The Case for Spirit Photography. With Corroborative evidence by experienced researchers and photographers.

CONAN DOYLE, Sir Arthur.

London: Hutchinson & Co. [1922]

First edition. 8vo. 216x140mm. pp. x, 11-110 [1 advert, 1bl]. Illustrated with thirty one black and white photographs. Original wrappers bound into modern blue cloth boards. Some chipping and tears to wrappers and slight toning and soiling in places but overall a very good copy of a rare book in which Conan Doyle got himself entangled in a celebrated spiritualist fraud. 

In 1922, the spirit photographer William Hope was investigated by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and found to have been creating, by fraudulent means, images of what he claimed were ghosts and other spirit forms. The SPR’s findings were published by Harry Price in a pamphlet entitled Cold Light on Spiritualistic "Phenomena" and this led eighty-four members to resign en masse from the Society. The leader of this walkout was Arthur Conan Doyle who felt that, in casting doubt on spirit photography, the SPR was undermining belief in spiritualism altogether. Doyle described Price’s pamphlet as “sewage”. A somewhat more measured response is contained in this short book, The Case for Spirit Photography, which provides a forthright defence of William Hope supported by numerous photographs and “conclusive proof” in the form of first hand testimony from witnesses to Hope’s photographic experiments. But the truth is that Doyle had been had. And, it must be said, he had form in this field, most famously with the Cottingley Fairies but also in his insistence that Houdini’s extraordinary magic tricks were due to spirit phenomena even after Houdini had explained (to Doyle himself) that they were indeed just tricks and illusions.

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