It's in the trees!

I give myself a kick up the bum this morning and finally headed out to the trees I have been meaning to photgraph all months. Whilst I was diappointment that the woods had received a bit of a clear with a few of the trees having been chopped into logs, there were still a couple of the trees I was looking forward to finally photograph them.

These tree outgrew their iron girdles (designed, I think, to stop farm animals eating them as saplings)  many years ago. 

My aim achieved, Me and Mrs E settled ourselves in the snug of the nearby Gower Inn pint for a cheeky pint.

With the early afternoon weather being unusually clement, we worked off our pint by taking a walk through the woods behind the pub car park.

This is the site of Trinity Wells, the first Baptist Church in Wales:

The Killy-Willy stream leads to another great Gower Hamlet, Ilston and past a fantastic ancient Yew in a medieval graveyard. But not for us today.

The Killy Willy Stream

Shelf Work

Today was a quiet day. My biggestcachievent was starting to tidy my bookshelves:

My Seth's Crimbo Ghost Stories

I finally disassembed by Lego M.R. James too:

Return of the Werewolf by Guy N Smith

The latest Guy N. Smith reissue was just pushed through my letterbox this evening.

For reasons I am not going to go in to, just yet, I am especially looking forward to the next book in this series being republished 🙂

6th Armada Ghost Book

The 6th Armada Ghost Book has my least favourite cover in the anthology series. It looks more like a juvenile adventure/mystery book to my weary eyes rather than suggesting the ghostly terrors awaiting readers within its pages. Again, the artist doesn't receive a credit in the book.

The book was released in 1975, for the price of 25p, making the cost of each tale within the book just a little of 2p a story, which has to be a bargain.

Along with disappointing cover art the story illustrations in the book hardly pump up the fear factor either:

All in all, this was a rather quiet entry in the series. That said, it sold well enough for Armada to start immediate work on a successor...

The later updated artwork for the book's re-release addressed the lack of scares in the original art with this:

Just look at the state of that cat!

GNS2 Back On

With a sudden flurry of interest these past few days, the send issue of the the Guy N Smith zine is very much back on the cards. So much so that I have had to up my game to today to get stuck back into my Guy N Smith ghost story: 

When I finally got home, these two beauties had been pushed through my letterbox:

5th Armada Ghost Book

It's January 1st, 1973, and look what has just hit the bookshop shelves:

 

Moving on to the 5th Armada Ghost Book, we find the first girl protagonist decorating a cover in the series. It also features its first horse! And doesn't that horse look terrified? 

The rear cover art does a great job, with the scariest looking treesthe in the Armada books to date terror too. Shame the publisher didn't think to credit the artist!

The story's illustrations are pretty scary too, especially for the age group the book was aimed at:

I've not read any of the stories in Book 5 yet, but when I do, the tale with the illustration directly above will definitely the first I tuck into.

4th Armada Ghost Book

1972 saw Armada publish its 4th Ghost Book. Peter Archer was responsible for illustrating the book's cover and internal pages. This was the first of the Armada Ghost books to ditch the familiar running boy motif on the front cover Whilst the running boy motif

I love seeing the prices on old books -you could leave a bookstore with this little beauty having spent just 20p!

This is a delightful collection of stories with some genuine stand-out first-class spooky entries nestled amongst the lineup. It's great to see children introduced to the Master of the Macabre, M.R. James, who adds literary class to the ghoulish fayre with his tale The Haunted Doll's House. And I remember E.F. Benson's classic The Bus Conductor giving me the heeby-jeebies when I first read it as a child in my bedroom at night. This tale haunted me for a long while afterwards, adding to my reluctance to open my bedroom curtain at night to peek out into the dark! The tale was made famous by featuring in the 1945 portmanteau Ealing horror Dead of Night.

Just what I need...

... a new project to justify my collecting and give me something new to work on...

3rd Armada Ghost Book

1970, two years after their previous anthology, the 3rd Armada Ghost Book hit the bookshelves. This time, a new Captain had taken the helm - Mary Danby. 

Danby's name was to become synonymous with the ghostly Armada franchise over the next thirteen years. Much to their reader's delight, as well as curating the stories presented in the anthologies, she was also happy to include her own spooky outings amongst their number.

Peter Archer was the chosen illustrator for this third volume of ghost stories, and he did a sterling job - even keeping the now familiar running boy, crooked tree and flying agressor motifs on the cover artwork.

Archer also delivered the scariest story illustration so far in the series. Imagine laying in bed as a child reading scary stories and coming across this image!