"A flourishing lushness of cryptograms."
—Jean Ray, Malpertuis

~ Amorphous Apparitions ~

Frontispiece from Guardian’s Mystery.

"Only a ghostly shadow, but without that shadow, ironic nuance would be lost.” —W. B. Carnochan, Gibbon’s Solitude

Long before the film Snakes on a Plane came this illustration in Pall Mall magazine (1896) of snakes on a train.  The caption reads: "The ground was alive with snakes."

"You have to be able to laugh at anything and everything.  The statues of the Buddha all smile, and not without reason, whilst the Christian saints are all bathed in tears.  If people would smile more often, there would probably be fewer wars."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"As one goes through it, one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it." —R. D. Laing (via Clifford Pickover)

Bibliomancer Craig Conley turns his attention to a decidedly modern bit of marginalia—Google Books' scanned images of author portraits as found in the frontispieces of Victorian-era books.  From his introduction: "In old books, frontispieces were typically protected by a sheet of translucent onionskin.  So thorough is the Google Books scanning process that even this page of onionskin is scanned.  The figure in the plate beneath the onionskin—'beyond the veil,' as it were—emerges as from a foggy otherworld.  The frontispieces were never meant to be seen this way."

However, the eyes of Conley have seen them such, and he presents here an entire book of paired portraits, veiled and unveiled.  The presentation evokes "necromancy by proxy," as Conley puts it, the scanning machine taking up the role of the crystal ball.  Quotes on ghosts, shadows, mist, and nothingness culled from Conley's tireless research accompany each diptych.  Ephemera of ephemera, The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine is an unexpectedly rewarding and transporting read.

—Clint Marsh (editor of Swami Panchadasi's Clairvoyance and Occult Powers: A Lost Classic), from his review in The Pamphleteer