Seth gives ghosts of Christmases past new life
More than a century before Elf on a Shelf began terrorizing children into behaving during the Christmas season, yuletide spirit came in the form of ghosts. As far back as the 1700s, families would gather around during long winter nights and tell ghost stories by gas or candlelight. The Victorian-era obsession with the paranormal, combined with the rise of periodical publications, created a demand for these chilling tales, which became just as much a part of Christmas as figgy pudding and sleigh rides.
Those seasonal apparitions have risen once again, thanks to a little conjuring from acclaimed cartoonist Seth and his pocket-sized Christmas Ghost Stories series, published by Windsor, Ont., indie press Biblioasis.
Seth (the pen name for Gregory Gallant) is internationally recognized for his signature personal and design es- thetic, a vintage-inspired but timeless style that hearkens back to the midcentury cartoons of the New Yorker, for which he is also a contributor.
About 20 years ago, Seth picked up an old anthology of Victorian ghost stories, The Haunted Looking Glass, illustrated by one of his idols, Edward Gorey. He was hooked, and began seeking out more spooky titles from other eras. So he obliged when Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells approached him to curate and design a series of collectible Christmas ghost stories, giving these relics such a cool but classic treatment.
The pocket-sized series, which would fit snuggly into a stocking, kicked off in 2015 with “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens (1866) and “One Who Saw” by A.M. Burrage (1931). To date, all11titles in the collection are by British authors, and not by accident.
“When I think of cosiness and sitting around in a warm chair by the fireplace with a glass of brandy that seems like a very British idea,” says Seth from Inkwell’s End, his 19th-century brick home in Guelph.
“It’s a very middle-class, stuffy old-world British kind of culture, which of course appeals to me tremendously.”
This year’s additions are Walter de la Mare’s 1929 tale, “The Green Room,” about a man who discovers a strange annex in the back of an old bookshop; Frank Cowper’s “Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk,” which recalls a spooky encounter with a ghostly shipwreck; and “The Red Lodge,” a story about a possessed holiday country home by H. Russell Wakefield, who is considered a titan of the haunted-house sub-genre. Most of the books are safe to read before sleep without fear of nightmares. But what these stories lack in a dramatic boo factor they make up for with chilling ambience, a mood Seth boosts with his illustrations.
“I will draw something that suggests the ghost’s presence in the house or shows the house from a distance,” he says. “I try not to draw anything that’s too specific.”