Hieroglyphic Tales by Horace Walpole (1785)

This literary delight came to me completely serendipitously. The power went out in our library for 40 minutes. A student was looking for The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. With no computer to look for a call number in the catalog, I ventured to use my librarian skills in still locating this book. Sooo... Walpole was a British author from the 18th century (looked that up in the print version of the Dictionary of Literary Biography), so in the early part of the PR's. I guess I could have looked up the call number range in the PR section of the cataloging classification books, but this student seemed to be in a hurry, so we just went wandering in the PR's.  I knew it had to be an early range of PR's, but probably not in the same range as Shakespeare, and I knew approximately where he was (turns out Walpole was in PR3291-3785 - 17th and 18th centuries)  So I tried a few sections, following the alphabet until I got to W's. Now mind you, it was dark in the shelves that were not close to windows, so we used the light of our cell phones. Walpole was in a dark section of the shelves, so I had to pull out handfuls of books and take them to the one emergency light in the area. I found Walpole, but not Castle of Otranto. (The name Otranto seems familiar to me. It took me a while, but then I remembered that a Latvian poetry book had that name. Had to look up the author - Andrejs Eglitis. Will have to look up the book and see if it refers to Walpole or the city in Italy.) Though I didn't find the book for the student, I was proud I found the right area. And there among Walpole's books, mostly books about Walpole, was this delightful little book, printed in 1993 and whimsically illustrated by Jill McElmurry.

This book is appropriately prefaced by a quote from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It contains seven absurd tales that the author himself describes as: "...they are mere whimsical trifles, written chiefly for private entertainment, and for private amusement half a dozen copies only are printed. They deserve at most to be considered as an attempt to vary the stale and beaten class of stories and novels, which, though works of invention, are almost always devoid of imagination....that there should have been so little fancy, so little variety, and so little novelty, in writings which the imagination is fettered by no rules, and by no obligation of speaking truth. There is infinitely more invention in history, which has no merit if devoid of truth, than in romances and novels, which pretend to none." (from the author's postscript) There was also a substantial editor's note at the beginning explaining Walpole and his effect on literature. His Castle of Otranto is considered the first gothic novel, so I will have to check that out.

Not all the tales caught my fancy, nor did I really understand them all, as they were full of absurd names, references that there was no way I would understand, but mostly I found them fun. "A New Arabian Night's Entertainment" was a variation on the spinning a good tale to save one's life story. "The Peach in Brandy - A Milesian Tale"was quite gruesome, but was written for friends, so maybe they thought it was funny. I think my favorite was "Mi Li. A Chinese Fairy Tale" where it is foretold that a prince will be unhappy unless he marries a princess whose name is the same as her father's dominions. The conditions of the foretelling are muddled over the years, so the prince goes looking for the wrong bride all over the world. The tales are full of little commentaries, like in this one: "...for it is death in China to mislead the heir of the crown through ignorance. To do it knowingly is no crime, any more than in other countries." or "What could She do? Nothing but what a Woman always does in critical cases -- that is nothing." (OK sexist, but could apply to anyone.) I also really like "A True Love Story" - with a twist, of course.

I love being a librarian!