This collection of new short stories was published in 1995 by Philomel Books which is now a children’s imprint of Penguin Books but at the time was a division of the Putnam and Grosset Group, Philomel does seem to have had a varied history of owners over the years since it was formed by Ann Beneduce in 1980 taking the poetic name for a nightingale and has always specialised in children’s titles which I hadn’t realised when I picked it off the shelves to read. Frankly the only reason I own the book is that it contains the first printing of the Terry Pratchett story ‘Once and Future’, I used to buy various anthologies just to track down Pratchett short stories but since 2012 when ‘A Blink of the Screen’ was published which gathered presumably all his fiction short stories together in one volume I’ve stopped the hunt. Pratchett’s story tells the tale of the pulling of a sword from the stone only in his version it’s controlled by a time traveller who has built an electromagnet into the rock so that he could control who succeeded, needless to say his plan doesn’t work out a expected. Interestingly in ‘A Blink of The Screen’ Pratchett states:

There’s a lot more of this deep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in Camelot, edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I’d wanted to write it for nearly ten years, I really ought to dig out those old discs again…

Sadly he didn’t live to have another go at it.

Of the nine other stories, and one song by Jane Yolen, the only other author I have heard of is Anne McCaffrey, famous for her Dragon Riders of Pern series of novels, and her offering ‘Black Horses for a King’ is probably the best of the collection, closely followed by Pratchett. Frankly the McCaffrey story is strong partly because she largely ignored the brief and simply wrote a good short story with nothing to make it Camelot apart from the leader of the warriors being called Lord Artos, which is probably close enough to Arthur to be included. The story is actually the first part of the novel ‘Black Horses for a King’ by McCaffrey which came out in 1996 so either she was inspired to continue the tale, and develop it into the story of the early days of British cavalry, in a way that Pratchett considered doing with his contribution or she was already working on the novel and simply extracted part of it when asked to supply something for this collection.

The real joy in the book are the lovely illustrations by Winslow Pels who has just the right amount of mystical whimsy for the book. The one above is for ‘Excalibur’ by Anne E Crompton who was sixty five when she wrote this story and a well established writer of children’s stories although this is the only example of her work I own, I quite enjoyed it but not enough to seek out any of her other works.

The other stories included along with Amesbury Song by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple are:

• The Changing of the Shrew by Kathleen Kudlinski
• Wild Man by Diana L Paxton
• Gwenbwyfar by Lynne Pledger
• Holly and Ivy by Jaes D Macdonald and Debra Doyle
• The Raven by Nancy Springer
• All the Iron of Heaven by Mark W Tiedemann
• Our Hour of Need by Greg Costikyan

I cannot find any examples of this book being reprinted after coming out in 1995, so I’m guessing it wasn’t a great seller and as the best parts are available elsewhere it has probably had its day.