The Prof is back

Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger returns for the last time in a two-part story, The Disintegration Machine. Here he is displaying his usual good temper on the front of the Strand Magazine, January 1929.

Spooky Sunday x 2

Two full-page illustrations for Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist. In the top picture, a man sees the spirit of his mother at a seance; below it the psychic investigators encounter a 'dark soul' in a haunted house, a malevolent shadow that swoops down on them from the upper storey. They are from the September and October 1925 editions of The Strand respectively.

The Land of Mist

Cover of the July 1925 edition of The Strand Magazine - the first instalment of Arthur Conan Doyle's novella The Land of Mist, 'starring' Professor Challenger. The magazine still tended to use a uniform template for its covers at this point, so departures like this really stand out. The girl's outfit is so much of its time - her scarf's design looks like its been inspired by Clarice Cliff pottery.

Important notice

At the end of the articles in the June 1925 edition of The Strand is this full-page 'teaser' announcing the commencement the following month of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist, the third of his Professor Challenger novels after The Lost World and The Poison Belt. Doyle had fully established his spiritualist credentials by this time - the infamous 'Coming of the Fairies' article about the to-modern-eyes obvious fakes The Cottingley Fairies - had appeared five years earlier in The Strand's December 1920 issue, for example. The Land of Mist saw Doyle further his campaign for credibility of his beliefs by introducing them into a work of fiction using established and popular characters. It's not an entirely successful story but I'm hoping the illustrations will be good. I shall save beginning the next volume till tomorrow - and then I'll find out.