I found it after a long conversation about weather over Saturday afternoon drinks. Weather used to be a safe subject but now, in the era of once-in-a-generation storms that roll through annually it’s a stressful topic. After lamenting about heatwaves and deep freezes and high winds I went for a walk (on an unseasonably warm Winter evening) and sitting on the display shelf at the book shop (because of course I stopped at the bookshop) was Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes edited by Kevan Manwaring and published by the British Library as part of their Tales of the Weird series. It was only $15.00 and after my heavy-hearted chat I was keen to explore the topic through a literary lens.

I found a second volume in the series in the same shop a few weeks later: The Ghost Slayers: Thrilling Tales of Occult Detection Edited by Mike Ashley. Detective short stories with ghosts?! Absolutely.

So what are these little paperbacks and why has an institution like The British Library decided to churn out a set like this instead of beautifully illustrated limited editions that so often hit the market these days? Paperback novels were invented as a way to make reading more affordable, and this series is an extension of the same tradition. Of course, with the internet and many classics out of copywrite there is plenty of reading available for free online (and at your local library if you have one). Sure enough, in Heavy Weather the excerpts from Mary Shelley and stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville are only a quick Google search away, but in his introduction, Manwaring describes how he also turned to other sources (which as he says “meant plunging into the archives of pulp magazines”) which would not be readily available to the reading public.

Ashley’s collection, The Ghost Slayers, is even more focused on reviving out of print stories, introducing modern readers to detectives who were popular in their day but haven’t managed to remain in print. So instead of creating an expensive publication with new illustrations and fancy bindings (which hold their own value to many readers!) this series invests in the cost of publishing these rarer texts including paying someone to collect them from the archives, prepare introductions and notes, and hunt down possible copywrite holders.

Books and authors that remain widely published decades or centuries after their release is a topic of endless conversation and debate as plenty of popular writers in their day have disappeared and others who saw a quieter initial publication have grown in popularity over the years. These volumes also bring up plenty of other interesting ideas and subjects all falling under the “Tales of the Weird” theme of the series but what is most interesting to me about this collection is this focus on affordability.

I love collecting beautiful editions of my favorite books, but finding these remarkable paperbacks was a good reminder that the majority of my first experiences with my favorite books were not shiny, colorfully bound editions. Instead, my first experience of Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker was through the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offered (and still does) these works with footnotes and good introductions in a lightweight paperback form for less than $10.00 (which was usually as much as I could talk my dad out of on a Sunday morning trip to the shopping center).  

So, in an era of color organized shelves and online bidding wars for beautiful, limited editions I hope we can all remember the power of the dog eared, has a crease on the back cover from when you shoved it into your bag a bit too hard, scuffed, dented, and well-loved paperback.