8th Armada Ghost Book

1973 brought another collection of spooky stories together in the form of the 8th Armada Ghost Story.

We are back to the effective scary book covers of a child being chased by a supernatural peril that were a highlight of the early books in this anthology series, Peter  Archer doing a sterling job of portraying the literary scares awaiting the reader within the title's pages.

The book's later reboot, with a pricetage of more than double of the original (darn that inflation!) sported a a cover with a direct reimagining of its predecessor's artwork. This, however,  somehow feels less powerful than its earlier incarnation.

As for the stories in the book, I think Mary Danby did a fine curator's job, with at least a handful of tales drawing in the readee with their curious titles alone:

This book stands as the centrepiece of the Armada Ghost Book's 15 volume run.

7th Armada Ghost Book

Another book cover I am not overly fond of, especially for a book anthology of ghost stories:

Despite it's rather lacklustre cover, the anthology boasts a few interesting titles...

...and the tome received a more powerfully visual cover for its 1983 reincarnation! 

It is also nice to see the artist get a credit in this issue too:

March Project Catch-up.

March was a big improvement on February in every respect. I managed to get what I had imagined a heavy workload completed in the first couple of weeks of the month. Leaving me with two weeks of free-time. 

Except Nature abhors a vacuum-and a couple of new projects popped up to fill my time. The first was a new one-off zine about that series of spooky stories that haunted many childhoods - The Armada Ghost Book anthologies. This sprung from my recent collection of the books, in all their variants & reincarn­ations. With April looking to be a fairly quiet month for me, I'll try and get this zine out by end of that month. 

Another project popped up our last week too, this one completely out of the blue. That is all I want to say about that at this stage, but I am rather chuffed about it. 

That's all from me today. I've got some long-missed reading to catch up on...

Stuck in the past

These corridors in the office where I work remind me of a aet gor 2001: A Space Odyssey

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!