Shelfies #60: Kim Newman

I collect editions of Dracula.

My first was an Arrow paperback, bought (and read) in 1971. When I extended my Anno Dracula series of novels with a comic Anno Dracula 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem, I asked artist Paul McCaffrey to homage the cover of that Arrow edition… a woman in a Victorian dress looking startled, as a taloned hand is laid on her shoulder. The model on the cover looks a bit like a young Queen Victoria, so that may even have been where I first had the idea of writing Anno Dracula, in which – among other things – Count Dracula becomes the Queen’s second husband.

That paperback fell apart from re-reading so I replaced it – I think with a Sphere edition put out in their Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult line. The first hardback Dracula I bought (while at university) was Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula – which was also the first scholarly, footnoted Dracula, packed with insights and facts that settled in the back of my mind. Sometime later, as a supposed grown-up, I took to buying up any copy of Dracula I came across – I have some vintage editions and some oddities: a nice green Dracula published in 1902 (Stoker’s lifetime), tie-in editions for the 1927 play and 1931 film, a uniquely-sized 1944 Armed Services Edition (shaped to fit into a kit-bag), versions with Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella and the logo of Francis Ford Coppola film, several simplified versions for young readers (including a pop-up book and one with Mickey Mouse as Jonathan Harker) and several sexed-up versions for smut connoisseurs. I have foreign language editions, comics adaptations (and reprints of Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula from the 1970s), playscripts and several further annotated editions. So many Draculas that these shelves are full.

Of course, to get to the books, you have to look past the merch. I’m not sure when and how I started accruing this stuff – Dracula tat like snow-globes, paperweights, a cool pencil sharpener (the pencil becomes the stake through the heart), a ‘Gracula’ garlic press, salt-and-pepper-shakers in the form of Dracula and Wife, action figures (of Lugosi, Lee, Max Schreck, the Marvel Dracula, Oldman, even Richard Roxburgh from fucking Van Helsing) and mash-ups like the Minion Dracula, Dracula Ducks, a Care Bear Dracula, two different Ninja Turtle Draculas, Scooby-Doo as Dracula, a Dracula Transformer, and Storm-of-the-X-Men-when-she-was-bitten-by-Dracula. Somewhere in the Dracu-clutter is a phial of earth from Transylvania suitable for scattering in a coffin and sleeping on and a chunk of red-veined rock from the castle of Elisabeth Bathory in Slovakia. On a related note, I have sand from Monument Valley and a phial of water from the Black Lagoon too.

Once I started, people began giving me things which fit in. It’s easier now – I could go online and order new editions of Dracula every week, but preferred it when it was a matter of seeing if second-hand bookshops had old paperbacks tucked away or poking through out-of-the-way shops for discontinued toys.  

Still, I’ll probably have added a bunch more Draculas by the time this is posted.

Kim Newman is a British critic, author and broadcaster. His books about film include Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics booklets on Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, the Drearcliff Grange School novels, The Night Mayor, The Quorum, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the d’Urbervilles, Angels of Music, A Christmas Ghost Story, Something More Than Night and Model Actress Whatever.  He has written for television (Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema), radio (Afternoon Theatre: Cry-Babies) and the theatre (The Hallowe’en Sessions), contributed many commentary tracks and extra features to DVD and BluRay releases, and directed a tiny film (Missing Girl). 

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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