Great Reckonings In Little Rooms

We received an email earlier this month from a writer for the British magazine Dolls House and Miniature Scene who is working on a forthcoming article about the use of dollhouses in fiction. We’re told that John's The Spell Of The Sorcerer's Skull will be mentioned in the piece, in reference to the Childermass Clock:

...In the bottom part of a clock of this sort, you usually saw a pendulum behind a square glass door. But in this case, what you saw was a dollhouse room. It was made to look like the parlor of a well-to-do Victorian house of the 1870s or '80s. Everything was done very carefully in miniature: when Johnny squatted down and peered into the shadow-box room, he saw a red Turkish carpet on the floor and an oval antique table with a green plush cover. On the table were an oil lamp, a pair of glasses, and a Bible. The wall to the left of the fireplace had a built-in bookcase, and before it stood a doll that was made to look like and old man. It had a silky gray beard, a black suit, and a black string tie. The doll appeared to be studying the bookcase, and its hand was stretched out in the act of taking a book from the shelf [11-2].

Excellent!