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Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Iain Spence on library messages from the dead

 

Unsplash photo by  Iñaki del Olmo 

In a recent blog post about the Hilaritas Press podcast on Aldous Huxley, I mentioned the incident in which Aldous Huxley after his death allegedly used a book in the couple's personal library to communicate with his widow. The incident is described in Robert Anton Wilson's first Cosmic Trigger book, and I was a bit sorry that Huxley biographer Nicholas Murray wasn't asked about it. (I emailed Murray after listening to the podcast. No reply.)

After my blog post, RAW fan and writer Iain Spence emailed me and pointed out he has written a whole article about mysterious library doings and famous authors. If you read the piece, you'll get a more detailed account of the Huxley incident and also read an amazing anecdote about C.S. Lewis. "C.S. Lewis and his study could be a strange place to visit," Spence remarks, and it seems difficult to disagree. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Tom, thank you for posting up the link to my article.
I’m not sure if the link above is free, so here’s an alternative address which ought to evade the annoying Medium 3 article limit:

https://baos.pub/haunted-libraries-5341cfdc1923?sk=8ce017ae125dc687b4d85d8cc7748291

I usually clear my browsing history if I get stuck on their limit. They don’t seem to stop people with a floating IP.

Keith Rhinehart (who carried out the book test for Laura Huxley) was using an old technique which goes back to the cross correspondence scene. I seem to remember that Pamela Glenconner dates the technique back to the 1st World War, but I could be wrong. She wrote a book on the topic, The Earthen Vessel, now out of copyright:

https://archive.org/download/earthenvesselvol00glenuoft/earthenvesselvol00glenuoft_bw.pdf

The beetles story (which turns up in Ms Glenconner’s book) brings a chuckle to most readers, although the background to it is rather sad and poignant.

Iain Spence