The Haunted LibraryTales of Cursed Books and Forbidden Shelves
A manuscript on loan delivers doom to its seeker. An uncanny tome enthrals its reader to a course of evil. Welcome to the Haunted Library, a collection of cursed tales steeped in the arcane secrets and dark psychic traces to be found in the stacks and shelves of libraries, museums and other treasure troves of hidden knowledge. First published by the British Library in 2016, this expanded edition features several new stories and an updated introduction by Tanya Kirk, now ensconced in the realm of Jamesian terrors as librarian at St John’s College, Cambridge.
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Tanya Kirk
Tanya Kirk is the Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at the British Library and is currently the leading expert on 300 years of the Library’s printed collections. She has curated five major exhibitions on topics including Gothic fiction, Shakespeare in performance, the British landscape in literature and most recently Harry Potter: A History of Magic. She has edited two themed collections of ghost stories, The Haunted Library (2016) and Spirits of the Season (2018).
British Library Tales of the Weird
The British Library Tales of the Weird series revives and unearths classic strange fiction from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the form of novels, single-author collections and thematic anthologies, complete with new introductions and fascinating notes by expert editors.
British Library Tales of the Weird consists of seventy-two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.

