There are sometimes where I wonder if my titles are good enough
and then I come across yet again the title The Book of Wonder by Baron Edward John Moreton Draw Plunkett Lord Dunsany. Then I realize no, no
the problem is not my titles, the problem is my byline. I don’t have a name like Winthrop Wetherbee the Third or Baron Edward John Moreton Draw Plunkett Lord Dunsany.

This chap:

Let me tell you a bit about him:

He was Anglo-Irish (guilty as a solid 30-40% of me is charged). Published some 90 volumes. Most folks know his 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Most folks point to him as the earliest fantasy writer because of that book. Right up there with Frankenstein. (Check out my talk with the Science Fiction Fantasy Alliance here and the address book for 251 Fantasy Literary Agents)

I like him, obviously, because he was born near Tara — the hill of the kings in Ireland and the namesake of my bonnie lass — in a castle named Dunsany (thus the name). Champion in chess. Champion in pistols, of which Chesterton would have been proud, though it seldom impresses this pacifist. But he did devise Dunsany’s chess:

Why yes, yes Dunsany’s chess is madness. That’s why he was over the chess puzzles at the London Times for awhile. What’s most notable about this variant is that it uses no fairy pieces — none from a keystone fairy tale writer.

Folks called him Eddie. Kin to Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, martyred Archbishop of Armagh, the unionist Sir Horace Plunkett, and the Papal Court politician George Count Plunkett whom they sentenced to death for the 1916 uprising.

Dude was 6’4″ tall. Second Lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards (Second Boer War). He heard about the Easter Rising of 1916, rushed into help, got a bullet to the skull and survived. Got patched up and returned to duty.

During the Irish War of Independence, Dunsany was charged with violating the Restoration of Order in Ireland Regulations, tried by court-martial on 4 February 1921, convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine of 25 pounds or serve three months in prison without labour. 

— wiki

He was buddies with Yeats and Lady Gregory, French and Russel, Gogarty and Colum, Ledwidge and Lavin. And thus central to the Irish literary revival.

Taught in Greece as the Byron Professor, toured the States (including California), and died of the now rather curable Appendicitis at 79 in 1957. It’s rather wild to think that had that not happened and he lived until 92 — entirely possible — he would have lived to see Woodstock (or at least the era of British pirate radio).

Horseman, hunter, big game hunter in Africa, and campaigned for animal rights in the RSPCA (the equivalent of the ASPCA here, the tomb of the founder is just blocks from my house here in Greenwood — and yes, I refuse to use the hyphen). He also wrote plays and his work was adapted for stage, radio, television, cinema, music, audiobook, and video games.

Anyways.

The point is we should all find a byline that looks at us as lovingly as Baron Edward John Moreton Draw Plunkett Lord Dunsany’s byl looks at him.