or, Fragments from the star city of Montalluyah
London, Samuel Tinsley, 1873.

First edition. 8vo. Original brown cloth ruled in black and lettered in gilt.

An intriguing work of speculative fiction, set in the city and planet of Montalluyah, strongly hinted to be Mars, wherein resides a highly civilised society whose inhabitants grapple with the same concerns as Victorian progressives: public health, education, crime prevention, the art of government. The twist is that they've largely solved them, principally through electricity, which here serves as a universal agent for everything from anaesthesia to disease detection. Physicians are the aristocracy; there are no poor; microscopy and breath analysis replace the doctor's bag. The chapters on education and madness are perhaps the most compelling, particularly the counterintuitive finding that mental illness originates not in overworked regions of the brain but in those left dormant. The book sits slightly awkwardly between imaginative fiction and social satire, akin in ambition to Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race and Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

and other poems
London, Macmillan, December 1933.

First edition, second impression. 8vo. Original blind-tooled sage cloth decorated in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket, priced 6/-.

An excellent example of the second impression of this collection by Yeats, the title poem from which had originally been published in 1929 by Fountain Press in a signed limited edition.

London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1947.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Contemporary library cloth with ex-libris stamp to upper cover. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.

Bowers' fifth & final novel, concerns a series of apparent suicides in a quiet English village and the murder of a local business proprietress, investigated by Detective Inspector Raikes.

London, Faber & Faber, 1931.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.

An uncommon work of magical realism, featuring same-sex attraction. Uncle Stephen is the first volume in the Tom Barber Trilogy. Bleiler listed.

London, Macmillan, 1933.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, publisher's price label of 5s net to upper panel and spine.

George Saintsbury (1845-1933) was one of the most prolific and influential literary critics of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, holding the chair of English Literature at Edinburgh from 1895 to 1915.

London, Hobart Manufacturing Co., June 1935.

4to. Original pictorial wrappers. Housed in custom cloth case with colour illustration and title label to upper cover and 2 inset illustrations to lower.

A special souvenir issue relating to the French Line's North Atlantic steamship Normandie.

New York & Toronto, Farrar & Rinehart, 1945.

First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.50. Housed in later drop-back cloth box (somewhat misleadingly stating 'signed', which the book is not).

The novel centres on a con man haunted by a genuine clairvoyant ability - an unusual blend of noir and the supernatural. Cornell Woolrich (1903-68), who also wrote as William Irish, is a foundational figure of noir fiction whose work inspired numerous films including Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). First edition copies in dust jacket are scarce.

London, Heinemann, 1927.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6. Housed in later drop-back cloth box (somewhat misleadingly stating 'signed', which the book is not).

Priestley's only foray into horror, rare in the dust-jacket. Benighted was adapted into the classic James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932), and has more recently been adapted for the stage.

A Survey of Evidence
London, Faber & Faber, 1939.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.

Sir Ernest Bennett (1868–1947) was a British Liberal MP and psychical researcher who compiled this survey of reported apparitions and hauntings as an evidential study.

London, Geoffrey Bles, 1939.

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

An uncommon bibliomystery by this British detective fiction writer of the Golden Age, who authored some thirty mystery novels, many featuring Detective Inspector William Austen.

A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
London, Hamish Hamilton, 1966.

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

Considered by many to be the prototypical true crime novel, In Cold Blood details the 1959 Clutter family murders in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas; Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, and spent six years working on the book, which he described as a "non-fiction novel."

n.p., G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1937.

First edition, first printed. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.50.

A work adapted from the diary of a Scots private during World War I: 'It ends as it began with the sight of the long road unrolling from the opened end of a moving car; first a lorry and last an ambulance.' (jacket blurb)