She is evil because when I stopped by her office for a chat, she forced me to look at four large cartons of books recently “weeded” from the university’s literature and criticism shelves, forced me, I tell you, with the magic words, “They’re free. Take as many as you want.”

Many (not all) were by little-known writers and critics of the 1890s-1920s. I knew of George Moore, of course, and also recognized the seagoing novelist William McFee, because I had been given one of his tramp-steamer novels, In the First Watch (1946), as a kid. Here was a book of his magazine pieces, Swallowing the Anchor (1925).

And the rest of my finds:

• Pierre and His People: Tales of the Far North (1894) by a Canadian, Gilbert Parker, who turns out to have been a British propagandist, working in secret to bring the United States into World War One.

• Avowals (1919) by George Moore, the Irish novelist and poet.

• Light Freights (1901) by W.W. Jacobs, best known for one of the most chilling short stories of all time, “The Monkey’s Paw,” but chiefly a writer of sea stories.

• The Phantom Future (1897), by Henry Seton Merriman, which Wikipedia says was the pen name of one Hugh Scott, a popular novelist at the turn of the last century.

One box also held a six-volume collection of the poems of Algernon Swinburne, the Decadent and somewhat small-p pagan poet of the Victorian era.

But someone had already spoken for them: the very Catholic Irish-American literature professor, a great admirer of Cardinal Newman, etc. Given Swinburne’s heretical and fairly erotic writing — lots of sex and death — you might say he was an original Goth — is this a window into Professor X’s secret kinky side?