Opinions on Various Horror Collections?

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Opinions on Various Horror Collections?

1thomas_spoke
dec 7, 2021, 12:52 pm

I was wondering if anyone would care to share their opinion on the various ghost story collections that Folio Society have offered over the years. I have purchased the anthology of horror stories (The Folio Book of Horror Stories) https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-folio-anthology-of-horror-stories.html and I am very fond of it (was waiting for many months until it came back into stock!).

More recently, I came across

The Folio Book of Christmas Ghost Stories https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324921883371?hash=item4ba6da7aeb:g:l4kAAOSwCbRhnW1P,

Ghost Stories and Other Horrid Tales https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115028077353?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006... ,

and the Folio Society Book of Ghost Stories
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334112444195?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006....

Am wondering if anyone has any of these three and whether you could share your opinion on them (be it the stories in the collection, the presentation, the artwork, etc)?

Sorry for the cumbersome links -- I couldn't see an option for entering a hyperlink or something more convenient.

2housefulofpaper
dec 7, 2021, 9:58 pm

>

all three books are in the same format as The Folio Book of Horror Stories - same height and depth.

Ghost Stories and Other Horrid Tales (1997). Stories selected by Charles Stewart, and also illustrated by him, with 20 full-page colour illustrations, plus the "wraparound" cover illustration (printed on the paper Folio used to call "elephant hide"). Stewart selects, mostly, four stories from favourite ghost story writers of the 19th-early 20th century. R L Stevenson only gets two; Walter de la Mare only gets one. 319 numbered pages, plus Stewart's preface and the colour plates.

Christmas Ghost Stories (2005). Selection credited to The Folio Society. Illustrations by Peter Suart.
Cloth back and spine. Printed paper over the front board . 15 full colour illustrations. 288 pages of text, no preface or introduction. Stories range back to the 19th Century (Charles Dickens, Mrs Gaskell), and more recently than did Charles Stewart - the latest date on the copyright page is for Russell Kirk's "Saviourgate", which is (c) 2004. I haven't re-read this and to be honest I don't remember all the stories. The impression I have is that, as you'd expect, a proportion of the stories aim for the seasonally spiritual and uplifting, and a couple of tongue-in-cheek tales.

The Folio Book of Ghost Stories (2015). Introduced by Kathryn Hughes and illustrations by David McConochie. These are full colour, but painted rather than pen and ink (or perhaps pen and watercolour in Charles Stewart's case). Boards covered in semi-glossy paper printed with a painting on the front and a foxing/spotting effect on the back (the whole is supposed to look like an old book, and the image on the front could be either a water stain or a sheeted spectre). Nine full page illustrations, plus 273 pages of text and the introduction and other front matter. The paper is noticeably thinner than that used for the other two books, with a bit of show-though. The story choice is focused on the early 20th century, four earlier (Dickens' The Signal-Man, 1866, is the earliest). Five post-WWII stories, the latest stories (two of them) dating from the 1980s. Not all the stories set out to scare, but use the idea of the ghost to talk about grief, loss, fear of our own mortality.

I compared the contents pages and didn't see any overlap between the three volumes.