Barbara Ninde Byfield's The Glass Harmonica (The Bookof Weird)

[Extollager]

Anyone remember this book? I happened upon a library copy over 45 years ago, soon after the book was published. As a kid, I missed some of the humor. For example, the leaning figure of a devil to the lower right on the dustjacket is -- once you know the original -- a riff on Millet's "Peasant Reposing" --

but that went by me then. I would have been able to detect the puckish humor of some other bits of the book.

Entries included Basilisks, Bats, Bedbugs, Berserkers, Castles, Caves and Caverns, Crones (+) and Hags (-), Dastards and Poltroons, Dragons, etc. Byfield uses "Dwarves" not "Dwarfs," and I might have connected that usage with Tolkien's. A two-page illustration of a dwarves' subterranean realm appealed to me very much. On page 79 the drawing of a dwarf as a tough miner would have looked, at first glance, like a Tolkienian dwarf with an axe (in fact he holds a digging implement). A two-page illustration of a wizard striking a felled treetrunk with a monster at its other end must be derived from Gandalf and the Balrog in Moria. Wizards "appear when least expected" -- here and elsewhere Byfield seems to have Tolkien's wizard in mind. I'd recently discovered Tolkien and appreciated allusions to his work.

Today, if I try to look at pages from the book apart from affectionate feelings for how I liked them then, I'm not terribly attracted to its arch style. When one was an unsophisticated youngster looking at this book, one might not only miss some of its irony but pretty much ignore some of the other instances of the tongue-in-cheek and attend to the remaining element of spookiness, antiquity, heroic adventure, mysteriousness, etc.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I discovered this book in my mid-twenties. My friends in the SCA had a habit of quoting lines from it, and for a historical recreation group many of the entries were particularly droll. ("Never take a Herald to a picnic" was popular.) So I was glad to find a copy and find out what everyone was talking about. And I loved it, since I was older than you when you found it, and I had read enough of the sort of books and seen enough of the movies that it was affectionately satirizing, that I could appreciate the irony. Later, as I read even more and was also doing a lot of writing myself, so that I was ever more aware of the tropes commonly used in fantasy, I enjoyed it that much more. (And there are actually parts of it that give useful information, like the different parts of a castle, and the chart of weights and measures.)

Anyway, I literally wore out my paperback copy. (Probably a combination of how often I went back and read my favorite parts of the book, and the fact that the glue in the paperback copy was not meant to stand up to that much use.) Fortunately, years later I found it in hardback in a used book store, and snapped it up.

One of my favorite bits is in the entry on wizards,

"When traveling, Wizards at least half the time are disguised, usually wearing a cloak of sober hue, a soft, wide-brimmed hat, and an eye patch, carrying a staff, and stooping. The are touchingly fond of casting off this impenetrable disguise at opportune moments. Transformations are child's play to them but do not seem to satisfy their love of dressing up as disguises do."

 

[Bick]

"When traveling, Wizards at least half the time are disguised, usually wearing a cloak of sober hue, a soft, wide-brimmed hat, and an eye patch, carrying a staff, and stooping. The are touchingly fond of casting off this impenetrable disguise at opportune moments. Transformations are child's play to them but do not seem to satisfy their love of dressing up as disguises do."

That's funny - I presume Byfield was consciously joking that wizards disguise themselves by looking exactly like we all think wizards should look, rather than the book predating that trope?

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

That's funny - I presume Byfield was consciously joking that wizards disguise themselves by looking exactly like we all think wizards should look, rather than the book predating that trope?

Absolutely, and the whole book is like that. On the cover for the hardback edition, under the title, it says:


A Lexicon of the Fantastical
In which it is determined that:

Wizards see best with their eyes closed
Torturers reek of mutton, cold sweat and rust
It is Unwise to take a Herald on a Picnic
Like Owls, Bells comment
Apprentices cost but little to keep
Bats consider sunlight vulgar
and other revelations of the mystical order of things . . .

Which may give you an idea of what the whole is like. It's 160 pages of similar information, all tongue-in-cheek, including such entries as Guises and Disguises; Oafs, Churls, Louts, and Knaves; Trollops, Trulls, Bawds, Doxies, and Strumpets. And much else besides.