Sabine Baring-Gould’s *Book of Were-Wolves* (1865) — The Public Domain Review

An Anglican clergyman whose bibliography contains more than 1,200 works, including more than 100 books, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) was “the last man who knew everything”, in Matthew Walther’s borrowed phrase, whose interests overflowed library shelves: “philology, anthropology, folklore, children’s stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater.” Born in Exeter in 1834, he grew up traveling abroad with his family, before going up to Clare College, Cambridge, after which he took holy orders. As a teacher, he was eccentric, and it is said that he instructed students with a pet bat perched on his shoulder; as a writer, he was insatiable, routinely setting down three thousand words each day at his standing desk. In his memoir of childhood, he reveals that his voracious reading habit was a way of finding community where he otherwise couldn’t: “Looking back at this period of hobbledehoyhood, I can see that it bred in me a shrinking from society and a consequent love for isolation, and therewith a lack of conversational gifts. . . . Those whose words I really do value are to be found in books, not in small talk on food, motors, lawn-tennis, bridge and novels”.