71 years ago, Arthur Machen passed into whatever speculative realm lies beyond the material curtain of this world. The fact that the contours of the field of weird fiction as they exist today would have been unrecognisable without Machen’s influence is a testament to his legacy.
Presented here is a copy of Machen’s episodic novel The Three Imposters - published by Everyman, and sporting an Aubrey Beardsley cover which unintentionally (but wonderfully-) evokes the weirdly -sinister character of Miss Lally - and which of course includes two of the classic, of weird fiction by way of ‘The White Powder’ and ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’.
I bought this copy of The Three Imposters in Camden Lock in the late 1990s - a time during which that particular region of London had yet to be entirely gentrified; such, it still maintained a remnant of the peculiarly Machenesque urban mystique which (in the mind of this reader, at least), had come to define the hidden hieroglyphics of London’s esoteric typography.
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