While M. R. James is best remembered as the author of thirty-four ghost stories, most of which have seldom been out of print, during his lifetime he was acknowledged as a leading authority on medieval manuscripts and biblical apocrypha. He published descriptions of the Western manuscripts of all the principal Cambridge libraries and several other significant collections and made an influential translation of the apocryphal New Testament in 1924. This antiquarian expertise is evident in all his stories and is explicit in the title of his first collection of supernatural tales, Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904). His deeply informed fascination with the past and its artifacts, particularly those written or drawn, not only generates a surface verisimilitude but is at the heart of his conception of the ghost story. In an uncharacteristically revealing moment of his memoir, Eton and King's: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, 1875-1925 (1926), James wrote of his dissertation, "I...