From the Files of Manifex Saltmarsh, Ph.D.

brought to you by

Smith-Smith: Discretion Guaranteed

Barjon Garth of the X Division

And

The Monks of Medmenham

in honor of our recently elected Letter Queen

Decadence…may very broadly be considered as implying a devotion to exquisitely crafted style in literature, and in life to the quest for new sensations, involving variously the exploration of the occult, the exotic, the sexually unorthodox, the bohemian way of life, and a taste for strange drugs.

– Arthur Machen

Woman performs a kind of duty when she endeavors to appear magical and supernatural, she should dazzle men and charm them; she is an idol who should be covered with gold in order to be worshiped. She should therefore borrow from all the arts the means of rising above nature in order to subjugate all hearts and impress all minds.

– Baudelaire

For thou thyself art thine own bait.

– John Donne

She was a houri at the court of Thanatos, and had learned her darkness in the Fuhrerbunker , just as I had learned mine among the legion of the damned.

“This is home.”

“Where the brink is?”

“That’s right.”

– Adam Hall

And enigmatically smiling,

In the mysterious night,

She dances for her own delight,

A shadow smiling

Back to a shadow in the night.

– Arthur Symons

I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread. Sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between us.

I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

– E. A. Poe

And the funny part was that even when you were with her, and even holding her as when you’re dancing together, man, oh, man, you were lonely for her even then.

– John Gilmore

It’s just now, a little piece of time that doesn’t fit, and that I want to keep forever.

– Leigh Brackett

He ended every meeting with her either by cursing her or admiring her – sometimes both.

– John Dickson Carr

He was conscious of the complete and irredeemable loss of the waking dream, in which the loss is itself part of the realization.

A waking dream, after all, never returned, and one did not communicate, unless unconsciously, the incommunicable.

– PM Hubbard

I’ve let myself be ruined aesthetically and, if you like, morally, for a plaster reproduction that wouldn’t take in a housemaid.

– Ngaio Marsh

She couldn’t speak. She was watching her little sister, mink coat spread behind her like a ballet dress, scrubbing blood from a polished floor.

– Dorothy Hughes

Hylas’s fate at the hands of Dryope and her nymphs will have been that of Leucippus or any of the sacred kings of the oak cult; namely to be dismembered and eaten by wild women.

– Robert Graves

I shall die, as I have lived, a victim of perverse and incurable habits.

– Charles Brockden Brown