Tales of the Weird cover gallery
The titles are listed chronologically and grouped by year, with brief notes for each batch. All images were briefed and commissioned by me, with Mauricio Villamayor designing in collaboration with a range of illustrators. All final covers copyright The British Library. If you’re looking to purchase any of these books, I recommended starting at the Library’s own shop page, where your purchase helps fund the vital work of the institution.
2018
The beginning. Two anthologies of lost tales edited by Mike Ashley (From the Depths and Glimpses of the Unknown) join two macabre collections edited by British Library curators (Mortal Echoes and Spirits of the Seasons) and a pair of novellas by Charlotte Riddell introduced by Andrew Smith. I create the brief for designer Mauricio Villamayor and we work on a style drawing on engraving to represent the vintage origins of many of the stories which appear in the books, offset with vibrant colours against voidlike backgrounds. The illustrations are by Mauricio’s collaborator Enrique Bernardou, who also provides frontispieces for Mortal Echoes and Spirits of the Season. The other frontispieces are sourced from the Library’s vast image collections.
2019
We get to do more? A positive reception from the book trade helps greenlight four more titles per publishing season (spring and autumn) for 2019, including two more themed anthologies from Mike Ashley and three books edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes. The previously published collection The Face in the Glass is given the Tales of the Weird cover treatment. Surprise submissions from academics Daisy Butcher (Evil Roots) and John Miller (Tales of the Tattooed) strike a chord and become popular entries in the series. All illustrations by Enrique Bernardou again, aside from Tales of the Tattooed, for which we commissioned editor John Miller’s own tattoo artist Luca Ortis to illustrate the Jun’ichirō Tanizaki story ‘The Tattooer’. Later, when we were publishing John’s follow-up book in a different British Library series, The Philosophy of Tattoos, I discovered later that Luca lived on the same street as me in London.
2020
Weird from home. Only six titles this year due to disruption from the Pandemic. Work continued full time (from home) for the publishing team but publication dates were adjusted due to uncertainty about how printers and other parts of the publishing pipeline would react to the wild events of the year. Elizabeth Dearnley works on her first anthology for the series, and Mike supplies another three. British Library curator Tanya Kirk provides more Christmas frights and John Miller edits what became one of the evergreen strong sellers for the series, Weird Woods. For this cover, Mauricio drew on Paraguayan mythology of the tree/shadow spirit malavisión to illustrate the hauntingly humanoid tree figure in the foreground. Enrique Bernardou provides his final series cover for Into the London Fog. For the rest of this year’s titles, Mauricio suggests asking illustrator Sandra Gómez to bring her skills to the series. I’m keen to see how her style translates, and she delivers some classics, with my highlight being not one, but two, enticingly strange options for the culty hand-crown brief I sent for Queens of the Abyss. The second option adds to the list of wonderful bespoke frontispieces.
2021
Outré, Randalls, regional. Returning to the full complement of eight titles for the year, 2021 saw us bouncing back from Pandemic publishing with some offbeat themes I’m not sure have been attempted in anthology form before (mathematical and meteorological weird) along with some classics in Minor Hauntings’ ghostly children and the insectoid-focused Crawling Horror. Cornish Horrors marked the first spotlight regional title, which proved very popular, and, after it was suggested by Aaron Worth, I was personally very pleased to track down the copyright holders for the Eleanor Scott estate to negotiate our publishing of a new edition of the scarce horror collection Randalls Round. This would be the forerunner of some of the later work on the novel side of the series, following a similar approach to the Crime Classics where I had been tracking down ‘lost’ estates to republish rare material. The covers for Cornish Horrors and I Am Stone remain some of my favourites of the series, and Sunless Solstice (I am still quite proud of this pleasingly sibilant title) also became a perennial strong seller.
2022
Canon, classic, polar, Pan. This year kicked off with a Mike Ashley collection on the excellent yet not particularly well known Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and continued with some classic TotW anthology themes. Our Haunted Shores was imagined as a sort of coastal equivalent to Weird Woods, and still contains some of my favourite stories in the whole series (I am also fond of it as it gave us an excuse to illustrate frog-men assaulting a lighthouse). The Night Wire explored a popular vein of weird fiction centred around one of the all-time great stories from Weird Tales magazine, and The Horned God was a riot of poetry and surprisingly varied stories inspired by Pan and his antics. This cover also featured the first illustration by Mag Ruhig in the series. Rounding out the year, Manon Burz-Labrande’s innovative concept of stories based on sound and heard hauntings led into more Christmas classics, and an off-kilter wintry offering from the returning John Miller, pairing dark science fiction with polar bear peril.
2023
Subscription and sabbatical. Due to my sabbatical adventure to Chile from November 2022 to January 2023, the first few titles of this year were cued up since autumn, and mostly went without a hitch. May Sinclair and Ambrose Bierce made for a heady combo of single-author collections to start the year, while Holy Ghosts and The Uncanny Gastronomic ushered in a nice contrast of very classic and very atypical themes to round out the season. The Arcimboldo-inspired cover for The Uncanny Gastronomic was probably one of my most bizarre ideas pitched to Mauricio, but it was rewarded with an amazing illustration. This autumn, we launched the subscription service, starting with The House on the Borderland, marking the first standalone novel to join the series. I had suggested adding novels as a way to help with workloads while moving from four titles per season to one title per month (as was the requirement of the subscription), and as part of this I developed a complementary but distinct style for them with Mauricio and Mag. On either side of this we had our usual mix of classic and experimental themes, with the year closing on Circles of Stone, pitched as an alternative to another Christmas volume, focusing on ritual celebrations of a more sinister kind.
2024
Now We Are Twelve. With the subscription in full swing, 2024 is the first year with one new title per month. You can also see the four novels mingling with the anthologies, featuring some classics of the genre (The Human Chord, The Night Land) as well as the rare and (in my opinion) highly deserving The Haunted Vintage from one of my favourites, Marjorie Bowen. The covers were now divided between Mag doing the novels and Sandra illustrating the anthologies, delivering some haunting classics for the Dorothy K. Haynes collection, Eerie East Anglia and Deadly Dolls (the 50th volume in the series) in particular. This batch also included the first collaboration with the multimedia collective Weird Walk and intriguing takes on the themes of séance, the phenomenon of horror writing spanning generations of the same family, romance/horror crossovers and terror-tinged historical fiction.
2025
Lost things, pulp reckonings, illusions. This year featured several books centred around ‘lost’ writing, from the return of the rare E. H. Visiak novel Medusa (following another recommendation from Aaron Worth, and some more sleuthing to trace the estate) and the first edition of Possessed (discovered by Johnny Mains) since its original publication. The Marjorie Bowen novella-plus-stories collection featured some extremely rare material from the BL collections, as did the new and revised edition of The Haunted Library. Elsewhere, mythological hauntings and mushroom horror both became very satisfying collections, Weird Walk returned with a second foray into haunted rambles, and Cornwall was revisited for more thrills. Weird Sisters and All the Fear of the Fair ventured deeper into the territory of the pulps to plumb new depths of weirdness, and we experimented some more with illusion-based covers for the faces hidden in The Lost Stradivarius and Medusa, as well as the yawning maw of a tiger’s mouth for The Tiger Skin.
2026
Novel experiments, core themes. Continuing on the road from Medusa and Possessed, this year saw the inclusion of Gerald Heard’s taut Gothic novel The Black Fox and the rediscovered The Luck of the Town by the pretty-much-unknown writer Marion Fox, whose estate I had fun tracking down. Intriguingly, the author and her descendants had actually intimated that they would like to support the Library though their wills, so that felt very fitting. Meanwhile, Ruth Heholt provided some Victorian goodness from Catherine Crowe and the popular horror writer Mark Morris assembled a pleasingly varied collection based around the theme of shapeshifting. Disembodied hands and a fourth regional collection, this time based around Yorkshire, ended the season with pulp thrills, intriguing folkloric retellings and some rare material rubbing shoulders with some of the series regulars such as Arthur Machen and J. Sheridan Le Fanu. My role on these books came to end with Haunted Yorkshire, but I hope to return with commentary from the new team when I can for the covers which follow!