For those who linger in museum halls or lose themselves in old bookshops. You are always welcome here.
A collection of richly illustrated volumes exploring the strange, the overlooked, and the wondrous.
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The featured volume
FORBIDDEN BOOKS
Thirty histories of dangerous books and lost libraries. The grimoires include the Key of Solomon, copied by hand for centuries. The Voynich Manuscript has resisted generations of cryptographers. Alexandria, Baghdad, and Nalanda were lost to fire and conquest. A Michigan chemistry professor bound eighty-six arsenic wallpaper samples into a warning volume, and its five surviving copies are still handled with special precautions.
The illustrated anthologies
Classic supernatural fiction by the great Victorian and Edwardian writers, each tale introduced and illustrated.
Classic Victorian Tales for Cold Winter Nights
Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. F. Benson, Amelia B. Edwards, Charlotte Riddell, Jerome K. Jerome, and more.
Eight classic ghost stories for Christmas, each with an introduction and full-page illustrations.
Classic Tales of Botanical and Fungal Terror
Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. G. Wells, E. Nesbit, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgson, and more.
Ten classic tales of carnivorous plants, creeping vines, and fungus, each with an introduction and full-page illustrations.
From the plates
A few of the full-page illustrations from the books.
The illustrated histories
Folklore, forgotten history, and natural history, illustrated throughout, each volume with a bibliography.
Prophets, Utopias, and the Strange Congregations of History
Thirty religious movements, communes, and prophets, from the Shakers and the Millerites to Heaven's Gate.
Joanna Southcott and her sealed box, Cyrus Teed and his hollow earth, the Oneida Community, Cao Dai, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the cargo cults of the Pacific. The book looks at who joined, what they believed, and what became of them.
More than forty creatures that science has doubted, denied, and in a few cases confirmed.
Lake monsters, phantom cats, sea serpents, Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Mngwa, the Bunyip, and the Wendigo, in six chapters, with the sightings, the explanations, and what is still unexplained. A regional appendix lists them by continent.
Thresholds, Crossings, and Places In Between
Short essays on thresholds, crossings, and the places people pass through without stopping.
Attics and cloakrooms, corpse roads and desire paths, watchtowers, unfinished bridges, abandoned railway platforms, and forgotten tollbooths, with the folklore and history of each. Five parts and a bibliography.
Hidden Orders, Secret Rites, and the Oaths That Bound Them
Twenty-five secret societies across some thirty-five centuries, from the rites at Eleusis to the Propaganda Due lodge in 1981.
The Templars, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Hellfire Club, Golden Dawn, and Skull and Bones are here, with the Carbonari, the Black Hand, the Triads, and the Poro and Sande societies of West Africa. Each entry keeps the documented record apart from the legend.
A Cabinet of Botanical Wonders
More than thirty-five plants that changed history, each with its own illustration.
Tulip mania, orchid fever, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, smuggled tea, carnivorous plants, foxglove and willow bark, hemlock and nightshade, and the sacred plants used to alter the mind, in seven chapters.
Six of the books come in hardcover: Christmas Ghost Stories, Deadly Blooms, Curious Cults, Cryptids, Entangled, and Liminal Spaces.
Choose a hardcoverAbout the Library
Library Mirabilis is the work of A. R. Wells, who writes the non-fiction and selects, introduces, and edits the anthologies. The non-fiction draws on folklore, forgotten histories, and natural wonders, and closes each book with a bibliography.
The anthologies gather classic supernatural fiction from Victorian and Edwardian writers, restored from early printings. Every volume is illustrated throughout in a Victorian engraving style.
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