Talk:Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971)

Commentary transcribed from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971)

Recent subsequent effort has been made to show how subsequent generations have modelled their work upon his - see the remarks about Hippisley Coxe, who subsequently did a book on ghosts of England, citing Underwood's work in the bibliography, as well as mention of Richard Jones's books (his 'Haunted Britain and Ireland' is directly modelled on the structure of Underwood's Gazetteer - as is his book on haunted London, which is explained in the entry for Underwood's 'Haunted London' (1973)). The 'library of psychic knowledge' comes from editorial text by Tabori, and reference can be made to that. The supposed 'puffery' of authority perhaps boils down to something self-evident - ghosts and haunted places had never before been systematically or comprehensively presented in the manner Underwood presented them, and literature in the paranormal has followed in his footsteps ever since. Others recognise a debt by listing his work in their bibliography - again that isn't necessarily puffery but a fact of citing work that directly influenced theirs - isn't this nitpicking a little? Drilling down to every sentence? Links to a BBC interview have been given which relates directly to material covered in the Gazetteer, and does the 'notability' of every instance of reference of his work - whether in other officially published books or on popular news/entertainment websites have to be scrutinised to death? If a hundred more books are tracked down that make direct reference to Underwood's book, whether it be under its original title or republished title of 'The A-Z of British Ghosts', would they all be summarily discounted for not themselves being 'notable' enough? Sherlockpsy (talk) 15:46, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

I have found a link to a review from TIME MAGAZINE : http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909941,00.html and an Academic Journal - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0015587X.1971.9716735 . Hopefully this may suffice as a mainstream example on the one hand, and an authoritative, scholarly one, on the other. Sherlockpsy (talk) 16:15, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

(I posted the following on the other talk page): i have no intention of creating any new entries - these two works simply seemed to be the most historically significant - the claim on the inside jacket cover of the Gazetteer of British Ghosts is that it is the first comprehensive survey - the novelty of the use of the gazetteer form to systematise the accounts or so-called 'sightings' of the paranormal "Here for the firs time, catalogued and placed in alphabetical order, are well over two-hundred accounts of ghostly happenings"; Underwood set the trend for paranormal literature to come (much of the subsequent literature on folklore and the paranormal was modelled on this novel form; previously you had collections of ghost stories and legends; collected oral histories; Underwood collected and brought together his accounts from all over the country - hence the self-evident seriousness of the endeavour in the act of systematisation and comprehensiveness. The Gazetteer formed part of a series edited by Paul Tabori called 'Frontiers of the Unknown' - there are over half a dozen titles that Tabori commissioned that together constituted the so-called 'library of psychic knowledge' (again, that is a quasi-blurb from the back cover); but again, all this work is very much to do with the legacy of the work of Harry Price - who's archive currently exists at Senate House in London (paranormal historian Paul Adams was bequeathed Peter Underwood's archives - Underwood corresponded with Price and produced his Ghosts of Borley (co-written with Tabori) on the back of his own investigative work and through a full internalisation/comprehension of the two books Price produced on Borley)

i'm happy to take your advice and leave it for a month or two - alternatively, if you think i am already in a position to more clearly articulate in a more condensed form the significance of the two works that were singled out for attention (The Gazetteer and Haunted London), then i will happily attempt to do that and introduce them as subsets of the main Peter Underwood page so that the individual pages can proceed with deletion. (I have also already made some notes about a possible section covering his appearance in the media - A 1975 BBC documentary 'The Ghost Hunters'; an episode of 'Strange but True'; his appearance in a contemporary artwork - 'In Search of...', by Matthew Day Jackson that was exhibited at Hauser & Wirth in Saville Row in London a few years ago; a 1986 LBC Radio interview given at the time of the publication that same year of 'The Ghost Hunter's Guide'.) However if you think the insertion/expansion of condensed, more clearly articulated versions of the book entries into the main page (as well as the idea of an inclusion of appearances in the media), is not a good idea - or is currently beyond my ability, i'll leave it.Sherlockpsy (talk) 09:55, 5 May 2016 (UTC)