What's Ticking in The Walls

1. Honoring Howard Hall (For Some Reason)

This year marks the centenary of Howard Hall, the first dormitory on the University of Notre Dame campus to incorporate Gothic architecture. As a sophomore, John Bellairs lived here without a roommate during the 1956-57 school year. Bellairs also famously revealed to the then-current residents during the 1958-59 school year that "THERE IS NO HOWARD HALL!". Hmmm. I wonder why we celebrate anything if it doesn't exist. Never mind.

2. The Maine Attraction

The tiny Maine island of Isle au Haut received mention in last month's Boston Globe (June 13). Lindsay Crudele wrote how the island is recruiting new residents to join its tiny population:

If you have, for example, ever dreamed of escaping to life on a remote island, much of what you imagine will be true. It will often be quiet, you will live surrounded by nature, and you can grow your own food.

 

But there are other practical realities, too: a big hardware store may be a boat trip away, winter is long, and a medical center nowhere to be found. This is the case on Isle au Haut, one of 15 unbridged islands off the coast of Maine, from where the island launched a digital campaign this spring to recruit new residents to join its tiny population.

The far-flung island appears in the spooky tales of John Bellairs, who set his Edward Gorey-illustrated story The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull in the island fog. And rooted in a real-life happening, its mythology includes the Royal Tar, a shipwrecked circus ship that set its doomed animal cargo afloat in the island's waters in 1836. Rumors of shipwrecked giant snakes surviving ashore exist in local record. There are no giant snakes, said Kendra Chubbock, who owns a shop on the island, but she said there are eels in the mile-long pond that sometimes hosts a triathlon. The island is home to artists and writers who find the setting uniquely imaginative, but islanders say they love the adventure of everyday life, too.

(And kudos for mentioning Spell, too.)

3. Fun With References

I cracked a smile thumbing through Atlas of Cursed Places (2015) by Olivier Le Carrer and its first chapter about Château de Montségur, the former fortress of the Cathars, a one-time Christian movement between the 12th and 14th centuries. The Catholic Church denounced the group, commonly known as Albigensians (after the French city Albi, where the movement began), as heretics and eradicated the sect by 1350. The text:

What should we make of the site's architecture, of the spectacular alignment of the sun's rays at solstice time, as if its architects had wanted the castle to function as a kind of astronomical calendar? And doesn't its floor plan reflect the constellation of Boötes, with the donjon representing the star Arcturus?

Bellairs briefly mentioned the Albigensians in his first book, Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies (1966), and the star Arcturus was a significant plot point in his last book, The Mansion in the Mist (1992). So now, of course, I'm interested in the ruins of this old place.

4. Proof Readers

Russell Bernard, our forum's resident book collector expert, shared some photos of an uncorrected proof edition of The Lamp From the Warlock's Tomb (1988). The edition has the wraparound Edward Gorey dustjacket covering a light blue book with release information on the front cover – information such as release date, trade and library issue prices, and ISBNs. Bernard says the proof includes an "Attention Reader" page (announcing this is not a finished book), and 145 numbered pages of story. The front suggests the finished book will be 176 pages. Bernard is correct in saying the published book had 168 pages, which got me thinking:

1. Was Dial just guessing with 176 pages?
2. Did the original manuscript come closer to 176, and then editors found a way to trim eight pages?
3. How many uncorrected errors remain in the 23 pages not included in the 145-page proof?

Has anyone ever gone line-by-line with proofs and final editions? Discuss.  Go crazy.

5. As The Romans Do --

An article about Roman emperors' outrageously lavish dinner parties caught my eye. It mentions Nero - the subject of a lost Elizabethan play, which was the subject of Bellairs's aborted doctoral thesis - and his Domus Aurea. Bellairs mentioned Nero's golden house in Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies (1966) and can only imagine what it looked like.

Nero's notorious Golden House palace in Rome featured "dining rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens." Remarkably, some of this building survives including some of these dining rooms and possibly even the revolving one, the remains of which might have now been identified in Rome.

The rest of the article provides details of ancient Rome's delights and debaucheries. It also reminds me of Brewster's throwaway line in The Trolley of Yesterday (1989), which discusses Justinian's time as emperor: "Boy, did they have parties then!"

6. Dee-Lightful

I stumbled upon a 2021 article by Mark Milligan at Heritage Daily about John Dee's spirit mirror. Dee gets a few mentions in Bellairs's books, notably, the image Lewis Barnavelt finds during the events of The House with a Clock in its Walls (1973 - the book, not the movie). The so-called mirror is really a piece of obsidian on display at London's British Museum, and the article gives its surprising backstory:

Researchers have long suspected that the obsidian mirror originated from the Aztecs of Mexico, however, no historical records or contemporary accounts was able to prove the provenance.

A study published in the journal Antiquity has now solved the mystery, using a geochemical analysis and X-rays to measure the composition of the mirror. The team studied four objects in the British Museum – John Dee's mirror, two other Aztec mirrors, and a polished rectangular obsidian slab, where researchers compared the unique 'fingerprints' to trace the origins of the material.

This revealed that all the objects were made from Mexican obsidian exploited by the Aztecs, and that John Dee's mirror originated from near Pachuca in the present-day state of Hidalgo. During the Aztec period, Pachuca was overrun by the Aztec Triple Alliance between AD 1427 and AD 1430, but would later be conquered with the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1528.

To the Aztecs, obsidian had spiritual significance. It could be used as part of medicinal practices, could act as a shield against bad spirits, and capture souls on its reflective surface. One deity, Tezcatlipoca, is even named "smoking mirror" and often depicted wearing circular obsidian mirrors, as symbols of premonition and power.

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