or, the Modern Prometheus
London, John Dicks, 1884.

In Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, vol.III. 4to. Contemporary half straight-grain morocco lettered and ruled in gilt to spine.

An uncommon serialised edition of Shelley's classic of sci-fi horror; the volume also contains Percy Bysshe's Zastrozzi, both illustrated by the well-known illustrator Frederick Gilbert.

London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1928.

'Cheap Edition'. 8vo. Original orange cloth decorated and lettered in black. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.

Eleven early Poirot cases (including 'The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb' and 'The Kidnapped Prime Minister'), collected from their original magazine appearances in The Sketch and first published in book form by the Bodley Head in March 1924 for Christie's fourth book, and the earliest to gather her short fiction.

This is the 1928 "Cheap Edition," a third setting reduced to 2/- and to a smaller trim size than the original 7/6 first edition, in the second of two recorded binding states: red cloth bearing John Lane's monogram to cover and spine, with updated endpapers and copyright page, as distinct from an ostensibly transitional first state in blue cloth without these revisions, seemingly assembled in part from older printed stock ahead of a full reprint. The jacket abandons the original edition's W. Smithson Broadhead illustration, itself reprinted from a 1923 Sketch drawing, in favour of new artwork by Wyndham Payne (1884–1974), the self-taught English illustrator and printmaker best known for his Methuen jacket to The Wind in the Willows, who designed a run of Bodley Head covers for Christie in this period; his archive is now held at the V&A.

Vol.61 No.365
London, Newnes, May 1921.

8vo. Original pictorial wrappers.

Includes 'The Uncharted Coast. VI - A Worker of Wonders' by Arthur Conan Doyle and 'The Coming of Gowf' by P.G. Wodehouse.

, , 1923.

Oblong thick 4to. Firm blue cloth boards with riveted leather straps to spine, leather clasp to fore-edge present but inoperative.

An excellent wallpaper pattern book, dated the year Essex & Co. was acquired by Sanderson, and bringing together more than 330 designs, most printed on the reverse, spanning registered design numbers 2001 to 2338. The sequence opens with the firm's "cameoid" range: raised, textured papers for relief decoration in the manner of Anaglypta, before broadening into a much wider repertoire of pattern and colourwork. Stylistically the book moves fluidly between Arts & Crafts sensibilities, Art Nouveau line, and an emerging Art Deco or modernist idiom. Several designs feel so far ahead of their moment that a modern eye might place them a decade later, in the 1930s, a testament to how forward-looking the firm's output had become by this point.Essex & Co. was founded by Sir R. Walter Essex, who around 1893 brought the architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey on board to produce wallpaper designs for the firm over the following decades. A good number of the patterns in this book are either by Voysey's hand or clearly derivative of his style. The range is remarkably comprehensive, touching nearly every domestic setting and taste: dense floral chintzes in the Morris tradition sit alongside crisp modernist one- and two-tone colourways, while Chinese and Japanese influenced designs featuring birds and foliage, and faux-tile patterns intended for bathrooms, cluster particularly towards the back of the book. Essex & Co. built its reputation as a foremost name in "art wallpaper," and is arguably rivalled only by William Morris & Co. in terms of influence on British wallpaper design of the period.The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a substantial collection related to the firm, 62 works dated between 1850 and 1941, including several Voysey-designed papers produced by Essex & Co. that illustrate the collaboration referenced above, among them The Saladin (1897), The Merle, The Fairyland, Feudal, and Cibber (1901). These pieces, several gifted to the museum by Courtaulds Ltd, offer useful comparative material for dating and attributing designs in this pattern book, and situate it within the firm's broader design output from the 1890s through to its absorption by Sanderson in the 1920s.

London, Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1881.

First UK edition. 8vo. Original terracotta cloth stamped in black & gilt.

The third and final volume of Verne's non-fiction trilogy 'Celebrated Travels and Travellers,' following The Exploration of the World and The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century; this volume surveys the exploits of real nineteenth-century explorers across the Arctic, Africa and beyond.

London, Grant Richards, 1909.

'New and Cheaper Edition'. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to upper cover.

One of the author's posthumously published novels, relating the rivalry between two amateur astronomers in small-town American town who attempt to claim a surprisingly valuable comet.

comprising: The Great Fortune; The Spoilt City; Friends and Heroes
London, Heinemann, 1960; 1962; 1965.

3 vols. First editions, first impressions. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jackets, first 2 with price-stickers to inside front flaps.

The Balkan Trilogy is semi-autobiographical, drawing loosely on Olivia Manning's own wartime experiences with her husband, R. D. "Reggie" Smith, in Romania and Greece during the Second World War. Anthony Burgess, in his Ninety-Nine Novels, called it "probably the most important long work of fiction written by a woman since the war," adding that it stands as "one of the finest records we have of the impact of that war on Europe."Manning continued the story in a second sequence, the 'Levant Trilogy' (The Danger Tree, The Battle Lost and Won and The Sum of Things), which follows her recurring couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, on to Egypt as they flee the Nazi advance through the Mediterranean. Together the two trilogies make up the six novels published as Fortunes of War, widely regarded as her masterwork. Adapted for television in 1987.

London, Andrew Melrose, [1936].

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.

Seemingly the first crime title by this Hubin-listed author, featuring his recurring character Inspector Hopton. Woodiwiss had also published a collection of ghost stories in 1931.

London, Chapman & Hall, 1839.

First edition in book form. 8vo. Half-title. 19th century half calf with marbled boards, spine elaborate gilt compartments within raised bands decorated in gilt.

Dickens's third novel follows the fortunes of young Nicholas Nickleby, thrown on his own resources with his mother and sister after his father's death, his path taking in the brutal Yorkshire boarding school Dotheboys Hall under the tyrannical Wackford Squeers, an itinerant theatrical troupe, and the machinations of his miserly uncle Ralph.

Conforming to the issue points: p. 123 'visiter' instead of 'sister'; p. 160 'latter' instead of 'letter'.p.245 'flys' instead of 'flies'; p. 272 'visiters' instead of'visitors'; p. 586 'suprise' instead of 'surprise'. The first four plates bear the imprint of'Chapman and Hall'.

Selected Poems. With a Drawing by Pablo Picasso. Edited by George Reavey
London, Europa Press & Stanley Nott, [1936].

First edition. Number 254 from 600 copies. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5s.

The first English-language collection of Paul Éluard's poetry, edited by George Reavey and issued by his short-lived Europa Press in partnership with Stanley Nott to coincide with the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in London in June 1936. Éluard (1895–1952) was, with André Breton, among the founding figures of French Surrealism; the volume's translators were a roll-call of the movement's Anglophone circle, including Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, David Gascoyne, Man Ray and Ruthven Todd, with a preface by Herbert Read and a frontispiece portrait of Éluard drawn by Pablo Picasso.

London, Heinemann, 1935.

First edition, first impression. With signed autograph letter from the author loosely inserted. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.

Thorne's first novel, a comedy of English tourists stranded by a bus strike in the fictional, sleepy Spanish town of Querinda, forced by circumstance into an unaccustomed intimacy with one another and with a place time seems to have passed by. The accompanying letter from the author is giving directions to the Keats Grove in Hampstead.

London, Heinemann, 1965.

Uncorrected proof copy. 8vo. Original green & white wrappers printed in black, with publisher's ink stamp to upper wrapper.

Achebe's fourth novel is a satire of political corruption in an unnamed West African state, narrated by the young schoolmaster Odili as he turns against his former teacher, the venal cabinet minister Chief Nanga. Achebe (1930–2013) remains the foremost figure of modern African letters, the founder of Heinemann's 'African Writers' series and author of Things Fall Apart (1958), and went on to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.