The perfect valentine's gift for any witch, historian or midnight eccentric who's wiling away of these lock down hours is in need of a life. First published in 1889 there is nary a mention of Hogwarts or that terrifying talking hat.
The journalist and author W. H. Davenport Adams (1828–91) established a reputation for himself as a popular science writer, translator and lexicographer. He also wrote several children's books. In this 1889 work, Adams gives a general introduction to alchemy in Europe and traces the development of magic and alchemy in England from the fourteenth century onwards. Initially the disciplines were persecuted by the Church and met with 'the prejudice of the vulgar', languishing throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Book 1 Adams portrays the English 'magicians' Roger Bacon, whom he considers to have been ahead of his contemporaries; John Dee and William Lilly, astrologists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively; and the English Rosicrucians. Book 2 is a historical account of witchcraft in England and Scotland, from the middle ages to the witch trials of the seventeenth century, and includes a chapter on witchcraft in literature.
Seen here with two of our most popular esoteric gems.

We are so excited to be releasing three new editions of these classic turn of the century detective and ‘master-thief’ novels. This is the Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, a Netfilx series of which is making such a sensation. Here in print, is the original source. And there is the much loved by the surrealist Fantômas, considered a sensational trio with two early films Judex and Les Vampires. And before she wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy wrote Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. There is a link in the bio to assist in your book buying and surreal experience.
 
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar  is the first collection of stories by Maurice Leblanc recounting the adventures of Arsène Lupin, released on 10 June 1907. Containing the first eight stories depicting the character, each was first published in the French magazine Je sais tout the first on 15 July 1905.
 
Fantômas is the first of 32 novels penned from 1911 to 1913 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. The title character is a ruthless thief and killer, a bloodthirsty successor to LeBlanc's Arsène Lupin. The first five novels were made into silent film serials. In Fantômas, the Marquise de Langrune is savagely murdered and Inspector Juve, who is obsessed with capturing Fantômas, arrives to solve the murder.
 
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard is a collection of short stories about Molly Robertson-Kirk, an early fictional female detective. It was written by Baroness Orczy, who is best known as the creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but who also invented two turn-of-the-century detectives in The Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard.
 
First published in 1910, Orczy's female detective was the precursor of the lay sleuth who relies on brains rather than brawn. The book soon became very popular, with three editions appearing in the first year. As well as being one of the first novels to feature a female detective as the main character, Orczy's outstandingly successful police officer preceded her real life female counterparts by a decade.

What better way to spend yet another quarantine with four vintage locked room mysteries. Spiritualists, seances, mayhem, murder, mystery and martinis. There is a link in the bio to make purchasing that much more convenient.


The Shadow World
​Hannibal Hamlin Garland was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. A prolific writer, Garland continued to publish novels, short fiction, and essays well into his 80s.In 1917, he published his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border. The book’s success prompted a sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border, for which Garland won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. 

Garland naturally became quite well known during his lifetime and had many friends in literary circles. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1918."The Shadow World" was first published in 1908 by Hamlin Garland, who was known for his fiction works involving farmers and the hardships of agrarian life, such as "Main-Traveled Roads" (1891), and who in 1929 moved to California from Massachusetts to pursue devotedly a paranormal phenomena, an area of study that he first took interest in 1891.
Mr. Garland had had pointed out, in his Foreword, that "The Shadow World" is a "faithful record" of several psychic phenomena that he observed up to seventeen years before this book's publication. This is pretty much the synopsis for the entire book, but it was done with a novelist's style. The author shared his experiences, in a first-person perspective, during his numerous séances with both "professional" and "amateur" mediums as well as all the noted physical phenomena, such as furniture and other objects movements, etc. It sure is an interesting reading of its timeAfter moving to Hollywood, California, in 1929, he devoted his remaining years to investigating psychic phenomena, an enthusiasm he first undertook in 1891. In his final book, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939), he tried to defend such phenomena and prove the legitimacy of psychic mediums.


The Mystery of the Yellow Room
The Mystery of the Yellow Room is a mystery novel written by French author Gaston Leroux. Considered one of the first locked-room mystery novels, it was first published serially in France in the periodical L'Illustration from September 1907 to November 1907, then in its own right in 1908.
It is the first novel starring fictional reporter Joseph Rouletabille and concerns a complex, and seemingly impossible, crime in which the criminal appears to disappear from a locked room. Leroux provides the reader with detailed, precise diagrams and floor plans illustrating the crime scene. The emphasis of the story is firmly on the intellectual challenge to the reader, who will almost certainly be hard.


The Red House Mystery
A very scarce detective fiction by A.A. Milne, more famous of course as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin. It is one of three such works by Milne, being followed by the murder mystery The Fourth Wall (1928) and the detective drama The Perfect Alibi (1928). The book is a Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone, and drew considerable favourable comment by specialist bibliographer & collector Eric Quayle'And an excellent story it is Anthony Gillingham light-heartedly unravels the mystery, standing at the head of a long, and soon extending queue of humorous sleuths who gave a new and refreshing slant to the business of fictional crime. 'What fun Here's a body ' sums up the style; yet this fantasy, with its brilliant dialogue, finely-drawn scenes from the night-life of the 'twenties and credible characters, hold the reader until the final page is turned.' (The Collector's Book of Detective Fiction, pp.107-108).


The Secret of Lonesome Cove
A corpse emerges on a New England beach, handcuffed to a raft. The whole town seems to want to cover up everything and bury the body as quickly as possible without even bothering to identify it. Our hero, Chester Kent, is determined to investigate the matter...Nothing is as it seems in this completely engrossing mystery yarn that plays out like walking inside a labyrinth! The listener comes up against constant dead-ends during the tale's unfolding, right up to the surprising and satisfying resolution.

Samuel Hopkins Adams was an American writer, best known for his investigative journalism and muckraking exposing public-health injustices. He was a close friend of both the investigative reporter Ray Stannard Baker and District Attorney Benjamin Darrow

Adams was a prolific writer, “Night Bus” (1933), one of his many magazine stories, became the basis for the 1934 film It Happened One Night. He also published a biography of Alexander Woollcott (1945) In the 1920s and 1930s, Adams, under the pseudonym of Warner Fabian, wrote several novels that at the time were considered highly risqué. These titillating works, which mainly featured young women flappers and their trials and tribulations of early adulthood, often became best-sellers avidly read by Jazz Age youth.

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​And so begins our quarantined non-religious-anti-consumerist-Halloween-based-festive season at The House of Pomegranates HQ.

The PDSA Dickin Medal was created in 1943 in the United Kingdom by Maria Dickin to honour the work of animals in World War II. The bronze medallion, bears the words "For Gallantry" and "We Also Serve" on a ribbon of striped green, dark brown, and pale blue. It is awarded to animals that have displayed "conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty while serving or associated with any branch of the Armed Forces or Civil Defence Units". The award is commonly referred to as "the animals' Victoria Cross".
 
The medal was awarded 54 times between 1943 and 1949 – to 32 pigeons, 18 dogs, 3 horses, and a ship's cat – to acknowledge actions of gallantry or devotion during the Second World War and subsequent conflicts.