Special Collections
Book of the Month, December 2006
One of the main elements of the Harry Price Library is its large number of books on Spiritualism. Accounts of séances, biographies and memoirs of mediums and scientific testing of the claims of mediums all feature. Alongside these works, there is a group of writings which purport to be transmitted from beyond the grave to certain receptive mediums. In some cases, these are claimed to be the works of major authors. One recently acquired example of this genre is Jap Herron: a novel written from the Ouija board, a ‘new’ work by Mark Twain.
The dust jacket of Jap Herron remains on the Library’s copy , and is illustrated with a cameo of Mark Twain, but neither the dust jacket nor the title page mention Twain’s name. Indeed the title page gives no author at all. However, the first 42 pages of the book provide an extensive introduction, entitled “The coming of Jap Herron”, and it is here that the details of the transmission of this new work are given. The introduction is by Emily Grant Hutchings who explains how ‘on the afternoon of the second Thursday in March, 1915,’ she visited, by invitation, the meeting of a small psychical research society.
The introduction goes on to explain how Hutchings, in conjunction with the medium Mrs Lola V. Hays, was particularly receptive to the transmissions of Samuel L. Clemens. Over the next few months the novel built up via the Ouija board, until a manuscript was completed on 10th January, 1916 – although changes and additions occurred before publication as a result of later contact with the author’s spirit.
Emily Grant Hutchings wrote few other works, those recorded on COPAC and by the Library of Congress are a novel Indian Summer, published in 1922, and a work on spiritualism from 1933, Where do we go from here? The journey of life, which has also recently been acquired for the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature.
specialcollections@shl.lon.ac.uk 
020 7862 8470 shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 020 7862 8470
