The Candle of Dreams, another forgotten fiction book from Stoke-on-Trent. The author was local journalist, photographer and historian Ernest Warrillow. Warrillow was a fine local historian, whose History of Etruria (1953, third ed.) is now ridiculously expensive and needs to be brought back into print as an ebook, along with the best related pictures from his vast and surprisingly unpublished picture-archive.

But now I learn from an eBay listing that, in his retirement, Warrillow also wrote a book of stories for children. Judging by the two partial stories I’ve been able to see from this, via eBay pictures, The Candle of Dreams (1975) may lack a strong local flavour. But who knows? Perhaps there are stories in there that do feature local places and scenes?