Roy Bean is one of the immortals of the Old West, a rough-and-ready old timer once celebrated from San Antonio to Shanghai. He came to Texas in 1882 and had his town named after a romantic crush (a British socialite he never met). When he hung up his shingle as a justice of the peace and notary public, he offered ice-cold beer. Bean upheld the peace to his own satisfaction and personal gain and ran his courtroom with the spirit, not the letter, of the law. Here, the endless stories are told: how he fined a corpse for carrying a concealed weapon, why he married couples and quickly divorced them, the bamboozling, the swaggering, and his exhibiting live animals at his bar. The “Law West of the Pecos”, with a great appetite for publicity and a knack for achieving it, was something more than an amusing old scoundrel—for Roy Bean had in him the stuff of a folk hero of the sort which the Old West could hardly again produce.

Originally published in 1943 by the Macmillan Company in El Paso.

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The most famous and documented investigation of British psychic researcher Harry Price’s long career was that of Borley Rectory, in a tiny village in Essex, 60 miles from London. A vanished Benedictine monastery, a ghost nun, a phantom carriage, and poltergeists beguile Price and his team as they methodically track down, document, and test whatever is responsible for the alarming irregularities they witness—until the ten-year exploration goes up in flames.

Originally published in 1940 in Great Britain by Longmans, Green and Co.

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Trouble in Texas took on the epic proportions of the state itself in the hectic days after the Civil War. It was up to each person to right the wrongs done to them by others. Dr. C. L. Sonnichsen traces the workings of folk justice in ten incidents—the first and worst being the conflict between the Regulators and the Moderators. Here also are the Hoodoos, the Heel Flies, the Mob, the Boots, and the Sandals, in feuds fraught with such memorable characters as Preacher Ase Mitchell (carried a coil of lynching rope in his hat), Gentleman Jim Miller (more polite than the others), Helen Moorman (a Texas Joan of Arc), and quaint little Miss Sue Pinckney (the Emily Dickinson of Hempstead).

Ten stories of vigilantes, vendettas, and violence in Texas during a turbulent era of reconstruction—history with a vengeance.

Originally published by the University of New Mexico Press in Albuquerque in 1957.

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Fairies, Banshees, Changelings, Brownies, Kelpies, enchanted livestock, and more are investigated by a renowned folklorist and minister in 19th-century Scotland. Superstitions regarding subjects like funerals, suicides, and murders are explored, as are tales of augury, premonitions, divination, dreams, prophecies, spells, and the Devil—all collected entirely from testimonials made directly to the author by residents of places like the isles of Mull and Skye, Islay, Kintyre, the Hebrides and the Highlands.

Originally published in 1900 in Glasgow by James MacLehose and Sons.

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Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí eccentrically presents his ideas of painting, judging good or bad the prominent figures in the history of art, and expounding on 50 “secrets” that cover topics like the movements of types of brushes, blending, objects needed in a painter’s space, the characteristics of colors, sleep, spiders, and sea urchins.

Dalí surmised that no one even remotely interested in painting would be able to avoid consulting this wry amalgamation of testimonials, instruction, and arguments. It is a work that would serve as yet another step in positioning Salvador Dalí, as his very name indicated, to do no less than to rescue painting from the void of modern art.

Originally published by Dial Press in New York in 1948.

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Here are the stories of the great gangs that once terrorized New York City, from the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits to the Gophers and the Eastmans—here are the infamous gangsters, from the days of the murderous Five Points Gangs to the later underworld mobs led by Mose the Bowery Boy, Monk Eastman, Paul Kelly, Kid Dropper, Dopey Benny, Gyp the Blood, and Owney Madden, and such feminine underworld luminaries as Gallus Mag and Sadie the Goat.

An informative and important addition to what was, in the view of the late 1920s audience it was written for, the little-known history of the crime-infested hellholes of modern Babylon!

Originally published in 1928 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in New York.

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Whether intended as historical fiction or not, this tale of a California bandit in the early years of the Gold Rush by America’s first Native American novelist was based on real occurrences. By early 1853, a certain “Joaquin” was being blamed for seemingly every murder and robbery in the young Golden State—a Robin Hood-like figure originally from Mexico said to be an inspiration a half a century later for the character of Zorro (who in turn was an influence on masked vigilante and avenger characters like Batman). Only a year after newspapers printed stories of Joaquin’s violent death, author John Rollin Ridge, known as Yellow Bird in the Cherokee Nation, delivered this adventure of the folk hero with nerves of iron who battled danger and death.

Originally published by W. B. Cooke in San Francisco in 1854, the sole surviving copy of which reportedly being housed for decades in a private collection in Morristown, NJ.

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Magician and escape artist Harry Houdini profiles his onetime hero, French magician Robert-Houdin, whose name he used as inspiration for his own, and discovers that his former idol’s claims and professional accomplishments conceal disturbing realities. Houdini’s effort becomes an investigation through England and Europe that also serves as a general history of magic.

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This infamous compendium of the strange and unexplained, including UFOs and strange weather, was the result of decades of research in libraries by its author, Charles Fort (the inspiration for the term “Fortean”). Worldwide occurrences of the supernatural and the paranormal are documented, with names and pages of sources provided. Fort’s literary contemporaries who admired his work included Ben Hecht, John Cowper Powys, Theodore Dreiser, Tiffany Thayer, Sherwood Anderson, Clarence Darrow, and Booth Tarkington. This production excises Fort’s numerous forays into his speculative Super-Sargasso Sea theory in favor of focusing on his voluminous research and reporting – as author Colin Wilson said of Fort, “the facts are certainly astonishing enough”.

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The mysticism and fairy folklore of Celtic England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Brittany, and Wales is explored in this production, which focuses on interviews conducted with everyday citizens about their beliefs, sightings, and encounters in the early 20th century, followed by an anthropological examination of evidence. It is an exploration of the spirit world, of the Sidhe, the “good people”, who are claimed to interact mischievously with the populace – sometimes even abducting them and leaving only the victims’ clothes behind, transporting them far distances, and killing their livestock.

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When James Forrestal resigned as secretary of defense in March 1949 before apparently committing suicide (arguably the highest ranking US government official to do so), he left in his office a large accumulation of files and papers. Among them was a private record. This was the “diary”, as he called it, that he had maintained in one form or another since the middle of 1944, shortly after his appointment as secretary of the Navy. His instructions were that the diary should be deposited at the White House, which was an unusual request. The approximately 2,800-page work was then condensed and edited by military writer and historian Walter Millis. One hundred pages of the missing entries have been included in this production. Here is Forrestal’s take on the workings of government and how matters of high estate were debated and implemented, written by one of America’s most powerful public servants and in some of the most difficult and critical years of American history.

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The editor, Oklahoma school superintendent Stephen Melvil Barrett, first met Geronimo in the summer of 1904, and felt that the 76 year old Bedonkohe Apache leader and medicine man from New Mexico and Arizona, a prisoner of war for 20 years far from his home, who had never told his side of history before, should finally do so. President Theodore Roosevelt granted Barrett’s request to interview Geronimo, and this is the result, without Barrett’s clarifications or intrusions – “write what I have spoken,” as Geronimo said. Topics covered include his early life, the origin of the Apaches, their tribal structure, raids in Mexico, and interactions with the American military.

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