Forgotten books worth rediscovering

Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous book collector, did something practical about this when in 1990 he co-founded the Tartarus Press in order to bring the works of the once popular Arthur Machen back into print. Machen’s particular speciality was ‘weird fiction’, novels and stories that inhabit the borderland of this and other worlds, and Tartarus went on to reissue other authors in this genre, notably Robert Aickman and Sarban (otherwise the British diplomat John William Wall), as well as to publish new writers and a handful of classics.

Fifty Forgotten Books inevitably includes a number of Tartarus authors, not only writers of supernatural and other-worldly fiction, but also Alain-Fournier, A.J. Symons, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Denton Welch. Russell cheerfully acknowledges that both Le Grand Meaulnes and The Quest for Corvo are sufficiently unforgotten to have been Penguin Modern Classics for several decades, while Townsend Warner’s work is regularly reprinted – to which one might add that Welch has an enthusiastic cult following that keeps his name and works very much alive.

However, Russell more than makes up for this cavalier net-spreading in his chapters on genuinely forgotten books. Alongside the familiar (Baudelaire, Walter de la Mare) and the cultish (Anna Kavan, Jocelyn Brooke), there are some bona fide oddities, and he sometimes selects unexpected volumes by authors known for other types of book, such as Ernest Dowson’s short stories or Gerald Heard’s tales of the supernatural.

One of the themes that runs throughout the book is of writers who even during their lifetimes existed on the margins, and it seem wholly appropriate that Russell’s survey opens and closes with two books titled The Outsider. Russell came across the first of these, by Colin Wilson (1956), as a 14-year-old attracted to existentialism, and it inaugurated his passion for book collecting.