his publisher, Philip Unwin. Aickman engineered a change to the rules to require all members to conform to agreed IWA principles, and in early 1951 Rolt and others were excluded from membership. Aickman published two nonfiction books on the waterways in 1955. Nevertheless, the IWA has been one of the most successful conservation organisations in British history, succeeding in restoring and reopening much of the original canal network. Literary work Fiction As a writer, Aickman is best known for the 48 "strange stories" that were published in eight volumes, one of them posthumous. The American collection Painted Devils consists of revised versions of stories which had previously appeared in other books. After three of his stories appeared in We Are for the Dark (1954), occasional short stories appeared in magazines and anthologies during the rest of the 1950s, but Aickman's involvement with his many societies kept him from any writing at length. The year 1964 thus came as a watershed, with a slightly mystical novel, The Late Breakfasters, a story collection (Dark Entries) and the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, which he edited for eight volumes. "Those, if any, who wish to know more about me", Aickman wrote in 1965, "should plunge beneath the frivolous surface of The Late Breakfasters." Opening as a comedy of manners, its playful seriousness slowly fades into an elegiac variation on the great Greek myth of thwarted love. His own subsequent collections were Powers of Darkness (1966), Sub Rosa (1968), Cold Hand in Mine (1976), Tales of Love and Death (1977) and Intrusions (1980). In the essay that Aickman wrote in response to receiving a World Fantasy Award, he wrote: Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils featured dust jacket drawings by acclaimed gothic illustrator Edward Gorey. August Derleth proposed that Arkham House should publish a book of Aickman's best stories, but was unable to meet the author's demands and withdrew the proposal. The original collections of short stories are quite scarce, though copies of the U.S. edition of Cold Hand in Mine are very plentiful. The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (New York: Arbor House, 1987) was a novella which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Aickman had hoped to have the work illustrated by Edward Gorey. According to Mike Ashley, "Aickman bemoaned the lack of publisher interest in this work of about 35,000 words." Tartarus Press published a new collection of