The Transfiguration Of Mister Punch features new writings by Cate Gardner, Charles Schneider and D.P. Watt. But what - I hear you ask – is it all about? For some – for most perhaps - the very name of Punch will be enough ignite in their minds pictures of grotesque and cracked lacquered wooden things, of bells and distended bellies and moon-shaped grinning heads; or else they might find themselves involuntarily drawn to some garish childhood memory of fairground pandemonium or the melancholic sounds of candystriped tarpaulin flapping on some windblown seafront where Punch and his associates screeched and capered for their entertainment. Yet for all their pin-prickly poignancy, these thoughts are essentially superficial, grounded as they are in basic sentimentality. The Transfiguration Of Mister Punch proffers something more complex. It is the work of three celebrated contemporary writers, working more or less in isolation from one another to produce what might be termed a literary triptych – a three panelled piece – fantastical in its parts, suggestive in its entirety of a reality altogether out of this dream we call life. A reality behind that little rectangle of gloom and plywood scenery where the myth of Punch is played out in time honoured fashion to the human world. This is the wondrous and dreadful, tragical and comical domain of Mister Punch & Co., fettered no more by the manipulations of humanity; real living things, breathing, large as life, real as the stars. The contents of the book reads thusly: The Show That Must Never Die by Charles Schneider - A curious and rambling essay with certain grand, glorious and once-secret revelations. Memorabilia by D.P. Watt - An evening’s entertainment for two players, incorporating a number of singular tales. This Foolish & Harmful Delight by Cate Gardner – A grotesque novella set in hell and theatreland, concerning love, death, dismemberment and a mechanical heart The book is a lithographically printed, 256 page sewn hardback with colour endpapers. ISBN 978-0-957160637. It is priced at £30 inclusive of P&P and is limited to 300 copies. The first 150 copies include an exclusive postcard of Charles Schneider's deranged Punch oil painting “How Do, Mr. Toby”.

This mammoth 350 page compendium of new, previously unpublished fiction, essays, poetry along with lesser known archive material, in praise, in awe, in fear of the great god was published officially on the solstice: The 21st of June 2015. The full contents are as follows... A Magical Invocation of Pan by Dion Fortune The Rebirthing of Pan by Adrian Eckersley Panic by R.B. Russell The Maze at Huntsmere by Reggie Oliver The Secret Woods by Lynda E. Rucker Faun and Flora: A Garden for the Goat-God Pan by Sheryl Humphrey Pan With Us by Robert Frost A Song Out of Reach by John Howard Lithe Tenant by Stephen J. Clark Pan by A.C. Benson (from an epitaph in The Greek Anthology) A New Pheidippioes by Henry Woodd Nevinson Goskin Woods by Charles Schneider Pan’s Pipes by Robert Louis Stevenson The House of Pan by John Gale The Company of the Lake by Jonathan Wood The Role of Pan in Ritual, Magic & Poetry by Diane Champigny Leaf-Foot, Petal-Mouth by Bethany van Rijswijk The Rose-White Water by Colin Insole The Death of Pan by Lord Dunsany Meadow Saffron by Martin Jones The Lady in the Yard by Rosanne Rabinowitz An Old God Almost Dead: Pan in the 1940s by Nick Freeman A Puzzling Affair by Ivar Campbell South-West 13 by Nina Antonia In Cypress Shades by Mark Valentine Honey Moon by D.P. Watt Summer Enchantment by Harry Fitzgerald