The Great God Pan & The White People by Arthur Machen - Lettered Edition

PRE-ORDER PRICE: $1950 
PUBLICATION PRICE: $2150 

Among the foundational works of supernatural fiction, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and “The White People” venture beyond reality as we know it, and into something older, stranger, and infinitely more dangerous.

In The Great God Pan, an experimental procedure intended to lift the veil separating the human mind from the unseen world leaves a young woman permanently altered. Years later, a mysterious and beautiful woman named Helen Vaughan appears in London, leaving ruin, madness, and death in her wake. As a group of men begin to trace the strange events surrounding her, they uncover a connection to that long-ago experiment and a horror that challenges the boundaries between the natural and supernatural.

In “The White People,” Machen turns inward, framing his tale around the diary of a young girl initiated by her nurse into a secret world of folklore, ritual, and forbidden knowledge. Written in the guileless language of childhood, her account grows steadily more transgressive as familiar woods and hills give way to an ancient landscape of strange ceremonies, hidden languages, and forces she cannot fully comprehend.

An early version of the opening chapter of The Great God Pan appeared in the literary magazine The Whirlwind in 1890 before Machen expanded the work for book publication in 1894. Its appearance caused an immediate sensation. Critics attacked its suggestions of sexuality, paganism, and moral corruption, with one contemporary reviewer condemning it as “a perfectly abominable story.” The scandal nevertheless helped make the book Machen’s first major success, and its reputation would change dramatically in the decades that followed. Today, The Great God Pan is regarded as a landmark of weird and supernatural fiction. Of it, H. P. Lovecraft wrote that “no one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds.”

Written several years later, “The White People” first appeared in Horlick’s Magazine in 1904 and was subsequently collected in Machen’s The House of Souls in 1906. Where The Great God Pan shocked its earliest readers, “The White People” achieved its power through suggestion and restraint, withholding explanation even as its sense of dread deepens. H. P. Lovecraft considered it among the greatest works of horror, praising it for its atmosphere and artistic achievement, while critic E. F. Bleiler would later call it “probably the finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature.” Its strange vocabulary and occult mythology would also leave a direct mark on Lovecraft’s own fiction, including his use of Machen’s “Aklo” in “The Dunwich Horror.”

This edition marks the first time The Great God Pan and “The White People” have been presented following a comparison with Machen’s surviving manuscripts. The texts were prepared by Henry Wessells, a longtime scholar of Arthur Machen whose work includes Arthur Machen: The Norman Hickman Collection, a descriptive catalogue of an important collection of Machen manuscripts. His examination of the original materials has allowed previously omitted text to be recovered and restored, offering readers a closer view of the works as Machen originally conceived them. 

More than a century after their publication, The Great God Pan and “The White People” remain masterpieces, revealing the terror that awaits when the veil of the ordinary is lifted and humanity glimpses what was never meant to be seen.

The limited edition of The Great God Pan & The White People by Arthur Machen is presented in two states: Numbered Edition and Lettered Edition.

LETTERED EDITION

• 6.7 x 9.5 inches trim size.
• Limited to 26 copies.
• Signed by Flora McLachlan and Henry Wessells.
• Eight stone lithographs by Flora McLachlan, tipped in by hand.
• Quarter goatskin binding with hand-marbled paper sides by Claire Guillot.
• Single blind-blocked rule marking the edge of the leather.
• Head and tail bands handmade in leather.
• Printed letterpress by Scott Vile on his Heidelberg Cylinder on Handmade Twinrocker paper.
• Handbound by Jace Graf in Elgin, Texas.
• Endsheets are Hahnemühle Bugra.
• Housed in a clamshell enclosure with cloth-covered boards and velour-lined trays.
• Includes new afterwords by Henry Wessells.
• Includes reproductions of a rarely seen unpublished frontispiece etching by Herbert Jones for The Great God Pan, and two leaves from Machen's autograph manuscripts.
• Letterpress bookmark with all pre-orders.

Published editions may differ slightly from mockups and prototype designs.
Illustrations © 2024 by Flora McLachlan.