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

Originally published as a three-sheet lithograph in scroll form in 1917 (and subsequently as a reduced-size single sheet circa 1920, the version we are featuring 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 from teaching in 1937. Long before that, however, he released a set of twelve woodcuts interleaved with prose and verse titled The Faery Calendar (1920), which includes a matter-of-fact preface about the world of nixies and sprites. “I believe in Faeries. It is very natural and not a bit foolish; for in these days we are quickly learning how little we know of any other world than our own.” His next work, A Faery Pageant (1924), was published not long after the Cottingley fairy hoax (Sleigh sided fully with Arthur Conan Doyle), in a limited edition of 475 copies, which sadly, like the calendar, remains undigitized. In 1926, he released his most substantial work of prose: The Gates of Horn: Being Sundry Records for the Society of Faery Fact and Fallacy. Across almost three hundred pages, Sleigh offers case studies of human encounters with Dreamland, discusses the use of mescal buttons for accessing the fairy world, which he discovered thanks to conversations with Havelock Ellis, and unequivocally answers “yes” to Peter Pan’s question, “Do you believe in faeries?” Unfortunately, due to the poor reception of this volume, his next work, Ardudwy, and an autobiography titled Memoirs of a Human Peter Pan were never published.