Edgar Allan Poe – A Wilderness of Dreams

A Wilderness of Dreams is a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’, an early science fiction tale about a balloon flight from Rotterdam to the moon that was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. After its first publication ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’ was revised and reprinted several times and renamed ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall’. A later version, which includes several earlier revisions and discards others, was published by Sea Urchin in 2001. From that 2001 version Sea Urchin has now lifted a dreamy, opiate passage that describes a scenery stretched into eternity in which, as Poe puts it: ‘Imagination, feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land’. The passage was illustrated by Ben Schot and published by Sea Urchin as ‘A Wilderness of Dreams’. This slim chapbook has been put together from a fine pick of papers and cut, folded, watercoloured and stitched by hand in a limited edition of 15 copies.