Salisbury Cathedral prepares for 750th anniversary

One of the stories we are watching this year is the 750th anniversary of the Cathedral of Saint Mary, better known simply as Salisbury Cathedral. Longtime fans will recall Bellairs used this iconic church – with its 400-foot tall spire – as inspiration for one of the massive buildings on the Zebulon Windrow estate in New York, as seen in The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost. The Salisbury Journal has a story about some of the events happening this year to commemorate the event.

Happy New Year 2008

Here’s a little something we picked up today off the wire: Public Domain Day, the day when a whole year’s worth of copyrights enter the public domain. In countries using the “life plus 70 years” term, works by authors who died in 1937 enter the public domain, including another familiar face, H. P. Lovecraft. 

A few celebrations of note this year:

Review: House "Addictive...I Couldn't Put It Down"

Book review: The House with a Clock in its Walls

Overhanging Second Stories

We found this kinda-sorta review of The Face in the Frost a number of years ago. We wondered about it then and – as we clean out some of the darker corners of our email inbox – we wonder about it again now. We thought maybe you’d like to wonder about it with us. Here goes:

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

The Grim Blogger reported earlier this week that a clip for an upcoming H.P. Lovecraft documentary is making the rounds online.

N-QB3: Chessmen on the Move!?

There are efforts to move the famed Lewis Chessmen from their perch in the Europe AD 1000-1540 gallery at the British Museum back to their native Scotland, where they were found in the early 1800s off the Bay of Uig on the Isle of Lewis.

The fight for the pallid dwarves has been long-running but recent activities have brought the story back into the news: 

The Legend of the Poinsettia

A bit of a Christmas story written by Brad Strickland and performed by the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, Dec. 22 and 23, 2007:

Now, it came to pass in the days when the Wise Men were journeying, yea, even unto Bethlehem, that they came bearing gifts. Balthasar bore unto the babe a gift of gold; and Caspar bore unto the babe a gift of frankincense; and Melchior bore unto the babe a gift of myrrh…and Irving bore unto the babe a gift of a poinsettia.

Diaphanous Sprites of the Upper Air

You don’t see references to Snodrog from The Pedant and the Shuffly often but here’s one: a ghost made of bed sheets in a M.R. James story reminds someone of the Flimsies “flying out into the night to do his [Snodrog’s] bidding and smother people in their sleep.” 

Something About Amazing Stories

Blogger Madripoor_rose posted the titles of fiction pieces from the July 1986 edition of Amazing Stories - in which Brad Strickland’s short piece, "The Winds Of Oberon," was printed - and asks:

Sorcerers vs. Wizards?

Something caught our eye about the definition of a sorcerer verses a wizard, albeit in a D&D setting:

The Chessmen of Death

We’re not comic book experts but this bit caught our eye. One of the stories in the Wonder Woman comic from September/October 1952 (#55) was entitled "The Chessmen of Doom". It appears to have been rewritten as The Chessmen of Death! for issue #208 (Oct. 1973). The only bit of story we've ever found is that the Chequerians play chess with entire planets as pieces.

Fraternizing with Alpha Delta Phi

The third in an occasional series about where John Bellairs lived during his time in Chicago.

No, John Bellairs was not a member of any social or professional fraternal organization, from what we can tell.  Yet, one may ask why he once lived in a University of Chicago fraternity house.

Something About American Wizards

We have a LiveJournal user looking for "American Wizards of the fantasy type", originating from literature or wherever else.  The blogger has started off the list with some familiar names and we're in good company:

48 Years for an Autograph?

This is easily one of the strangest stories about John that we’ve heard: someone uses the checkout card from the back of a library book (presumably owned at one point by the University of Chicago) as a bookmark and finds John Bellairs checked the book out on November 10, 1959 – 48 years ago yesterday.

 
Adding to the mystique is that it was an Algernon Blackwood anthology, something we can easily see John enjoying (our favorite of his tales is Secret Worship - we do recommend it, just not after midnight...).

Researching Bellairs the Boy Scout

In a 1990 article with the Haverhill Eagle-Tribune, when asked about his childhood, John Bellairs noted he was somewhat of a loner until he made some "lifelong friends in the Boy Scouts."

We know John was a member of Marshall Boy Scout Troop 112 in 1951, and some of his Scouting experiences snuck into his books over the years. Take the story of Johnny Dixon, also a member of Troop 112: he goes off to Scout camp and also meets a lifelong friend in Byron Ferguson [The Mummy, the Will and the Crypt]. Camp Chocorua was probably influenced by his attendance at Camp T. Ben Johnston on Sherman Lake outside Augusta, Michigan, itself about 8 miles west of Battle Creek.