffin and bat are a wardrobe and vase full of umbrellas (Batsel).”