Well before Leonard Wolf died in March 2019 at the age of 96, I was planning to write up a Lesser-Known Writer entry on him. I piled his books where I could access them easily, but for various reasons I never finished the entry. So now, before I reshelve his books back to where they belong, I thought I'd post a gallery of the covers of his various weird-related genre work.
His first such book was A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead (1972), which the author himself described twenty-five years later as "a strange book"--a very personal book of its times with social commentary. Nonetheless it led to him doing The Annotated Dracula (1975) and The Annotated Frankenstein (1977). Both annotated editions were revamped as The Essential Dracula (1993) and The Essential Frankenstein (1993). Wolf did other such volumes like The Essential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1995) and The Essential Phantom of the Opera (1996). Wolf also edited some worthwhile anthologies, including the bumper-sized Wolf's Complete Book of Terror (1979), which was significantly abridged, but with a few additional stories, under the same title in 1994. Other anthologies include Doubles, Dummies and Dolls (1995) and Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction (1997). Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (1996), by Le Fanu, was edited and introduced by Wolf as a mass market original from Signet Classics. The reference book Horror: A Connoisseur's Guide to Literature and Film (1989) is selective and not comprehensive. Wolf also published two novels, The False Messiah (1984) and The Glass Mountain (1993).
Here follows a chronological cover gallery of most of these books.
