Chief among these, perhaps, are the members of the Arthur Machen Society. This Society was formed early in the spring of 1948 by Nathan Van Patten, Vincent Starrett, Paul Jordan-Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Montgomery Evans, Robert Hillyer (all names that will long be associated with Machen) as well as August Derleth, Joseph Vodrey, Ben Abramson, James T. Babb, William P. Wreden, Frederick Coykendall, Cyril Clemens, Gilbert Seldes, Ashton Stevens and a score of comparative newcomers in the great society of the admirers of Arthur Machen.
This is an informal group which hopes, in the words of its president, Mr. Van Patten, to stimulate an interest in Arthur Machen’s work. There is to be an exchange of information and privately printed Machen material, with possibly an annual or quarterly publication.
In the summer of 1948 Alfred Knopf issued Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, the largest and the best collection of Machen’s stories ever published. Edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, it included a reprint of Hillyer’s Atlantic article. The book was reviewed with interest by Orville Prescott and John Dickinson Carr in the Times. The Nation’s reviewer thought the atmosphere of the tales did not “compensate for his failure to explain the inexplicable.” Mr. Knopf’s ad-men, applying modern techniques, exhorted readers to “remember Machen, it rhymes with crackin’.”
The Arthur Machen Society has already begun to make good its promise to stimulate interest in Arthur Machen:
Mr. Joseph Kelly Vodrey of Canton, Ohio, a specialist in Machen bibliography, has printed and distributed to the members of the Society a booklet: There Are Some Who Mourn, written by Nathan Van Patten.
Mr. Van Patten, a distinguished professor of bibliography at Stanford University and dean of Machenites, has printed a handsome booklet, limited to fifty copies, of Arthur Machen’s The Gray’s Inn Coffee House.
There will be others. At long last something is being done to right the wrongs of which Mr. Cabell wrote so many years ago.
EPILOGUE
One might devote a great amount of time and give considerable thought to the final pages of a book about Arthur Machen. It is not easy for anyone who admires Machen to leave off talking or writing about him.