It’s been a few months since my last update here. In truth I’ve been taking a bit of a break and pursuing other hobbies, and new book acquisitions on the M. R. James front have been few and far between in recent weeks. I have, however, made a few small updates to the site over the past few days, and thought it would be worthwhile covering these in a short post.

Firstly, a further three books I acquired between the tail end of last year and the first couple of months of 2021 have been added to the collection pages. Two of these are works by MRJ – Cambridge Under Queen Anne and A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Eton College. The Eton catalogue, which I had been coveting for quite a while, came with an interesting bundle of letters, dating from the early 1970s, from the ‘Keeper of Library and College Collections’ at Eton to the previous owner of the book – a university academic who required a copy for some of his own manuscript research. Obviously I only have one side of the correspondence, but it appears the academic in question received the book from Eton in exchange for a couple of other titles gifted to the library. A visit to the college itself was subsequently organised in mid-1972. Unfortunately due to the dates involved I cannot at present include any images of this correspondence on the site for data protection and copyright reasons.

The third title is something a bit different in the form of a copy of the new Jamesian pen-and-paper roleplaying game, Casting the Runes, which was published by The Design Mechanism earlier this year. At this point I haven’t yet had time to fully delve into the intricacies of the game, but I’m planning to cover it in greater detail in a future post.

---

Aside from these few new book pages, I’ve been making some minor style and formatting changes to the site to compensate for some broken functionality introduced by a recent update to the WordPress editor, and have also added James McBryde’s four original illustrations for Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to the relevant story pages (Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book and ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’).

I’m planning a number of reasonably extensive pieces and articles this year, so hopefully I’ll have some more substantial content for you soon. As always, any new book acquisitions will continue to be added to the collection pages for those who are interested in such things.

Duncan J. Rule.