Bernard Sleigh’s *Anciente Mappe of Fairyland* (edition c. 1920) — The Public Domain Review

Originally published as a three-sheet lithograph in scroll form in 1917 (and then as a reduced single sheet about 1920, the version we show here), the Anciente Mappe of Fairyland was later remade by the artist into a Rosebank Fabric, which led to well-paying textile commissions after his retirement as a lecturer in 1937. Long before that, however, he released a series of twelve woodcuts interspersed with prose and verse entitled The Faery Calendar (1920), which contains a matter-of-fact foreword about the world of nixies and sprites. “I believe in elves. It is very natural and not a little foolish; for these days we are quickly learning how little we know of any other world than our own.” His next work, A fairytale parade (1924), was published not long after the Cottingley fairy hoax (Sleigh completely sided with Arthur Conan Doyle), in a limited edition of 475 copies, which unfortunately, like the calendar, has not been digitized. In 1926 he released his most substantial work of prose: The Gates of Horn: Being Diverse Records for the Society of Faery Fact and Fallacy. In nearly three hundred pages, Sleigh provides case studies of human encounters with Dreamland, discusses the use of mescal buttons to access the fairy world, which he discovered through conversations with Havelock Ellis, and answers unequivocally “yes” to Peter Pan’s question, “Do you believe in elves?” Unfortunately, due to the poor reception of this volume, his next work is, Ardudwyand an autobiography titled Memoirs of a Man Peter Pan have never been published.