new blog post about what happened when Aleister Crowley tried to seize the Golden Dawn's headquarters, and what W B Yeats did about it: felixtaylor.org/yeats-vs-cro...

Current task at work: try to repair this Yeats collection for a student.

Very sad to read of the passing of folklorist and poet Neil Philip. He was fascinating to talk to, and always kind and supportive. When I interviewed him for issue 12, he quoted William Blake: “This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity”.

The 1908 edition of "Poems" by W. B. Yeats has an amazing gilt design on the front by Althea Gyles, full of occult symbolism. Gyles was in The Order of the Golden Dawn with Yeats who described "a strange red-haired girl all whose thoughts were set upon painting & poetry"

Sylvia Townsend Warner's OPUS 7 is dedicated to her uncle, Arthur Machen. #booksky

A sad truth, but the man had a deep antipathy for anything resembling leftist politics

This week on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, we continue our look at women's memoirs of Lovecraft with "A Glimpse of H.P. L." (1945) by Mary V. Dana. deepcuts.blog/2026/01/10/a...

I've had zero time for writing blogs recently, so I cheated and cobbled one together using photos of Nicholas Hawksmoor Churches taken last winter: felixtaylor.org/half-a-dozen...

From an old book called The Haunted Omnibus/Great Ghost Stories of the World. These are the only others I found good scans of, for Afterward by Edith Wharton, The White People by Arthur Machen. Lynd Ward, the artist, also did an edition of Frankenstein.

A cataloger at the Morgan on cataloging, book curses, and the need for a controlled vocabulary term so we can describe and find said curses. 📜📚

The Christmas Tree, Emil Czech (1903)

Publication date 19th March! uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Tom Paulin's 1986 LRB piece on Yeats' letters is a glass of champagne - both dry and sparkling. Look at these 3 sentences! "The impulse dissolved in helpless love..." What a writer he was.

G is for ‘The Great God Pan’ in my #folkhorroralphabet published in 1894 by Welsh writer Arthur Machen. The story is complex but I’ve focused on the character Helen Vaughan; a woodland dwelling deviant and daughter of the mythological God Pan. matpringleillustration.bigcartel.com/product/folk...

Hedgehog, Jane Dignum.

Gawsworth, not Galsworthy! I've heard Francis Ford Coppola is apparently Redonda's Duke of Megalopolis

Dormice, Edward Adrian Wilson, 1910.

A little post about The Unicorn, a magazine that ran for two or three issues in 1895, and published H G Wells and almost (but not quite) Arthur Machen: felixtaylor.org/the-quest-fo...

Can’t decide what to buy on Prime Day? Try: absolutely nothing, and then go support indie bookstores instead 📚

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fantasy-th... This is on the 23rd, if you live in or near Oxford and have a long lunch break to fill

"There was a whole world of underground activity [in the period that birthed Lud Heat]. Those first years of the 70s were the best for it, because so much of the 60s had been taken up by psychedelic gangsters and chancers”' #IainSinclair’s Lud Heat At 50 buff.ly/x4m4wMR

New blog post up on the publisher Ralph Shirley and popular occult journalism in early 20thc London: felixtaylor.org/ralph-shirle...

Book Cover of the Day:

Hear me talk about the Golden Dawn in the setting of an Oxford college:

Ithell Colquhoun exhibition at the Tate recently. Beautiful, & magic(k)al in every sense of the word, given the palpable weird aura coming off some of these

A month ago today! Still standing

New book announcement! LYNCHIAN: THE SPELL OF DAVID LYNCH, an exploration into why his work has such a profound impact on us. Out in November, pre-order link in bio, some details in my newsletter... It is happening again!

I'm pleased to share my open access article "Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery", from a forthcoming issue of the journal Humanities: www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/14...

Goodnight. Full Moon, Cornwall, Morna Rhys.

New blog post up on the Arthur Machen papers at the Harry Ransom Center: felixtaylor.org/arthur-mache...

ft. my essay on what Lovecraft thought of Wales and Welsh people (not flattering, with the exception of Arthur Machen) - whole issue should be online soon!

It's half nine in the evening, fool, quit trying to index a whole book

A short post about my trip to the US to see some Arthur Machen archives (part one of who knows how many?) felixtaylor.org/arthur-mache...

A highlight: the cavernous basement of the Strand bookshop in NYC!

‘For the Dead Remember: The Life of M. R. James’ will be published by Oxford University Press on 10 September 2025. Set your watches, mark your calendars, and spread the word!

How the hell is anyone with a wfh desk job expected to do 10k steps a day? I would LOVE to do 10k steps a day.

Lucia Joyce - daughter of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle - in 1928. Photo by Berenice Abbott, born 17 July.

British artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare #AustinOsmanSpare Astral body and ghost, 1946 (Spare's interpretation of the merging of the astral body and the Kia (or Zos), representing the state of self-realization and potential transformation.) #Occultism #Thelema #ChaosMagic

I was in New York for the first time last week, my neck hurts

Good fresh takes on an exceptional career in this. I read Garner's memoir a few months back - he continues to mine the same themes, but with age is far more candid and says things he's never said before

Novel reading is declining at the same rate across genders, I've heard. Situation sucks but I doubt applying 'romantasy' tropes to 'male-oriented fiction' is going to help!

Processing some interesting stuff today, this issue of Astounding Science Fiction from 1950 - contains one of Sprague de Camp's anthropological essays, and a discerning fan letter from a 20-year-old Lin carter

Out on July 17th from British Library Publishing. This is an absolute must for me. Love Buchan’s weird fiction. The Strange Stories of John Buchan - British Library Gilded Nightmares edited by James Machin.

New blog post on people who were not members of the Order of the Golden Dawn: felixtaylor.org/the-order-of...

Arthur Machen owned a pet bulldog during the 1890s called Juggernaut (or 'Jug' or sometimes 'Juggy').When he entered a room he would take the best seat by the fire 'with many groans and grunts of joy'. But who looked after him when Machen went off on his acting tours?? The true mystery.

It's lunch time (kind of) and it's a good opportunity to remind you how great this is

Owl by (I think) Claud Lovat Fraser, 1921