Vincent Price
Look who our “warlock” is on A Hornbook for Witches: none other than the ruthless namesake of the 1968 film Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm, after Poe).
Released in 1976 on both LP and cassette (it’s now available on CD), this recording of Vincent Price reading “stories and poems for Halloween” is a real curiosity. The title—a pun on a word for “primer”—comes from an ultrarare collection of poems by Leah Bodine Drake published in 1950 by Arkham House, specialists in “weird fiction.” Along with samples from Drake’s Hornbook, we have verses by Poe, Maria Leech, and Charles Kingsley, plus short stories by John Collier and John Kendrick Bangs. There are also a few sound effects at the end.
Price is no slouch, even on a throwaway project like this. His reading of Bangs’s “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” is a particular standout. I wish I’d been in the studio to see how he simulated the ghost’s watery voice. (I suspect some manual cheek flapping was involved.)
When I stumbled on the LP on ebay, I liked the cover art so much I had to buy it. I’d dearly love to have Drake’s book, too. Alas, only a couple hundred copies were distributed by the publisher. The fate of the other 300 copies, which went to the author, is unknown. Copies of the original Hornbook now go for more than a thousand dollars each.
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| Cover illustration by Leo and Diane Dillon. |
Price is no slouch, even on a throwaway project like this. His reading of Bangs’s “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” is a particular standout. I wish I’d been in the studio to see how he simulated the ghost’s watery voice. (I suspect some manual cheek flapping was involved.)
When I stumbled on the LP on ebay, I liked the cover art so much I had to buy it. I’d dearly love to have Drake’s book, too. Alas, only a couple hundred copies were distributed by the publisher. The fate of the other 300 copies, which went to the author, is unknown. Copies of the original Hornbook now go for more than a thousand dollars each.
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