![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I was not surprised to find every wall of every room of his house and garage covered with shelves of books, some double-banked. His monograph on The Broadside Ballad, (2) his detailed case study of the printer John Pitts, (3) and his wide-ranging The History of Street Literature, (4) were volumes that on the one hand developed systematically the sleuthing of earlier folk song scholars and antiquarians, such as Frank Kidson, and on the other complemented the discourse of his Marxist contemporaries, such as A. Leslie Shepard's other label for himself-'a bit of a back-room boy'-is perhaps more appropriate, for, in a quiet, unassuming way, he wrote himself into every folklorist's bibliography with his ground-breaking scholarship, which focused around vernacular and popular print culture and ephemera. In his adopted home in the Irish Republic he confessed himself to be both a recluse and an outsider. Even on a modern housing estate, Leslie managed to create an aura of mystery appropriate to the editor of The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories (1977) and How to Protect Yourself against Black Magic and Witchcraft (1978). However, house Number One was not to be seen until my wife parted an overgrown leylandii hedge to reveal it hiding among the shadows. ![]() On a bright May morning in 1997, I made the first of several visits to renew my acquaintance with an old friend, Leslie Shepard, with whom I had conversed and corresponded since the late 1960s, at his home in Stillorgan, Dublin. ![]()
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