Furry Paws

Trying to work on an introduction to one of my favourite reads.

Gardening

I finally managed to clear the chicken coop from the garden today! 

Whilst I was dismantling and burning the construction, Mrs E busied herself by adding a small wildlife pond to the garden:

The oustanding plant of the moment has to be our cherry tree, both in is large and bosai forms:

Haunting Ghost Stories

I picked up this hard cover book this week for just £3.59, and that included p&p!

As well as containing some classic ghostly tales, the book contains some fascinating illustrations, in colour as well as black and white.

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