Bob Dylan, who can usually be found performing live somewhere in the world at any given moment, found his caravan passing through Germany the week before last, making camp in Frankfurt just as the world's largest trade fair for books was also setting up its tents and booths. 

Dylan was surprised to find himself in the middle of a “publishing convention" and that the booksellers were holding parties in his hotel “all night”.

Sharing this information on Twitter, he failed to say whether he found this a pleasant development or a menace to his preparations, but did mention that he “didn't know there were so many book publishers in the world.” 

Finding himself amid the book folk though, he plunged in to try and find the people from Crystal Lake, purveyors of eerie and sinister fiction, to offer his congratulations for their publishing one of his favourite books, Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan.

He was unable to locate them amid the dealers, agents and people trying to get off with each other, and so presumably returned to the road, where a date with Stuttgart's Porsche Arena awaited. 

The Great God Pan was published in 1894, and deals with sex-tinged occult happenings in Welsh woods and their unsettling consequences, but came out just as the trial of Oscar Wilde turned the tide of public opinion against anything that could be labelled deviant. 

This and other setbacks, including his wife dying of cancer, caused Machen
to be “plunged into breakdown, wandering the London streets like a character from his own fiction”, according to the Friends of Arthur Machen website. 

But then another inexplicable transformation occurred, and through his involvement with a touring theatre company, Machen's previously introvert – and then despairing – personality mutated, and he emerged as a “bon-vivant and raconteur, extrovert and man thoroughly at ease with the world.”

Following the 1914 battle of Mons in the first world war he also managed to write one of the greatest ever ghost stories, The Bowmen, in which British troops about to be overwhelmed by German opponents are saved by the supernatural assistance of longbowmen from the battle of Agincourt. 

Shortly after publication people were already believing that these spectral archers had really appeared, and books and journalism on the subject followed.

Even today the story is still often told as something that “happened”.  

Machen's star then rose and he enjoyed a bit of a celebrity byline writing for The Evening News, but found that even the upper levels of the noble profession of journalism disguised the sort of trapdoors more suited to a haunted house. 

“In 1919 he lost his position with The Evening News,” reports the Friends site, "when he published on his own initiative an obituary of his former editor, Lord Alfred Douglas.”

But “Douglas had not in fact died” and unfortunately for the writer, “took exception to some of what Machen had written about him.” 

The undead, the Bowmen of Mons, a wandering troubador finding himself in a strange location – all spookily appropriate for Halloween.

Buy The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (includes The Bowmen)

Book club: has a celebrity ever wandered into your trade fair in search of answers you cannot provide? Unnerving appearances please, to info@strong-words.co.uk 

A glowing endorsement...

Dear Ed, I just wanted to tell you that Strong Words is still awesome. I think I've been subscribed for nearly 3 years. It was a wise decision. Kind regards,

Jonathan. 

This is an example of the kind of sophisticate you'll be among should you choose to subscribe – the sort of person who can compress profound insight and wisdom into a few brief and clear sentences. Hopefully this will sway all doubters towards signing up immediately. Ed


On the unexpected appearance of the word “wankers" on the cover of the book Paper of Wreckage, recently published in the US (as discussed in last week's Book Club)...

Dear Ed
Wankers. Americans have no clue what this means, hence it being on the front cover of the book. It just sounds good. Secondly, “bad” language is so passé now. They’re just words. Who cares? I even heard “cunt” used in a BBC drama recently. BBC!!! As long as the use isn’t excessive (yes you, Danny Dyer) there shouldn’t be a problem with it. The words are expressive and are even helpful in pain management (scientific fact). For context, I’m a 72 year old woman who spent twenty years of her life living with a man and two sons. I learnt to hold my own. Enjoying your writings. Regards,  

Sue B. 

It's certainly one of the trickier words to incorporate into daily usage Sue, so it's good to see the BBC earning their licence fee by making an effort to do so. By the way, I'm not surprised you're not shocked – it's my belief that older women are the least shockable sector of the population. (The easiest? Middle-aged men. See: House of Commons, tabloid newspapers...) Ed

On someone who is himself quite shocking, although not in the way he thinks he is...

Ed, re: your mention of Russell Brand's fledgling amulet business (Sunday Book Club, October 20). How are people still falling for this swindler's patter? Surely he should have been asked to stay away from the public the instant he brought out My Booky Wook. Doesn't the cringe of that title tell you he is not suitable to be around adults? I think women have seen right through him since day one, whereas men, for some reason, are still blind to his posturing.

Miranda R.

Book club: has your life ever been turned around by a mid-range amulet? Or exposure to the “Booky Wook"? Testaments please, to info@strong-words.co.uk

Recently out in paperback is film director/ madman Werner Herzog's superb memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All.

It includes this piece of advice for those hoping to become reporters or are thinking of travelling to the planet's less-touristed corners. 

After leaving school he decided, like many students nowadays, to see some of the world. 

Except the bit he was keenest to see was Congo, at the time undergoing the upheavals of civil war shortly after the murder of Patrice Lumumba. 

“All of its institutions had failed, and law and order no longer existed” says Herzog, describing the country's appeal. 

After making his way up the Nile he was forced to take a small mail plane to Juba in Sudan, a short distance from the border with Congo. 

But that's as far as he got. 

In Juba he contracted amoebic dysentery and retreated to Egypt...

“where I sheltered in a shed for garden tools. I didn’t have any insurance. Things went downhill fast. The fever made me feel so cold that I wore a sweater in spite of the heat. I had almost nothing in the way of baggage, just a half-empty duffel bag. I had fever dreams in which I saw myself swimming miles out to sea, then something was biting me in the elbow, a fish, maybe a shark. I leapt up, and a rat ran right across my face. There were more of them too. When I extended my arm, I saw that a big hole had been gnawed in my sweater. I suppose the rat was getting wool for its nest. I found a little bite wound in my cheek. My cheek swelled up, and the wound was still leaking pus weeks later and refusing to heal.”                                                        
                                                            
With the help of some “shockingly powerful medicine” administered by a doctor connected to German engineers working on the Aswan dam, he made it home. 

But in true Herzog style, he later learnt of another of the grotesque outcomes his curiosity could have led to...

“In 1992, when I was briefly the director of the Viennale film fest in Vienna, I invited the Polish writer and philosopher Ryszard Kapuściński as one of my guests. He had more knowledge of Africa than anyone I knew, and it was he as well who, a year before me, a young man himself coming from Juba, had reached eastern Congo. There he was arrested forty times in a year and a half and four times sentenced to death. I asked him what his worst day had been. The worst day went on for a week in which he was in a pit under sentence of death, and drunken soldiers were throwing poisonous snakes onto him. ‘In the space of a week,’ said Kapuściński, putting his hand to his head, my hair turned white.’ His hair wasn’t just white, it was as white as driven snow. ‘I want you to get on your knees,’ he said, ‘and thank God you were never there.’ Apart from him, there was only one other reporter who emerged from there alive.”       
                             
Buy Every Man For Himself and God Against All

Book club: what is the correct etiquette when placed in a pit by soldiers and pelted with poisonous snakes? Appropriate diplomatic responses please, to info@strong-words.co.uk

If, with the giving season approaching, you're in need of a volume to satisfy a historian of popular music design, you have reached your destination. 

Logo Rhythm is a compilation of the stories behind band logos, a process that began with Brian Epstein talking the then unknown Ringo into a Denmark Street music shop and asking for the name of his band to be painted on the kick drum in a way that subverted the typeface. 

Thus the Beatles logo with the extended “T” was born – would they have made it without?

Plenty of other legendary logos are considered here, from the elegant (Motown, Roxy Music) to the groovy (The Byrds) to the barely legible (Yardbirds), along with abundant background intel. 

So if there's someone in your circle who needs to know why the Grateful Dead “Stealie” skull has 13 points on the lightning flash, why the Chicago logo is a shameless steal of the Coca-Cola lettering, or who has failed to notice what the Monkees' guitar shaped logo has for tuning pegs, shop now. 

(This message is brought to you courtesy of my “Free Publicity to Strong Words subscribers” programme)                 
    
Buy Logo Rhythm: Band Logos That Rocked The World

Dear Book Club readers,

occasionally you may receive unsolicited emails or find you've been served adverts about “getting the most out of your investments”. 

It occurred to me that buying hardback books can also be a bit of an investment these days, with them often going for £25 or even £30. 

How do you know that this might be the right place to put your hard-earned? 

Obviously a subscription to Strong Words could save you a lot of anxiety, not to mention misdirected spending. 

At prices as low as just £4 a month – a sum of money now barely visible to the naked eye – you may even find a subscription to Strong Words improving your budget by guiding you consistently towards books that meet your needs. 

And, obviously, even when there's nothing to tempt you into the book market, Strong Words is a delight to read in itself. 

It's useful, entertaining, and confirms the taste and sophistication of the subscriber. 

As the cliché would have it, it's money well spent. 

And you can contemplate the various ways of subscribing to Strong Words by clicking this link. 

Please do. 

Looking forward to seeing you on board, and thanks for all your support.

More next week,

Ed Needham 

Got a story you’d like to share? Or a question that's bothering you? Send your gossip, tips, literary sightings and intel to info@strong-words.co.uk

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