Following our traditional Christmas motif, if you click on the link to the right, or on the icon on the left hand side of the Contents page, you can see a selection of Christmas cards sent out by DW. New to the section is a calendar for 1935 featuring Tamara Desni from the 1934 film of ‘The Forbidden Territory’.

In the corresponding section on cards sent to DW, there are also two new items; a card sent to DW by Sir Derek Jakeway, the Governor of Fiji, and a card sent to DW by Betty and Eric Wight-Boycott. Exactly who the latter were is obscure (if you know, please tell me !), but they sent him a nice card from Assam !.

All three of these items came to light while perusing the new material in the archives at Leeds University, and are reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library (MS 1942).

As in years gone by, I wish a very happy Christmas and New Year to all the site’s visitors and to all the many and growing friends of its cause.

This month’s update is the report on our tenth Convention, held at the Laura Ashley the manor hotel on 10th / 11th November 2017.

Please see the Conventions launch page for details of next year’s Convention, which will be held on Saturday 13th October 2018.

We will hope to see many of you there

Last month I added to the site the compliments slip that is often found in copies of ‘The Seven Ages of Justerinis’ (1949). For completeness I am therefore adding to the same section the insert that is often found in ‘The Eight Ages of Justerinis’ (1965) and the insert that is often found in ‘Saturdays with Bricks’ (1961). The latter is not strictly speaking ‘publicity material’, and I always imagine DW fuming at the red tape which obliged him to include it, but it ought to be recorded somewhere, and this place is as suitable as any.

I believe this completes the cataloguing of the inserts generally found in DW first editions (publicity postcards, bookmarks etc.), but if anyone thinks differently, please let me know and I will update the site accordingly !

Elsewhere, and later than I should have, I am including Anthony Cave Brown’s book ‘Bodyguard of Lies’ (1975) , which was one of the earliest books to discuss the top secret ‘London Controlling Section’, and DW’s role in it.

Finally, and more recently, Colin McCourt very kindly passed me earlier in the year a press cutting from the Daily Express of April 14th 2017, in which Dave Davies of ‘The Kinks’ (younger brother of Ray) discussed his ‘six best books’. I am delighted to say that weighing in at number three was ‘The Ka of Gifford Hillary’ .

This also gives me an opportunity to say that sometimes, when I am sent DW related material by well-wishers to the site, I stagger putting them on the site rather than put them all on-at-once, to avoid having ‘feast followed by famine’. I hope those who have sent me excellent pieces which are awaiting publication will indulge me and understand why I do this. Hopefully never for more than a few months, and ‘thank you’ !

When I was creating the room in the Museum on DW's Library, I was conscious that there was a gap (and there are others) … the gap was that I was unable to exhibit any of the memoirs signed to DW by the grandees of World War II. Thanks to the assistance of that wonderful grandee of the bookselling trade Maggs Bros, who recently handled four lovely specimens, that has now been rectified.

Also, thanks to the good offices of an old friend of this site, Clive Williams, I am recording in the 'Other Publications' section a copy of the compliments slip that is occasionally found in copies of 'The Seven Ages of Justerinis' (1949).

Elsewhere in DW news, we have a DW book being offered for a record sum. Christopher Lee's inscribed copy of 'The Devil Rides Out' is being offered by London booksellers Henry Southeran for the princely sum of £30,000. If you buy it, please let me know!

It must, I suppose, be something about how the human brain works, but sometimes something ‘hides in plain sight’. This is what happened with this month’s star exhibits. They had been sitting in a pile of papers, and for some reason which I absolutely cannot fathom, I had not until now appreciated just how important they are. The exhibits in question are the ‘thank you’ letter that the guest of honour wrote to DW following the launch party for ‘The Forbidden Territory’ on 3rd January 1933, and a follow-up thank you from the same personage, the rather impressive looking Belgian Ambassador, for a price list for wine. Even though he had just written a best seller, DW was not (yet) giving up on his career in wine. What an amazing find !

Elsewhere, I am updating the site to record an excellent talk given by Chris Josiffe at Treadwell’s Bookshop on 10th August about Rollo Ahmed, one of the three main experts that DW consulted while writing ‘The Devil Rides Out’. I have taken the opportunity to add to this section a full list of Phil Baker’s various (and excellent !) talks about DW and his works.

First of all I’m delighted to advise that Paul Adams has written another book with DW topicality – his new book Secret Luton includes a section on DW at Biscot Camp and his meeting Gordon Eric Gordon Tombe.

Secondly, I’ve added a couple of recent-ish talks to the section on Broadcasts etc; and I’m hoping to add entries for Phil Baker’s various talks there shortly.

Third, although they were mentioned elsewhere, I have added details of the three 2013 Bloomsbury paperbacks to the paperback section,

and fourth, for completeness, I’m adding a section to the site cataloguing the various Ebooks of DW’s novels – this last section is very much ‘work in progress’.

Thanks to feedback following the launch of the new Room on DW’s Library, I am able to add a few more illustrations of DW’s own copies of his own works

I am also, thanks to Richard Humphreys, able to add an illustration of the last missing dust jacket for Hutchinson’s ‘Century of …’ series – the jacket for ‘A Century of Nature Stories’, which, while not strictly DW related, will nevertheless be of bibliographical interest.

After last month’s massive update, this month sees a smaller number of items added. In the new Room on DW’s Library I am adding one further book – a book on Voodoo from the Occult section of DW’s Library.

I have also added further references to the sections on Wilde and on Anthony Powell; the latter giving the source for our knowledge that Powell enlisted DW’s help with part of the plot for ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’

Finally, and with thanks to Kevin Pearce, Dorothea Rota and Steve Whatley, in the bibliographic section I have added further details of recipients of the limited editions of ‘Old Rowley’ and of ‘The Devil and All His Works’.

This month sees a further special exhibition go live in the virtual Museum – an exhibition on DW’s Library. I had been meaning to create this for some time as his Library was such an important facet of DW’s life, but in the event it has taken some two years to assemble and comment on the material. I hope you will enjoy the new Room as much as the others; the extent of DW’s Library was very impressive.

My thanks go, as always, to the various contributors, whose names are given at the bottom of the pages, and who include various booksellers, Leeds University Library’s Special Collections for some early manuscript material, and our friend Steve Whatley for one item. I would also like to pay tribute here to Nigel Burwood of ‘Any Amount of Books’, who wrote two excellent online articles about DW’s Library in ‘Bookride’ in 2011, which set a very high standard to be followed.

A further recent find in Leeds University’s Special Collections is some material on the exhibition that DW and the Bond Street Galleries put on in 1967 to publicise the paintings of Fijian artist Semisi Maya. I am indebted as always to Special Collections for their unfailing courtesy and for their permission to display it.

Viewers will recall the rather charming sketch DW drew of himself as a young(ish) wine merchant that I put on display in the Museum last month. My thanks to Darren Nugent for pointing out to me that the ‘Two Pipes’ of Port that DW sold in the sketch would have been a staggering one thousand four hundred and forty bottles (!).

Finally, if any DW aficionados live near Southend and are around on Saturday 11th March, Darren has reminded me that there is a talk on ‘Dennis Wheatley – the man, his life and his works’ as part of the Essex Book Festival. Subject sounds good, but not too sure about the speaker …

First of all my thanks to my Netherlands correspondent Hillebrand Komrij for giving me the details of a hitherto unknown Dutch edition of ‘The Malinsay Massacre’, and for letting me reproduce on the site an article he has written about the Crime Dossiers – thank you Hillebrand !

Secondly, it gives me great pleasure to include a rather charming new exhibit in the site’s ‘virtual Museum’.

In the New Year I was browsing the material in Leeds University’s Special Collections (first visited with Darren Nugent in 2015; I hope to go there again with Darren soon), and I came across a rather lovely drawing by DW showing him extolling the virtues of laying down Port to one of his noble customers. My (profuse) thanks to Special Collections and the Wheatley family for permitting me to display it.