'If you like black humour you will like Clay's eclectic compilation.'
The Times

'It's a fun account of the more lurid side of Victorian life that, if you'll forgive me for mentioning Christmas this early, would make a good stocking filler.'
Liverpool Echo

A summer's afternoon, 1889. In a hotel in the sedate Welsh resort of Llandrindod Wells, holidaymaker Mr T.J. Osborne is preparing to catch the train home. The day is warm. The window is open. A fully-grown African lion leaps in.

In the animated few minutes that follow, a startled Mr Osborne gets a crash-course in lion-taming, and after holding the ferocious beast at bay with a chair, becomes the star of a brisk article in the next morning's newspapers.

The report of this unlikely encounter is just one of countless extraordinary tales which have lain unseen and unknown in the dusty recesses of newspaper libraries across the nation.

Journalist Jeremy Clay has delved into the British Library archives to find the long-lost stories that enthralled and appalled the Victorians. The result is The Burglar Caught By A Skeleton and Other Singular Stories from the Victorian Press, a treasure trove of bizarre, quirky, pathetic and grisly stories from the newspapers of the age. They include:
* An unseemly brawl between a bearded lady and a snake charmer.
* A fisherman who netted the body of his long-lost brother.
* A dozy inventor, killed by his own Wallace and Gromit-style contraption.
* A widow living with a corpse, to claim his pension.
* A python, stoned to death by boys in Middlesbrough.
* A cricket match setting a team of one-legged men against players with one arm.
* A drunk monkey, that smashed up a bar after being refused more booze.
About the Author: At first, Jeremy Clay wanted to be a soldier. A war hero. The kind of steel-jawed Tommy from the comic books, who single-handedly storms a machine gun post to anguished cries of aieeeeeeeee from the enemy.

But after losing a primary school fight to a younger kid who grew up to be a poet, he quietly changed tack.

In his early 20s he set out on a short but satisfying career as a layabout, which segued neatly into a stint in an also-ran indie band. No, you haven't heard of them. They released two albums - the second selling even worse than the first - before splitting up, to general indifference.

Jeremy has been a journalist since the mid-1990s. As a reporter on a local newspaper, he interviewed people with gripes about bins or buses and encouraged them to say they were either livid or devastated, sometimes both.

He also covered global news stories. He reported on the handover of Hong Kong, for instance, albeit from a suburban front garden in the Midlands, where a Union flag was being solemnly lowered by a man who had once lived in the Far East.

Jeremy has been a features writer and a TV critic and is the author of two books: Leicester Til We Die, the story of the emotionally-charged final season at Filbert Street, and Blokes and Balls (New Holland).

He is a dad-of-two, a dog-owner, a drummer and a devotee of alliteration, which he wishes began with a d. He lives in Leicester but doesn't know Kasabian or Sue Townsend, although he did once shake hands with the singer from Showaddywaddy.