 Hi there. Today on Typical Books we're going to talk about vampire nonfiction. You can tell I've come prepared with my coffin from upstairs. It used to be a backdrop for my videos and I don't believe it was with my older video, Episode 13, which we'll get to in a minute, but it is returning for this particular video because why not? If this is your first time visiting, welcome and be sure to subscribe. I don't always do nonfiction books, but I do have a few coming up like true crime if that's the thing you like to see the most. If you're a horror fan and this is new to you, I am so glad you're here. This goes double if you have a booktube channel like myself and like Jason from Jason's Weird Reads who recommended this idea then let me know in the comments below. Now you may have seen these on my recent bookshelf tour, some of them anyway. I had a note from Jason at Jason's Weird Reads about the vampire books on my shelves and he had asked if I had a video that covered his vampire books and I always elude to the other two videos where I talk about vampire books, specifically Vampire Nation. Vampire Nation by Arlene Russo, which I'll talk about here. I do a little deeper of a discussion on the dedicated video, but that is way back when in the ether, in the eons ago, in the beginning of time, it's before typical books, 13. Episode 13 is when I talked about Vampire Nation and I looked a little bit something like this. Okay well maybe I looked about exactly the same but I had a little more of a stilted delivery and also my phone was very garbage. Very much shit. So yeah. Now that my camera is not a bit shit and maybe I am a little bit more comfortable being in front of the camera and six years have passed since that video and although the the prop is not bad. Yeah. Batilda would be proud. But being a fan of vampires, being someone who's written a vampire novel who is currently writing a second vampire novel and who does have a few of the gems of her collection left on her shelf, these are reference books that I used in writing those things in just enjoying vampire stuff, in wanting to expand my nonfiction vampire knowledge every chance I get. I had had 25 books on vampires and vampire lore and nonfiction and fiction and just the vampire taxonomy and upon the time, around the time that I picked up the book vampire taxonomy was when I started culling that collection because there was a lot of duplicate information. There's only so much information available on vampires, right? So sure there's new vampires coming out in fiction. Entire books don't need to be written about them, I don't think. So there is a lot of duplication in that and there even is in the very small clutch that I still have and I'll talk about some of the books that I used to have that were very important that were kind of hard to let go but they were books that I did have the information in the books that I still own and there are one or two books out there that I still want to own so we'll get into my my little wish list. This is of course the book that sparked this video aside from Jason's request so thank you so much Jason. I actually heard of Jason from Jason's where it reads ages ago when I listened to the Darkness Dwells podcast as a big fan and really enjoyed that and then I heard a familiar voice on the Great Lakes Horror Company podcast and it was Jason doing interviews and then I discovered he had a booktube channel so go ahead and check out Jason's weird reads here on booktube. Huge fan and like-minded and double thank you for bringing this topic up and urging me to do a video immediately and rectify this situation. Let's talk about vampire nonfiction. Right away into the wish list. This is Ghost from the Enchanted World Collection. The collection also it has many titles. There was a green one that was Fairies and Owls, a red one that was Dragons and the black one is Night Creatures and Night Creatures was black like this so the two black ones I really have to pick them up. I had found this at Black Squirrel Bucks here in Ottawa and all of this collection got destroyed by mold and I'll do a video another time about the books that I have lost. Sadly we lost a lot of books to mold and flooding and things like that at one point and I also had a huge purge of books garbage bags of books unfortunately I know it hurts but hurt me too. The Enchanted World books are all very beautiful. This is of course the Ghosts edition but the Night Creatures one was so full of vampire goodness. I just need that book back. It is a beautiful book. It's a book that's irreplaceable and it's a book that I actually need in my collection. I'm not gonna spend much time on it but Vampire Nation by Arlene Russo. Now this is a fantastic book. It's a really good nonfiction book and not only dealing with vampires of lore in nonfiction but real actual vampires that live here and now. There are sanguine vampires or psychic vampires are all breeds of vampires that actually live and walk among us. Now there are very big differences between Dracula and even Vlad and our favorite vampires that we know so well and our Edwards. Now this is I'd say indispensable as far as modern vampire thinking. Not really in the same vein. No pun intended. I used to go and bite a vampire handbook by Kevin Jackson and that was a flashy covered book that I mean it was it was an interesting book and I kind of wish I could flip through it again to refresh my memory as to what it is that outweighed it among the books that I do own but I do remember it having this flashy cover that reminded me quite a bit of this vampire's book. Vampire Nation was similar but even though I don't think Bite was about real vampires. Here's another book that's being on the show so you can watch the more recent review of Vampires of Lore and this is a beautiful book. You've seen the inside of it no doubt. Now this of course was a gift to me by A.P. Sylvia, the author and the publisher Schaefer House I believe. They had sent it along for a review and I did enjoy it very much. It's a great addition to my collection although like I've said many of these books do have a lot of the same information. This is a nice quick little compendium of a lot of that information so I really do enjoy Vampires of Lore and I love the looks of it too. Another vampire book I used to own was Vampire's The Occult Truth by Constantinos and it is probably a Llewellyn publishing book considering that author does publish a lot with Llewellyn publishing. I don't own it anymore but it reminded me of Vampires of Lore in a way because it was so lovingly crafted. That book had a similar look. Now that book it does deal with the walking, breathing, sanguine vampires as well and so did vampires too much like Vampire Nation but it is smaller and it just didn't it had all of the things of Vampire Nation and something like Vampires of Lore have in it and I didn't hang on to it although it would be a cool oddity to have right now. This is Vampire the Complete Guide to the World of the Undead by Manuela Dan Masetti and I love this book. It is just gorgeous. It has beautiful, beautiful artwork throughout the entire thing. It has a wonderful run through history from the beginning to now and a lot of dark tourism inspired photographs. It is basically a travelogue of terror. Readers of Rue Marv will will understand that terminology. You could follow the map as it were from here to Dracula Country. I love reading this book and I've reread it several times. It is a coffee table book in many respects. It is a beautiful addition to a vampire non-fiction library because it does run through everything from the historical to the literary and it is just a luscious book to read. If you're looking for an all-around compendium of vampire knowledge and you want something that is a little more coffee table and beautiful to look at not so much heavy on the reading although there is a lot of knowledge contained here. It's just beautiful. I highly recommend this book. A book that is as beautiful in lore to me not so much in the pictures is a recounting of Countess Elizabeth Bathory. I had a couple of Bathory books. Blood Countess not the new fiction one or non-fiction one by one of her ancestors and NPR commentator. I had owned a very girthy, very studious academic tome on Elizabeth Bathory and if I can remember the title of infamous lady the true story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory by Kimberly Kraft. That was thick and it was wonderful and it was helpful and I'm sure there's lots of books on the Countess. I need a new book on the Blood Countess. It's not on my wish list because I don't know what one to pick. I'd have to go in a bookstore and flip through them and see if one really strikes my fancy. That book got lent out sadly and never returned but hey it probably went to someone who needed it more than I did. This unassuming little tome is a beautiful little vampire taxonomy. It would sit nicely on the shelves of any laboratory. Vampire Taxonomy by Meredith Warner. Now I love this book. It's fun. It is just a fun read. It's got pretty much anything you'd want to know at a basic glance. It reads almost like a like a a kids how-to book or an sas survival guide or something like that or I don't know not quite like a Peterson Field Guide but more like yeah an sas survival guide or something or a Foxfire book. How-to. It looks like a how-to but it is wonderful. It treats vampires as if they really do exist and I always love that angle when it comes to our vampire friends. Know your vampires. Identifying and interacting with the modern-day blood sucker. Think Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and True Blood or Disfiction? Think again. Now this book is of course not serious. It is a non-fiction book in that it covers vampires in a non-fiction manner. It's not a story. It's not a literary tale but it is fiction in that it stays in the Rommel fiction. If you're looking for something to do with psychic fires, sanguine vampires as I said. Vampire Nation by Arlene Russo is really one of the books to go for that. This is a vampire taxonomy of the fictional vampires we know. From sparklers to split jaws to just our plain old bloodsuckers and our sexy club goths all that stuff. All those vampires that we've seen in movies, they're here. And that brings me to one of my wish lists. Something that I'm gonna actually buy. Aside from the Night Creatures book from Time Life, Intended World series, I'm going to pick up Vampire Forensics. I'm covering the origins of an enduring legend by Mark Collins Jenkins. Now that book, the cover looks wonderful. Everything about it looks wonderful. It looks like it will have everything that I want in a vampire tome. And I think it'll be a good addition to my collection because I'm always looking for something that will go along with the next two books. This has been indispensable in my writing. The Vampire Encyclopedia Matthew Bunson. I've also pulled this out while watching movies and reading other books to see what the consensus is on things like Alampyr, Lamia, Mina Murray, Ovid and Owl, Rosaries, Shadows. I mean, it is a vampire encyclopedia. I have dog-eared so many pages in this. There's so much important lore contained within this book and I've used it, like I said, countless times when cross-referencing referring to things. If someone mentions being able to vampire, I will actually pick up this book before going online and see what the vampire encyclopedia has to say about it. Am I the only person that does that that picks up books before going online? I don't always do it. I go online a lot to research things but a lot of the time I know it's in a book and I know where to look for it. I don't need to spend 20 minutes being sidetracked online. I can just go straight to the source. Aside from that and Vampires of Lore, there's a book that I used to own that reminded me of Vampires of Lore. Vampires and Lore and Legend by Montague Summers. Beautiful book. Very beautiful book but again it was really duplicative among the books that I own. The vampire encyclopedia covered a lot of stuff in a concise manner and the Enchanted World series has a fantastic bibliography at the backs of those books so I'm gonna pick up Night Creatures and see what it refers to. Those were produced in like 84 so any of the books that they mention are going to be old and from my point of view trustworthy tomes not just these sometimes books that are created for coffee tables and revenue. Okay last but not least it is the biggest book I own on vampires and it's probably the biggest book that a lot of people own about vampires and this is Vampires by David J. Skull. So Vampires Encounters with the Undead edited with commentary by David J. Skull. It contains so much information it's hard it's really large and unwieldy right here but you can see that it is really about the sidebars. If you're looking for one stop shop for all of the short stories and such that have shaped vampire fiction and vampire lore as we know it vampires is the number one book. Skull has other books out that are very very very important as far as vampire fiction and non-fiction go and I highly recommend his books. We have here Carmilla Sheridan Le Fanu. This has gone through several editions. They go through parts of the historical evidence romantic and Victorian vampires. Vampires in the 20th century and there's more stories after this point because you're going through older stories like Dracula's guest Carmilla, Varni the Vampire, Count Magus. Those sorts of things begin into stories eventually by authors that we may be better entwined with already like Algernon Blackwood and we've got Robert Block, Sir Arthur Kenan Doyle, Fritz Lieber, Skull himself, David J. Schau and Caitlyn R. Kiernan. Vampires is probably my most favorite vampire book. It is maybe the most important because at the end of the day sorry to break it to you. Vampires don't exist not the way that they do in fiction so if you're looking for the number one compendium and want to sort of by osmosis create your own encyclopedic knowledge of vampires what they do can't do who they are who they're not reading through vampires gives you the ultimate basis of how vampires have grown within our history and you can really shape your own opinions at that in that way and that's the way I think is the best way to learn so maybe reading a lot of these books before having studied the classics is a backward way to go about it so studying those classics or at least having them handy in that book really is helpful when you're reading those vampire taxonomies, vampires encyclopedias and vampires of lore those sorts of things and then you can take it back to the source that goddamn book bit me anyhow on top of all of that I remember way back in the day when I had an account on vampirefreaks.com you might remember that website that was administered by someone named jet I was never really on there often because it was a lot after my time I was an adult when vampirefreaks was a thing so I didn't really spend time on there but I did peruse it often and I remember there was a an ask for a huge list of vampire books and I had provided a link to a fantastic list and I do believe that that giant list still exists in the vampirelibrary.com you can go to the non-fiction section of vampire library online and it will give you a bibliography like none other there are thousands of books on vampires thousands of vampire books I don't even know if my book is on there so I'm gonna have to check that out and add it if it's not but hey I highly recommend if none of these books strike your fancy or if they do or if you own them already and you want more like I do go to the vampirelibrary.com this is in no way sponsored I just think that that is the most beautiful page on the entire internet so there you have it between me wanting to replace night creatures to having one of the heaviest most bloodthirsty books on the planet in my possession so I'd like to think of this as a small culled and curated shortlist of some of the best vampire non-fiction out there for you and fiction if you can't vampires but it's got so much information in the sidebars that I would have to say that it counts as far as research non-fiction as well so thank you very much for watching I hope you enjoyed this particular show thank you to all my subscribers like Jason from Jason's Weird Reads thank you so much for suggesting this idea this uh was a super fun video and you can tell I've enjoyed it because I put it out within like 24 hours of the idea popping into your head so thank you so much Jason for that suggestion and of course thank you to everyone watching if there's something that you think I should read whether it's non-fiction vampire books or visceral extreme horror let me know in the comments below thank you so much for watching and have an ookey spooky day