London, Gollancz, 1987.

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

A surprisingly rare edition of this Asimov collection, which includes one previously unpublished, new story.

"Presented in this volume are several previously uncollected stories, alongside a selection of vintage Isaac Asimov: such tales as 'Little Lost Robot', one of the best of his famous robot series; 'The Feeling of Power', in which Asimov anticipates by over twenty years the development of pocket computers; 'The Ugly Little Boy', a time travel story which may be the most moving tale he has ever written; and 'The Last Question', which Asimov himself chooses as his best story." (jacket blurb)

London, Michael Joseph, 1959.

First edition. 8vo. Original black boards lettered in white. Dust-jacket.

The pseudonym saga achieves its final, magnificent absurdity: a collaboration between John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, i.e., between the third & fourth names of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, a man now formally credited with co-writing a book with himself. The fig-leaf logic was branding: this is hard, nuts-and-bolts space fiction rather than the domestic catastrophes the Wyndham name had come to promise, so 'Parkes' was wheeled out as notional technical collaborator to manage expectations. The book itself is a future history in four episodes at fifty-year intervals, following successive generations of the Troon family from the first space stations to the Moon, Mars and Venus, as the powers of the northern hemisphere obligingly destroy each other and leadership in space passes elsewhere. A fifth Troon story, 'The Emptiness of Space,' was added to the 1961 Science Fiction Book Club edition.

London, Michael Joseph, 1960.

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

The last of the novels published in Wyndham's lifetime under the famous name at full stride, and the one whose reputation has travelled furthest: a lichen extract, the "antigerone," is found to slow human ageing - and the two discoverers split on what to do with two or three centuries of life. A thriller plot wearing a genuinely radical argument about gerontocracy, cosmetics and female emancipation; sixty years on it gets cited in bioethics discussions more than anything else he wrote. Very good in equally good Hugh Marshall wrapper.

London, Newnes, [1936].

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.

Wyndham's third book and second science fiction novel. Written as John Beynon, it was serialised the same year in The Passing Show as Stowaway to Mars, abridged again in 1937 in Modern Wonder as The Space Machine, cut differently for a 1953 paperback, and finally restored in 1972 as Stowaway to Mars "by John Wyndham".

The plot: it is 1981, a million-pound prize awaits the first interplanetary flight, and a British millionaire launches the rocket Gloria Mundi from Salisbury Plain, bound for Mars. Once clear of the atmosphere the crew discover a stowaway, a woman, Joan Shirning, to their considerable period-typical consternation, carrying a strange tale of a machine of Martian origin. On Mars itself the book turns unexpectedly thoughtful: a dying race, and the machines destined to outlast it, a theme Wyndham was rehearsing fifteen years before anyone was paying attention. He revisited the story in the novella Sleepers of Mars (1938).

London, Michael Joseph, 1961.

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

The mature Wyndham in short form, led by the novella that first appeared sandwiched between Golding and Peake in Sometime, Never (1956) and here gives its name to the collection: a woman wakes in a future without men, the male half of the species eliminated by an escaped virus; her amnesia making her the reader's guide to a society of castes and functions that works perfectly well, which is precisely the problem...

London, Newnes, [1935].

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green cloth. Facsimile dust-jacket.

Before John Wyndham was John Wyndham (and technically he was always John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, his parents having supplied enough names for six pseudonyms) he was John Beynon, author of this, his only published detective novel. It offers Detective-Inspector Jordon, a stolen formula, and a heroine who briskly rescues herself while everyone else stands about suspecting the titular foul play.
Two further Jordon mysteries went unpublished, which may explain the author's pivot to carnivorous plants. The Day of the Triffids (1951) made Wyndham famous, and retroactively made this book, which almost nobody bought, that being the problem, extremely scarce. Only a handful of copies have surfaced at market in twenty years; the original jacket is so rare that owning one frankly borders on the gratuitous.

London, Newnes, [1935].

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.

Wyndham's first novel (or possibly second, the bibliographers not having entirely settled the matter, despite that surely being the point of bibliographers). Written in his twenties under the Beynon name, it is set in the impossibly distant future of 1964, by which point engineers have flooded a chunk of the Sahara to make an inland sea, and the well-off tour it by private rocket plane. As predictions go, wrong on every count, though one admires the aspiration.

British playboy Mark Sunnet and companion Margaret Lawn duly crash their pleasure rocket into the new Sahara Sea, survive that, and are promptly sucked down a whirlpool into a vast cavern world ruled by a mysterious race of pygmies. It is, in short, everything a 1935 scientific romance should be: brisk, preposterous, and quite unembarrassed about any of it.

Sixteen years later the same author produced The Day of the Triffids and became respectable. This is where he started, and early Beynon in collectable condition is far harder to find than the later fame would suggest.

New York, Doubleday & Company, 1951.

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

The book itself needs little introduction: the blinding green meteor shower, the walking carnivorous plants, Bill Masen unbandaging his eyes in a silent hospital, and the entire template of British catastrophe fiction (traced forward through Christopher, Ballard and, by its director's own admission, 28 Days Later) laid down in one stroke.

What's interesting here is that the Doubleday edition printing precedes the Michael Joseph London edition, making it the true first in book form. It is also textually distinct, the story having had a famously tangled birth: Wyndham's original draft gave the triffids a Soviet origin; Doubleday balked, a rewrite relocated them to Venus, Doubleday balked again, and the firm finally published the original conception shorn of some ten thousand words, while Collier's, serialising the abridged Revolt of the Triffids' in early 1951, ran the Venusian version. The result: the Doubleday, the Joseph and the serial are three variant texts of the same masterpiece.

New York, Ballantine Books, 1955.

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

The Ballantine Re-Birth actually precedes the Michael Joseph Chrysalids, making this less-lovely-titled US version the true first edition of the book many critics, and Wyndham's own editor at New Worlds, who thought it far superior to Triffids, regard as his masterpiece. Post-nuclear Labrador; a fundamentalist farming society whose scripture commands "Watch Thou for the Mutant"; crops burned and deviant babies cast out; and young David Strorm, who recites the creeds while concealing that he and a handful of children can speak mind to mind. It is the least typical of the major novels and the most perfectly made. A set text in British and Canadian schools for generations, and with the odd distinction of a rock afterlife: Jefferson Airplane's 'Crown of Creation' draws its lyrics directly from the novel's dialogue.

The texts differ, the American edition trimmed of some of the philosophical passages, so the completist perhaps needs both...but the priority belongs here, and Ballantine's mid-fifties hardcovers were tiny printings inside a paperback operation, making them far scarcer than their renown.

London, Collins Crime Club, 1964.

Later impression. 8vo. Original orange boards. Dust-jacket.

First published in 1934 (in America, less edifyingly as The Boomerang Clue), this is Christie in breezy standalone mode: Bobby Jones (the vicar's son, not the golfer, a distinction the opening chapter enjoys) finds a dying man on a cliffside whose last words supply the title, and investigates with the aristocratic Frankie Derwent in tow. The question proved durable enough to be re-asked twice on screen, including Hugh Laurie's well-received 2022 adaptation.

Incidentally, Christie's own account of the title is rather lovely: she said the idea came from visiting a friend for tea, whose brother tossed aside a book he was reading and said "Not bad, but why on earth didn't they ask Evans?", and she decided on the spot that a future book would bear that title, before knowing who Evans would even be.

London, The Readers Library, [1928].

UK Film tie-in edition. Small 8vo. Original red cloth decorated in gilt to upper cover. Dust-jacket.

Norris was among the highest-paid novelists in America, and this little tie-in exists because of the 1927 film: Mary Pickford's last silent picture, a shopgirl romance co-starring Charles "Buddy" Rogers, whom Pickford, in cinema's slowest-burning subplot, married a decade later after divorcing Douglas Fairbanks. The Readers Library specialised in these small cheap film editions with wrap-around pictorial jackets, printed on cheap paper that was already apologising as it left the binders; toned text-blocks are simply what the species looks like. Collected now almost entirely for the jackets, silent-film ephemera in book form, and increasingly appreciated as exactly that.

Edited by Walter Hooper
Cambridge, at the University Press, 1969.

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

Assembled posthumously by Walter Hooper, Lewis's tireless (his critics would say tirelessly proprietorial) literary executor, this gathers the professional criticism: essays ranging across Jane Austen, Shelley, Kipling, William Morris and the literary influence of the Authorised Version, written with the clarity of a man who believed criticism should be readable, a position that has perhaps never quite caught on...