News from the Invisible World: The Publishing History of Tales of the Supernatural c.1660–1832 Jonathan Barry This chapter explores the transmission of tales of the supernatural during the very long eighteenth century (between c.1660 and 1832). When writing my last book, on the transmission of a specifc tale of the con- juration of spirits over the same period, I became aware of a genre of publications on this subject which had not been studied. These are anthologies of supposedly true stories, usually relating to named people and places and sometimes dated, often each numbered separately, with relatively little discussion of their authenticity or signifcance, beyond perhaps a brief preface defending the reality of the world of spirits.1 This 1 Jonathan Barry, Raising Spirits: How a Conjuror’s Tale Was Transmitted Across the Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2013); id., Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England c.1640–1789 (Basingstoke, 2012), 259–60. J. Barry (*) Department of History, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail:
[email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 179 J. Barry et al. (eds.), Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-63784-6_9 180 J. BARRY distinguishes them (although this is a spectrum rather than an absolute distinction) from other volumes which might contain such stories but integrate them within a more argumentative framework, or from shorter accounts of individual incidents, as well as from a growing