Michael Dirda at the NYRB:
Back in the early 1930s Gilbert Seldes—a literary critic and early champion of popular culture—was asked to contribute an introduction to a volume of stories by Fitz-James O’Brien, now often regarded as the most original American writer of supernatural fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. At first Seldes declined, confessing that he’d never read anything by the man. But when the publisher jogged his memory, Seldes remembered that in some anthology or another he had in fact come across “The Diamond Lens,” O’Brien’s 1858 account of an obsessive microscopist who discovers an Eden-like world in a drop of water—and falls in love with the beautiful woman who lives in it.
Seldes finally did introduce The Diamond Lens and Other Stories, published in 1932 as a limited edition with subtly sinister illustrations by Ferdinand Huszti Horvath. The book featured seven of O’Brien’s tales of the weird and grotesque, most notably “The Wondersmith,” which centers on a satanic toymaker whose miniature figures can be animated to kill the young children who play with them. According to Anthony Boucher, who reprinted the story in the December 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “almost the whole body of writing on robots is here in matrix.”
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