George Hunt Williamson, contactee

Found on the endpapers of Secret Places of the Lion by George Hunt Williamson (Neville Spearman, London 1963)- a  handwritten  note by  the publisher Neville Armstrong (1914- 2008). He was one of the last of the gentlemen publishers, producing books mirroring his own whims and tastes - such subjects as flying saucers, the occult, wrestling, reincarnation, spiritualism, spies, sex, cooking, chess and Spain. In 1955 he began his own imprint, 'Neville Spearman Publishers'. George Hunt Williamson has a good Wikipedia entry. He is described there as a flying saucer contactee, channel, and metaphysical author who came to prominence in the 1950s. His dates were 1926-1986 and  he was also known as Michael d'Obrenovic and Brother Philip. 'Contactees'  are people who claim to have experienced contact with extraterrestrials.

Nevile Armstrong/ Spearman writes:-

George Hunt Williamson('Ric')  was one of the original witnesses to the desert sighting of a UFO by George Adamski 'Flying Saucers Have Landed.' A world bestseller and years ahead of the phoney Erich von Daniken.

 Ric was a personal friend. Many strange things happened when in his company. I recall a wine bottle in my cottage in Upper Hartfield which refused to empty!  After an evening's talk which included my wife, the bottle was still half full. This was a minor happening.

 He also wrote a very strange book, Saint of the Andes. It was a monastery inhabited by  strange people – monks, I think – to which many people& expeditions set out to find. All were unsuccessful.

He was one of my most extraordinary authors but entirely sincere. 

Neville Armstrong 28th March 2004

Locked Room Murders - 20 Solutions

From Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (Ferret Fantasy, London 1979)

Major discussions on the subject of locked room murders are to be found in Carr's The Hollow Man, Rawson's Death from a Top Hat and Holmes' Nine by Nine.

There appear to be some 20 different ways in which a locked room can be breached.

Analysis of solutions

1 Accident.

2 Suicide.

3 Remote control – poison gas or impelled to do so with his own hands.

4 Mechanical and other devices.

5 Animal.

6 Outside the agency made to look like inside agency. E.g. dagger fired through window.

7 Victim killed earlier but made to appear alive later.

8 Presumed dead but not killed until later, e.g., by the first person to enter the room.

9 Victim wounded outside, dies inside.

10 Turning key, bolt, catch, etc, from outside with pliers, string, etc

11 Unhinging and rehinging door or window.

12 Taking out and replacing windowpane.

13 Acrobatic manoeuvre,.

14 Door locked or wedged on outside. Key replaced or bolt thrown after re-entrance.

15 Door locked on outside. Key returned before re-entrance.

16 Other methods of gimmicking doors, windows etc.,

17 Secret passages, sliding panels, etc.,

18 Murderer still in room when entrance forced.

19 Alibi provided while murder committed in an apparently  
guarded area.
  
20 Other impersonation stunts

  A further mystery is the price and rarity of the much enlarged edition from Crossover Press 1992. A copy on Canadian Amazon (often a home for awesome prices) at $10000 seems to have now vanished...

Musical Sand in China

Taklamakan Desert, Khotan

Joseph Offord Musical Sand in China published in
Nature, Volume 95, Issue 2368, pp. 65-66 (1915).

Among the immense mass of ancient Chinese records and manuscripts brought back from the buried cities and caves of ancient Khotan, in Central Asia, and now stored in the British Museum, is one called the Tun-Huang-Lu, a topographical description of part of Khotan itself. This little geography was written in the time of the Tang dynasty, in the seventh century, but probably contains matter from earlier authors.

Among the specially interesting natural phenomena of the country described in the Tun-Huang-Lu is a large sandhill, which at certain times gave forth strange noises, so much so that a temple in its vicinity was entitled the “Thunder Sound Temple.'
The geographer, speaking specially of the sandhill, says:-"The hill of sounding sand stretches 80 li east and west and 40 li north and south. It reaches a height of 500 ft. The whole mass is entirely constituted of pure sand. In the height of summer the sand gives out sounds of itself, and if trodden by men or horses, the noise is heard 10 li away.  at festivals people clamber up and rush down again in a body,  which causes the sand to give a loud rumbling sound like thunder.Yet when you look at it next morning the hill is just as steep as before."

 Mr Lionel Giles, from whose translations of the Tun-Huang-Lu these extracts are made,  mentions that this sounding sandhill is referred to in another old Chinese book, the Wu Tai Shih.

Found reprinted in Strange Planet, A Sourcebook of Unusual Geological Facts (Sourcebook Project Maryland 1975). Compiled by William Corliss, this is from Volume E-1. From the amazing library of Jeremy Beadle MBE (1948 -2008)

Gadsby

Ernest Vincent Wright. Gadsby. A Story of Over 50.000 Words Without Using the Letter E. Los Angeles, 1939.

A literary curiosity and a legendary rarity. The author E.V. Wright (1872-1939) wrote Gadsby in five and a half months, on a typewriter with the letter 'e' tied down, "so that none of that vowel might slip in, accidentally". He finished his work about the middle of February 1937, and the typescript was illustrated in The Los Angeles Times on 24 March. After seeking a publisher for 2 years Wright finally settled on a vanity press (Wetzel) in LA. It is said that the publication of Gadsby coincided exactly with the author's death on 7 October 1939; however a copy is known with an inscription dated two months earlier and the copyright-deposit copy was received five months later.

From the introduction:

"People as a rule will not stop to realize what a task such an attempt actually is. As I wrote along, in long-hand at first, a whole army of little E's gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called upon. But gradually as they saw me writing on and on, without even noticing them, they grew uneasy; and, with excited whisperings amongst themselves, began hopping up and riding on my pen, looking down constantly for a chance to drop off into some word; for all the world like seabirds perched, watching for a passing fish! But when they saw that I had covered 138 pages of typewriter size paper, they slid onto the floor, walking sadly away, arm in arm; but shouting back: "You certainly must have a hodge-podge of a yarn there without *us*! Why, man! We are in every story ever written *hundreds of thousands of times! This is the first time we ever were shut out!.."

A book much admired by the Pataphysicians and Oulipans especially Perec and Queneau who both searched for copies. The rarity is due to one of those warehouse fires that frequently occur in the history of unfindable books (Nabokov's Despair, Beckett's Murphy, Moby Dick and Forster's Alexandria to name a few -- enemy action is also a great rarity creator...) Wetzel's novelty warehouse went up in a mighty blaze (a fireman died) along with most copies of the ill fated novel, it was never reviewed and only kept alive by the efforts of a few avant garde French intellectuals and assorted connoisseurs of the odd, weird and zany.

It has been reprinted this century. Perec wrote an e-less book 'La Disparition' (Paris 1969). Possibly in honour of Gadsby it was also 50,000 words. These books with grammatical restrictions are now known 'Lipograms'. Craig Brown's recent book One on One - 101 chance meetings (Proust/ Joyce etc.,) each described in exactly 1001 words is a late Oulipo influenced work, so the tradition goes on...
Perec's work was translated into English sans e's as A Void by Gilbert Adair. Try writing just a paragraph without it - it is horribly hard and you must continually look for odd ways of saying things...[From our sister site Bookride with a few alterations and additions, they also have much on its value - however it is a hard book to find and a hard book to sell especially without a jacket.]