Julian Stevenson Bolick Ghosts From the Coast • Hardcover First Edition

Ghosts From the Coast : A Collection of Twelve Stories From Georgetown County, South Carolina by Julian Stevenson Bolick

Published by The Presses of Jacobs Brothers, 1966. Hardcover. xvii, 158 pp. Red cloth with gold foil titles to spine and front. Introduction by Elizabeth Boatwright Coker. Illustrated throughout with in-text and full-page drawings by the author.

VG- Square and firm. Spine tips lightly rubbed. Moderate foxing to top page edge. Internally clean and free of markings. Dust jacket shows chips at top spine, trace soiling.

◇

In his third collection of Georgetown folklore, Julian Bolick reminds us that ghosts have affinity: one common noisily they insist on being noticed. They need not have been formerly human, as we learn in the harming story of The Playful Terriers.

The author's original illustrations have the other-worldly effect of ruined textures and surfaces. These woodcut-like renderings of old coastal houses and scenes make plain they were meant to be haunted - framed as they are by live oak thickets from whose branches swing unearthly streamers of Spanish moss.

Julian Bolick again invites us into the realm of the "... spirits and the unaccounted-for happenings that have been spoken of with restrained whispers...the mysterious and exciting realm of the supernatural.

Immediacy of effect is an essential quality of the folk tale wherein primeval horror is rendered harmless. In the land of racial memory where reality and nightmare overlap, We walk alone at the edge of the abyss. This is the region of nameless fears, of "ghosties and goblins and things that go boom in the dark. Some crime against Nature has been committed; the spirit or god must be appeased. Some terrible wrong cries out for help or for vengeance, and goes on crying down the remembering generations.

Mr. Bolick has also written and published, with his characteristic fine line drawings, three important books on South Carolina landmarks. "Georgetown Houselore, "Waccamaw Plantations,' and "A Fairfield Sketchbook." He is currently similar work about Laurens County, in the hope engaged in that recording objects which time and indifference indifferently destroy will make a difference to those who care. The legends that become an integral part of ancient places are just as irre- placeable, and some of these have been given permanent form in this volume.

The twelve stories in "Ghosts From the Coast are interesting in themselves: as an extra bonus Julian Bolick has laced his latest work with fascinating asides, the scattered mustard seeds of local lore usually overlooked in the more formally cultivated fields of history. (From the front flap)