Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book

"Canon Alberic's Scrap-book"
Short story by M.R. James
Illustration by James McBryde
Text available at Wikisource
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Horror short story
Publication
Published inNational Review
Media typePrint (magazine)
Publication date1895

Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book is a horror story by British writer M. R. James, written in 1892 or 1893 and first published in 1895 in the National Review. It is his earliest known horror story and the first (along with "Lost Hearts") to be read aloud to the "Chitchat Society" at Cambridge, where many of his stories made their public debut. It was subsequently included in his first short story collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), though the malevolent entity is a demon rather than a ghost.

Some have considered James' later story "An Episode of Cathedral History" (first published in The Cambridge Review in 1914 and later included in the 1919 collection A Thin Ghost and Others) to be a sequel or companion piece, as it features a similar creature, obliquely suggested to be the mate of the one encountered in "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book".