Page turner: The best hidden bookish gems to read this winter

Why do we need to read what everybody else is reading? Support independent and speciality presses this chilly season by picking up one of these fantastic tomes, writes Michael Dirda

Shopping online means you have access to whole other publishers that usually wouldn’t get the floorspace in a traditional brick and mortar shop (Handout)

Come the Christmas gift-giving season, remember that you don't need to buy the same books that everyone else is buying. If you're going online anyway, take a few minutes to browse the offerings of the smaller, independent publishers and speciality presses. Here's a sampling of what you might discover.

In League with Sherlock Holmes, edited by Edgar Award-winners Laurie R King and Leslie S Klinger, is the latest collection from Pegasus Books of "stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes canon". Among this year's 17 writers – one for each of the steps on the stairs at 221B Baker Street – are Joe Hill, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Martin Edwards, Joe and Kasey Lansdale, and Lisa Morton.

Connoisseurs of the 007 movies will covet The Lost Adventures of James Bond by Mark Edlitz, a substantial, illustrated volume that covers "unrealised, out-of-print, or largely forgotten Bond tales". These include an unmade Timothy Dalton film that revealed how Bond became a Double-O agent, a Casino Royale play, the animated series James Bond Jr, various novelisations and even some comic books.

Speaking of Bond, James Bond, the Folio Society has been issuing a uniform set of the original Ian Fleming novels with atmospheric illustrations by Fay Dalton, most recently On Her Majesty's Secret Service. However, this autumn the publishers wisely decided to honour Fleming's only work for young people, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, by producing a facsimile of its first edition. John Burningham's winsome illustrations have never looked so winsome. Fergus Fleming also contributes an informative essay about the creation of his uncle's children's classic.

To paraphrase the March sisters of Little Women, it wouldn't be Christmas – or Hanukkah – without any art books. The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler examines the relationship between the prickly American painter and the muse-mistress who modelled for his haunting Symphonies in White. Margaret F MacDonald, this Yale book's main author, argues that the two formed a symbiotic partnership, while other distinguished scholars pursue the image of "the woman in white" during the late Victorian era.

Elegance needn't be expensive. Introduced by antiquarian bookseller Rebecca Romney, Projections reprints a dozen science-fiction stories, each as a separate booklet tidily packaged together in a handsome box. The stories themselves touch on topics that have rocked 2020 – climate change, race, illness – and include J G Ballard's The Intensive Care Unit, excerpts from Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Talents and Frederik Pohl and C M Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and work by Mark Twain, Mary Griffith, Pablo Capanna and others. It is a lovely production from publishers Hingston and Olsen.

Like other fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I thought that Disney pulled the plug unfairly on the film John Carter. By contrast, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc does the author and reader proud with a sumptuous "deluxe manuscript edition" of the original 1912 novel A Princess of Mars. The protective case encloses not just the book itself, augmented with numerous illustrations by Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel and many others, but also several extras, most notably facsimile pages from Burroughs's original manuscript of this iconic planetary romance.

Ghost stories at Christmas go back to the Victorian era, but this is 2020, so why not take a detour into some non-English speaking spookiness?

A revered figure in science-fiction circles, Richard Lupoff died earlier this year, but Surinam Turtle Press/Ramble House has brought out a fourth collection of his enthusiastic introductions to quaint volumes of forgotten lore, neglected popular fiction. Writer, Volume 4 consists of affectionate, easygoing pieces about, for example, Frank Belknap Long's John Carstairs: Space Detective, Robert W Chambers’s The Tracer of Lost Persons and Clare Winger Harris’s Away from the Here and Now.

Classic whodunits have long offered temporary escapes whenever the world is too much with us – like now. Crippen and Landru, the go-to publisher for criminous short-story collections, has just brought out Hot Cash, Cold Clews: The Adventures of Lester Leith, which reprints some of the 1930s pulp escapades of a Raffles-like con artist imagined by the young Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner, of course, went on to create the defence lawyer-detective Perry Mason, whose 1942 outing, The Case of the Careless Kitten, reappeared last year as an American Mystery Classic from Penzler Publishers. More recent AMC titles reintroduce Anthony Boucher's 1940 The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, Vincent Starrett's 1934 The Great Hotel Murder, Ellery Queen’s 1932 The Egyptian Cross Mystery, and Todd Downing’s 1935 Vultures in the Sky, this last one focusing on an impossible murder on a train travelling through the Mexican desert. (For more about Downing, check out Coachwhip Publications, which champions his work or my 2015 column about him.)

Almost any paperback from New York Review Books makes an excellent stocking stuffer, though it would be a tight squeeze for the latest, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and JR, respectively the Mount Everest and K2 of modern fiction. Even Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo look up in awe at these towering masterpieces. More manageable is Richard Howard's pocket-size RH Loves HJ, a collection of witty verse-homages to Henry James, Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman. Notting Hill Editions, distributed by NYRB, offers similarly compact volumes of unusual prose, such as Happy Half-Hours, the selected writings of AA Milne, who was a dab hand at the light essay and not merely the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. Notting Hill’s other eclectic titles spotlight Georges Perec, Osip Mandelstam, fishing and dolls.

Ghost stories at Christmas go back to the Victorian era, but this is 2020, so why not take a detour into some non-English speaking spookiness? Okamoto Kido: Master of the Uncanny brings together a dozen eerie tales, reminiscent of Lafcadio Hearn's classic Kwaidan, written in the 1920s and now persuasively translated by Nancy H Ross for Kurodahan Press. In The Green Frog God, a warrior discovers – a common occurrence in Asian supernatural fiction – that his young wife is a demon. Or is she? Another horrifying amphibian appears in Jean Lorrain’s The Toad, part of Echoes of a Natural World, published by First to Knock Books. This anthology, edited by Michael P Daley, comprises "tales of the strange and estranged", several by Decadent writers like Marcel Schwob and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, who explore the disconnect between human beings and nature.

Richmond-based James D Jenkins and Ryan Cagle are the resurrection men behind Valancourt Books, which specialises in digging up forgotten classics of the gothic and grotesque. This December they showcase the ambitious, pioneering Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. None of this anthology's unsettling fiction, much of it translated by the impressively multitalented Jenkins, has ever been available before in English. The tales themselves, like Robert Frost's woods, are lovely, dark and deep.

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