Laetitia Flint exists (so far) only in this novel, and her books can be found only in libraries of fictional fiction. To read them, consult a spectral librarian.
My favorite spectral librarians are in the novel Lilith, by George Macdonald (Mr. Raven); various stories by Jorge Luis Borges, especially “The Library of Babel”; and “The Tractate Middoth,” by M. R. James (Dr. Rant).
All the other authors and books mentioned in this story are real. If you read them, you’ll find many beautiful descriptions, heart-pounding adventures, and chilling visions. You’ll also encounter attitudes that may jar today’s sensibilities. Supernatural fiction from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often reflected the writers’ anxieties, especially about women and people from other cultures, in ways that can seem ugly and shocking today.
I hope that won’t scare you off. There’s a lot to be learned—about the past, the present, and ourselves—from reading books we don’t agree with. Take them with a spoonful of salt, and remember that our own great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandnieces and -grandnephews will probably need a dose of salt when they read our stories.
A few more details:
New York City’s flea markets exist, though I moved them around and populated them with fictional characters. Some of the best markets are gone now, victims of the city’s ravenous appetite for real estate. But perhaps new ones will spring up.
People often ask me why the New-York Circulating Material Repository has a hyphen in its name. That’s how New York used to be spelled until about one hundred fifty years ago; the repository was founded when everyone hyphenated the city’s name. The New-York Historical Society, a wonderful place to visit, still uses the hyphen too.
Readers sometimes ask me if the New-York Circulating Material Repository really exists. Not in this universe, as far as I know. If you ever find it, please tell me!
In case you do want to try reading the books referred to in this one, here’s a not completely comprehensive list of the authors and their works. Except for Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (both of which I highly recommend for readers of all ages), none of them were written for children, so younger readers who find them hard going may want to try again after a few years.
Willa Cather: Various short stories, including “Consequences” and “Paul’s Case”
Robert W. Chambers: Stories from The King in Yellow, especially the title story
Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories from The Conjure Woman, especially “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Po’ Sandy”
James Fenimore Cooper: Various novels, especially The Red Rover and The Water-Witch
Mary Wilkins Freeman: Various stories from The Wind in the Rose-bush, especially “The Southwest Chamber” and the title story
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Various novels, novellas, romances, and short stories, including “Beneath an Umbrella,” “The Celestial Railroad,” Fanshawe, “Feathertop,” The House of the Seven Gables, “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,” The Scarlet Letter, Septimus Felton, Twice-Told Tales, “Young Goodman Brown”
Washington Irving: Various tales, especially from A History of New-York and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
Henry James: Novellas and short stories, including The Turn of the Screw
H. P. Lovecraft: The Necronomicon and innumerable, unutterable other works
Thomas Moore: “The Flying Dutchman”
Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and many short stories, including “The Assignation,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”
Sir Walter Scott: Rokeby
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and various short stories in Oldtown Fireside Stories, especially “The Ghost in the Cap’n Browne House,” “Captain Kidd’s Money,” and “The Sullivan Looking Glass”
Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome; various short stories, especially from Tales of Men and Ghosts, including “Afterward” and “The Eyes”
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
Tales from The Arabian Nights
Finally, the Poe Annex’s Spectral Library contains (among many others) fictional books that appear in the following works:
Hilaire Belloc: Cautionary Verses
A. S. Byatt: Possession
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Diana Wynne Jones: The Chrestomanci series
C. S. Lewis: The Silver Chair, from the Chronicles of Narnia
Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire