The work displayed in
A Reader of Curious Books
paints an intellectual portrait of Arthur Machen as a young man. All of the writer's future themes and favorite subjects can be found in its pages: Christian history and liturgy, folklore, early man, the history of world literature, psychic phenomenon, orthodoxy versus heresy-to name only a few.
For the certified bibliophile, a lover of literary exploration or the merely curious, a collection of this sort justifies itself. The archaic dispatches are both entertaining for the quality of the prose and interesting for the array of arcane subjects covered. The forgotten books reviewed in this collection become living characters with each title owing its existence to the simple suggestion that it does exist. In a sense, this lost bookshelf functions best as does the library of Don Quijote-a dusty chamber of the possibly dangerous, perhaps banal books which feed the imagination of man... that mad mammal.