Ahhhahhh! Sidney Sime and the Lost Beasts that Never Were
(part of a series of ongoing notes regarding my research and adventures centered around compiling a biography/art book chronicling the life & work of Sidney H. Sime (1865–1941).
In 1923 Godwin & Tabb of London published a short book by Sidney Sime and his musician friend Josef Holbrooke, titled Bogey Beasts. The book was an interesting cross-discipline collaboration, with Sime contributing 15 full-page drawings of what we would today call “cryptids” along with an oddball poem for each creature. Holbrooke then added a musical score to each poem.
The book today is a prized collector’s item. There are a handful of copies in the libraries of the world, and every now and again a copy comes up for sale at a weighty price:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/156046331665...
Some kind soul uploaded a series of photos of a 1975 reprint of the book, albeit out of order, to archive.org — https://archive.org/details/bogey-beasts_sidney-sime/
Most of the drawings in Bogey Beasts originally appeared in The Sketch magazine in serial form, titled “Beasts that Might have Been” (sans poems and music) from Jan. 18 through March 22, 1905. There’s a few differences, though. The Sketch series included 12 beasts. Two of them were not included in the 1923 book. Several creatures were re-named for the book, and all of them received subtle or overt re-working in regards to shading, addition of background detail, etc.
In the forthcoming Sime anthology, we can add to all of this the addition of what I call “bonus beasts.” There is a small sketchbook in the Sime Gallery in Worplesdon which contains “work in progress” beasts that never made the cut. In addition, there are several incredible weird stories about beasts which also didn’t make the final cut. A particularly fascinating example is “The Wilone,” which was actually reproduced (in fairly poor quality) on page 91 of Paul Skeeters’ Sidney Sime: Master of Fantasy, published in 1978. This image includes the caption “Untitled Fantasy,” but if one removes the mat-board of the original, there is a title inked at the bottom: “THE WILONE.”
Placing this creature with the story which accompanies the image feels pretty satisfying after their separation of at least a century.
Other creatures received finished poems with rough sketches suggesting what they would have been. One of my favorites is “The Ahhah,” or, as it’s called in the sketch, “Ahhhahhh.”
It’s so fun to tie these threads together and I hope you enjoy hearing about the process as it moves along. I hope to be more active with updates here as I go. So stay tuned for more Sime-ology!
