The Case of the Light Fantastic Toe, Vol. III: The Romantic Ballet and Signor Maestro Cesare Pugni, as well as their survival by means of Tsarist Russia: A chronicle and source book (Volume 3)

Recounts the life and career of the Italian composer Cesare Pugni (1802-1870), who worked in Milan, Paris, and London prior to going to St. Petersburg. During the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s he produced the music for most of the new ballets at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London and at the Bolshoi Theatre. He worked with the greatest ballet-masters of the 19th c., including Jules Perrot, Paul Taglioni, Arthur Saint-Léon, and Marius Petipa. He composed over 300 ballets, including Ondine (1843), La Esmeralda (1844) and The Pharaoh's Daughter (1862).

Called "The Last of the Courtly Poets," Donald Sidney-Fryer (b. 1934) continues the tradition of California Romantic Poetry whose luminaries include Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Nora May French and Clark Ashton Smith while standing in the long shadow of that other Courtly Poet, Edmund Spenser, author of the Elizabethan epic romance The Faerie Queene. Foremost among his original works are the Songs and Sonnets Atlantean series (first series, 1971; second series, 2003; third series, 2005; collected as The Atlantis Fragments, 2008). Sidney-Fryer has also translated important works in French by Baudelaire, José-Maria de Heredia, and Aloysius Bertrand. His bio-bibliography of Clark Ashton Smith, Emperor of Dreams (1976), forms the cornerstone of Smith studies, along with his seminal essay on Smith's life and work, "The Sorcerer Departs." As a performing artist, Donald Sidney-Fryer's recitation of poems by Spenser, Baudelaire, Sterling and Smith (sometimes with lute) pay homage to his masters in the ancient craft of enchauntment.