The Devil in the Belfry, and Other Tales

The devil in the belfry of a Dutch borough where every clock has always agreed; a lion of society made famous by his nose; a madhouse in the south of France run on a new system; the ghost-horse of Metzengerstein; a passenger's oblong box on a packet-ship; and, at the end, the grave prose poems — Shadow, The Power of Words, Monos and Una. Poe was a working journalist who liked to prove how easily readers could be hoaxed, and the comic pieces here are aimed squarely at the magazines he wrote for. Maelzel's Chess-Player shows him taking a famous automaton apart by reasoning alone. Forty-eight plates of fairgrounds, taverns, pianos and town squares by Goya, Munch and their contemporaries carry Poe's hoaxes and grave prose poems into the visual world of his century.