London, William Heinemann, 1896.

First UK edition, first impression, first issue with rear advertisement for The Time Machine on terminal leaf preceding publisher's list. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth, without publisher's monogram to lower board.

The cruellest of the great scientific romances, and the one Wells himself called an exercise in youthful blasphemy: Prendick, shipwrecked, is landed on an island where the exiled vivisectionist Moreau carves animals into men, the Beast Folk, chanting their Law in the dusk ("Are we not Men?") against the pull of tooth and claw, while their maker works uphill of them in the House of Pain. Published into the white heat of the vivisection controversy, it was received with genuine revulsion (reviewers reached for "perverse" and worse) because Wells had aimed past the surgery at the theology: a creator indifferent to his creations' suffering, a Law that is only fear, and the closing horror that London's faces look no different...

New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1924.

Grosset & Dunlap issue. 8vo. Original dark orange cloth lettered and illustrated in green. Dust-jacket.

Forster's last and greatest novel, published in 1924 after a fourteen-year silence and followed by nothing but silence for the remaining forty-six years of his life - the most dignified retirement in English letters, taken at the summit. A Grosset & Dunlap issue from the year of publication: the reprint house's economics made these simultaneous-vintage copies for readers rather than posterity, and posterity has accordingly thinned them - surprisingly uncommon in jacket.

London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1962.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Plain endpapers. Original orange boards. Dust-jacket.

The debut that broke the spy novel's class ceiling: an unnamed, bespectacled, chippy grammar-school narrator who cooks, quibbles his expenses, and distrusts his own side with the same professionalism he applies to the opposition - published while Bond still held the field unchallenged, and instantly recognised as the anti-Bond the genre had been waiting for.

London, Michael Joseph, 1957.

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

Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel, described by Margaret Atwood as his "chef d'œuvre", while the dramatist Dan Rebellato described it as "a searching novel of moral ambiguities" dealing with rape, abortion, motherhood, and the struggle between men and women quite as much as with alien invasion.

London, Chatto & Windus, 1932.



A pillar of the 20th century's dystopian architecture: Huxley acknowledged the book began as a parody of Wells's optimistic utopias, Men Like Gods specifically, before the joke deepened into the World State entire: Bokanovsky-processed embryos decanted by caste, soma, the feelies, Our Ford, and happiness administered until nothing human survives it.

London, John Lane, 1895.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.

Not scientific romance but Bodley Head belles-lettres, comic dialogues with a worldly uncle lately returned from abroad, discoursing on the fads, manners and small hypocrisies of the nineties with the nephew as straight man. It is Wells the struggling journalist bottling his Pall Mall Gazette manner, in the yellow-nineties livery of Wilde's and Beerbohm's publisher - a bibliographic neighbourhood he would never occupy again.

London, Macmillan, 1906.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth, lettered in gilt.

The gentlest apocalypse Wells ever arranged: a comet grazes the Earth, its green vapours dissolve into the atmosphere, and humanity wakes from "the Change" cured of jealousy, war fever, class hatred and the whole armature of pre-comet spite, narrated by a Midlands clerk who went into the Change murderous with sexual jealousy and came out of it sane.

The scandal was immediate and entirely deliberate: the transformed world's relaxed arrangements in love were read as an endorsement of free love, the Times Literary Supplement huffed, and Wells, then conducting his Fabian campaigns and his private life on similar principles, declined to reassure anybody.

London, Methuen, 1897.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original red cloth blocked & lettered in gilt.

A very good first edition of this collection of short stories by Wells, comprising ghost stories, tales of horror and even a cautionary tale about an apple.

London & New York, Harper & Brothers, 1899.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.

Graham falls into a trance in the 1890s and wakes two centuries on to find compound interest has done its patient work - he owns half the world, held in trust by a Council ruling a London of vast enclosed cities, moving ways, aeroplanes and a drugged, screen-fed proletariat. It is Wells pivoting from romance to dystopia, and the twentieth century took notes: the mega-city of Metropolis, and the administered futures of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell, all trace their plumbing here. Wells himself was dissatisfied enough to revise it in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes.

London, Heinemann, 1898.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. 32pp. advertisements, undated. Original dark grey/sage cloth.

The cylinder unscrewing on Horsell Common, the heat-ray, the tripods wading up the Thames valley, and the invaders felled at last by the smallest of allies...a template for many alien invasion conceived since, and still, a century and a quarter on, the best executed. Its afterlife is a catalogue of cultural detonations in its own right: Orson Welles' 1938 panic broadcast, the 1953 and 2005 films, Jeff Wayne's improbable and immortal musical version.

and particularly how Mr. Bert Smallways fared while it lasted
London, George Bell & Sons, 1908.

First edition. 8vo. First state blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine and upper cover.

Five years after Kitty Hawk, when powered flight could barely lift a man over a hedge, Wells wrote the book in which German airship fleets cross the Atlantic and bomb New York into ruin, air power dissolves the distinction between front and home, and civilisation, its trade and credit systems severed from above, simply stops. With A.C. Michael's plates, in the first state binding, an honest and attractive copy of the foundation stone of the aerial-warfare shelf.

Warrior Queen of the Britons
London, Robert Hale, 1937.

First edition, first impression. Signed by the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.

Spence was one of the great productive eccentrics of Scottish letters: journalist, poet, pioneering (if increasingly speculative) mythographer of Mexico and the Celts, author of a shelf of Atlantis volumes, and a founding father of political Scottish nationalism. The jacket is by Arthur Barbosa, decades before his celebrated Flashman and Patrick O'Brian wrappers made him the presiding artist of British historical mischief.