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The Haunted Library
Tales of Cursed Books and Forbidden Shelves
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Brief Description
As he turned over its stiff and yellow pages, he noticed with pleasure the smell of corruption that had first repelled him in these decaying volumes, a smell, he now thought, of ancient and secret knowledge... Researchers prying into an obscure manuscript come face to face...
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Format: Paperback / softback
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See moreA popular anthology published in 2016 before the launch of the British Library Tales of the Weird rejoins the series with new material included. Featuring stone-cold classics from M. R. James and Margaret Irwin alongside rare items from the labyrinthine basements of the British Library collections.
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Description
As he turned over its stiff and yellow pages, he noticed with pleasure the smell of corruption that had first repelled him in these decaying volumes, a smell, he now thought, of ancient and secret knowledge...
Researchers prying into an obscure manuscript come face to face with its ghoulish guardian. A bookseller digging through an attic disturbs something far more dangerous than dust. An uncanny tome tempts its reader onto a path of untold evil. Welcome to The Haunted Library, a collection of fourteen tales steeped in the dark psychic traces found in the stacks and shelves of libraries, bookshops, and other troves of hidden knowledge.
Including stories from rare pulp magazines, classics from the minds of M. R. James, L. P. Hartley and Margaret Irwin, and modern chillers from Penelope Lively and C. J. Faraday, this volume invites you into a hushed realm of cursed authors, ghostly bibliophiles, and readers haunted by the weird powers of the written word.
Series: British Library Tales of the Weird
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Weird Woods
Woods play an important and recurring role in horror, fantasy, the gothic, and the weird. They are places where strange things happen, where you often can't see where you are or what is around you. Supernatural creatures thrive in the thickets. Trees reach into underworlds of earth, myth, and magic. Forests are full of ghosts. In this new collection, immerse...Paperback$2500Elsewhere:$2699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Roarings from Further Out
The reputation of early-twentieth century British writer Algernon Blackwood currently resides with his two novellas, The Willows (1907) and The Wendigo (1910), and with good reason. They are perfectly crafted horror tales that convey feelings of mystical otherness; they hint at the possibility that there are forces which lie beyond the confines of our everyday understanding of the world and...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Haunted Trail
A remarkable blood-soaked stranger upends the lives of two Lake District ramblers; a lonely tavern offers its guests something much more disturbing than a post-walk pint; a night hike on the Fens takes a terrifying turn when the fog rolls in. From the darkly humorous to the chillingly sinister, tales of the haunted trail are as old as time. We...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Cornish Horrors
A mariner inherits a skull that screams incessantly along with the roar of the sea; a phantom hare stalks the moors to deliver justice for a crime long dead; a man witnesses a murder in the woods near St. Ives, only to wonder whether it was he himself who committed the crime. Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Lost Stradivarius
The discovery of a beautiful Stradivarius violin in a hidden cupboard at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, appears to be a stroke of good fortune for music student John Maltravers. But there is something sinister in the violin's history—something corrupt which threatens to re-emerge as the bewitched Maltravers plays and replays a devilish tune he is powerless to resist. First published in...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Chill Tidings
"The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood." The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed, and the fire is well fed, but the ghosts are still hungry. The ghosts are at the door. Welcome to a new collection...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Phantoms of Kernow
As the storm booms out in the bay and the waves smash against the rocks, the masts of a cursed and spectral vessel are drawing near. As the mists roll over Bodmin Moor, the moonlight reveals a night alive with spirits. Welcoming a fresh roster of seaside spectres, tin-mine terrors and holiday haunters, this return to the bountiful fold of...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Circles of Stone
In the wood, the grey stone rose from the grass, and she cried out and ran back in panicked terror. 'What a silly little girl,' the nurse had said. 'It's only the... stone.' Standing stones, stone circles, tumps, barrows, and ancient clearings still remain across the British Isles, and though their specific significance may be obscured by the passing of...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Our Haunted Shores
The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested, came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose. From foreboding cliffs and lonely lighthouses to rumbling shingles and silted estuaries, the coasts of the British Isles have stoked the imaginations of storytellers for millennia, lending...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Haunters at the Hearth
But something odd does happen here at Christmas time. When I first heard the story, I thought it was an old wives' tale, but—well, these old houses—you hear strange things— He lifted his shoulders and stared into the fire... From the troves of the British Library collections comes a new volume for Christmas nights—when the boundary between the mundane and...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Wayfarer's Weird
'Come to-night', I heard the old man say, 'come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead'. Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts, and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Night Land
Aeons in the future, Earth's surface faces perpetual night after the failing of the Sun. Humanity is entrenched within the Last Redoubt, a colossal metal pyramid. Beyond the safety of its structure lurk countless unknowable threats.William Hope Hodgson's strange, visionary novel of humanity's struggle for survival in the eternal darkness of the future was first published in 1912, and is...Paperback$2999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780712355292
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 13 November 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: British Library Publishing
Illustration: Illustrations
Contributors:
- Edited by Tanya Kirk
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 130.0mm
Height: 190.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 256
About the Author
Tanya Kirk is a librarian at St John's College, Cambridge and was a curator of the Western Heritage collection at the British Library. She has edited many seasonal collections in the British Library's Tales of the Weird series including Haunters at the Hearth, Sunless Solstice, Chill Tidings and Spirits of the Season.
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