In the writing of The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which would become his most famous work, it’s likely that Amalgam was inspired by Charles Dickens’ 1855 book, The Holly-Tree Inn, which shares a similar structure: guests at an inn pass the time during inclement weather by sharing tales. The combination of tales and interludes incorporates a wide range of folklore—not merely legends, myths, and fairy tales but also superstitions, riddles, ballads, dance, fortunetelling, folk art, and so forth.
Phineas Amalgam was both a collector and a creator of lore, and in Raconteur’s he uses a combination of his own stories and older Nagspeake tales of more mysterious provenance. The gambler’s tale, “The Ferryman,” is probably derived from a poem in Aunt Lucy’s Counterpane Book (“Crossing, Crossing”); “Three Kings” is recognizable as a version of Griffin Walter’s story of the same name, occasionally anthologized in other collections of Nagspeake lore; and “The Devil and the Scavenger” is believed to come not from Nagspeake at all, but from the itinerant peddlers who have passed through the city since time immemorial. Nagspeakers will recognize the protagonist of “The Unmappable House” as half of the inseparable pair from the anonymously authored The Tales of Troublewit and Pantin, but as far as we know this is the only Pantin story in which the boy appears without his shape-shifting iron sidekick. (This story, by the way, has been the root of a number of scholarly feuds over the years. One bar near City University still has a line painted down the middle of the main room thanks to a decades-old feud between scholars who can’t agree over what it means that Phineas Amalgam wrote himself into the book as a guest at the inn and then proceeded to have his character tell a Pantin story rather than any of the tales in the book that are more recognizably his own inventions. Some believe this was his admission that he is the author of The Tales of Troublewit and Pantin. Other folklorists will hit you in the face with whatever object’s closest for even suggesting this, as almost every one of them has a pet theory about the true identity of the Troublewit and Pantin author.)
In editing this edition, I did make one significant departure from the version Milo would have read. In my research into Phineas Amalgam for Wild Iron, I came upon a manuscript version of Raconteur’s dated 1932 in which the stories were arranged in a slightly different order than they were in the “slim red volume” Milo had been given. I have a pretty good idea why Amalgam rearranged them for that edition, but there’s evidence in his letters that suggests he regretted it. I’ve restored the 1932 order for this version. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the great debt I owe this collection for the influence it’s had on my own works set in the Roaming World. If you’d like to know more about the characters here and where to follow their trails in my other books, here are just a few suggestions. Find the man who sees the patterns in Bluecrowne and The Kairos Mechanism; in Bluecrowne and The Left-Handed Fate you can sail again with Melusine and Lowe (whose name, I’m sorry to say, Mr. Frost may have misremembered). You will find more High Walkers in The Broken Lands and lurking in the background in Bluecrowne; in Bluecrowne you will also meet an ancestor of Maisie’s and a few familiar peddlers. To find others like Jessamy, along with more tales of crossroads, read The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands; or pair The Broken Lands with Bluecrowne to meet others like Sorcha. Nagspeake’s self-aware iron is everywhere in the city, of course, but it’s most visible in The Left-Handed Fate and The Thief Knot. And lastly, many of my books are set in the Sovereign City of Nagspeake, but for peak exploring-the-place reading, you may enjoy The Left-Handed Fate and The Thief Knot most.
Kate Milford
Creve Coeur, Nagspeake, 2021
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book might represent the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. I’ve never not had fun writing a book, but Raconteur’s required the most puzzle-work I’ve had to do while putting a thing together, and since “short” is not my forte, writing all the individual tales was both a challenge and a delight. But this book took a lot of bandwidth, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help and encouragement and support of a truly wonderful network of people.
Firstly, always, most of all, all my gratitude and love to Nathan, Griffin, and Tess (and the auxiliary Milford team of Ed, Maxy, and Maz). I love you with all my heart. And Griffin, you were only four at the time, so you may or may not remember the night at a fancy-pants restaurant when you started to tell me about the King of Finding Things, the King of Opening Things, and the King of Tying Things, but thank you for telling me they existed and inviting me to write about them. The idea of bookbinding as fortunetelling became part of this story after Zane Morris (whose company Cradle makes notebooks from discarded materials and uses the proceeds from their sales to fund music workshops), showed me the beautiful branching thread patterns hidden in the center pages of his books. The reliquaries of Gaz of Feretory Street were inspired by actual objects made by an artist named Stan Gaz who I once met many years ago in New York. I’ve had the idea of a maker of reliquaries kicking around in my brain ever since.
