Mandylion Press unearths lost literary gems written by women and weirdos in the (very) long nineteenth century.
The Library
Arthur Machen exposes the darker side of the Decadent era in this occult künstlerroman. Blending the psychological and the supernatural, Machen entombs his main character, Lucian Taylor, in his own mind, cutting him off from the living world of sensation. Lucian journeys “all the long way from the known to the unknown,” travelling through Welsh hills, Roman ruins, opium dreams, and the grey streets of London. Put The Hill of Dreams in your pipe and smoke it.
This is the book for you if…
You spend too much time thinking about your crush.
The Roman Empire is your Roman Empire.
You’re a laudanum addict.
You’re an unpublished author.
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was born Caerleon, Wales. His most well-known works include The Great God Pan and Ornaments of Jade. He has influenced writers as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Jorge Luis Borges and Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Oliver Wendell Holmes confronts original sin in this medical case study-cum-romance. Elsie Venner is your typical teenage girl. But unlike her classmates at the Apollinean Female Institute, her mother was bitten by a rattlesnake while pregnant. Not a girl, not yet a woman, and also not quite human, Elsie battles the snake within. Published after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and before Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, this wild tale undresses Puritanism and anticipates psychoanalysis. Elsie Venner is sure to slither its way into your heart.
This is the book for you if…
You’ve ever done psychoanalysis.
You’re Britney Spears when she danced with the python.
You’re from Boston.
You’re in love with your teacher.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) was an American physician, writer and public intellectual. He established a medical practice in Boston and served as a professor and dean at Harvard Medical School, while also cofounding the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine he named. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., served as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932.
Ethel Lilian Voynich delivers the wildest nineteenth-century novel you’ve never heard of. Delight in this story of Italy’s Risorgimento starring a mysterious satirist, a hard-working lady-radical, and a Catholic cardinal with a BIG secret… Millions of copies sold in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
This is the book for you if…
You’re a troublemaker.
You’re an unrepentant Catholic.
You have daddy issues.
You can’t take a joke.
Ethel Lilian (Boole) Voynich (1864–1960) was born in Cork, Ireland, and raised in Lancashire, England. Her peripatetic adult life was defined by passions for music and leftist politics. In 1902, she married Wilifrid Michael Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and antiquarian book dealer. She spent her final decades in New York City, where she worked in a music school and as a translator of Russian, Polish and French texts.
