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Meet the Book
This is the book’s own stage: Vlad III himself — from the portrait at Ambras Castle, painted about 1560 after a lost original from his lifetime — stands on the stage while William Wilkinson’s 1820 Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia is read whole, aloud, in Alan’s voice. Vlad walks only a few of its pages — a father and a son in the first chapter — and this book says so plainly, on its face. But one of its footnotes is the most consequential sentence in the whole Dracula story: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil… a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning.” Stoker read this book, copied that footnote into his notes, and took his Count’s name out of it. This is the book the name came from. The bookstore barcode rides the preview — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
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Preview · Page 2 of 2
What’s Inside
- Wilkinson’s 1820 Account, whole: the Disclaimer and Preface, Chapters I–IX — the land, its government, its people and its history, with the Dracula father and son standing in Chapter I — the General Observations, Appendix Nos. 1–5, and the Footnotes as collected at the end of the book — Footnote 5 is the “Dracula means Devil” note itself.
- About 6.0 hours of narration — Alan reads the 1820 text aloud, page by page, in a reading room you can follow with your eyes, while Vlad III stands talking on the stage.
- The book’s pictures — the Ambras portrait, the woodcut title page of the German pamphlet of 1488 (the oldest portrait of him that survives), and the 1499 title page, dining among the impaled, cross behind him on the stage.
- THE SET IS COMPLETE — BOTH VOLUMES — Volume Two, the witnesses around the name, is out now: the German pamphlet of 1463 in a new English translation made for this edition, Samuelson’s history chapter (1882), and Gerard’s chapters on Roumanian death-customs and superstition (1888), where the nosferatu walks.
This book is about a man, not a monster. Vlad III of Wallachia — Dracula, “son of the dragon,” so called after his father — was born about 1431 and died in 1476 or 1477. No life of him was ever written in English in the old time, so this book is built the way the evidence stands: from witnesses, and every witness is named. This first volume is William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (London, 1820), whole and in his own words; Wilkinson was Britain’s consul resident at Bucharest, and his book is the first great English account of Vlad’s own country. The record is two-sided, and this book does not settle it. The narration is a synthesized reading (Piper — Alan) of that text, made for this edition. Editor: Franklin Langston.
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