London, Aldus Publications, 1949.

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

The first English edition of Hermann Hesse's last novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (Zurich, 1943), translated by Mervyn Savill. It was later retranslated by Richard & Clara Winston as The Glass Bead Game (1969). Set in the future, in Castalia, a secluded province devoted to scholarship, the novel follows the life of Joseph Knecht, who rises to become Magister Ludi, master of the Glass Bead Game, a ritual synthesis of all human learning. In the end Knecht turns his back on the order, convinced that intellectuals must not cut themselves off from the world. The novel closes with Knecht's poems and three imagined "incarnations" from other times and cultures. Hesse began the book in 1931 and finished it in Switzerland in 1943, after German publishers had refused it because of his opposition to the Nazis.

Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946; Das Glasperlenspiel, his last novel, had been published three years earlier. His books found an enormous new readership after his death, particularly with the counter-culture of the 1960s, and have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. This edition, with a foreword and translations of the poems by Eric Peters, was published by Aldus in London in 1949, the same year as Henry Holt's American edition of the Savill translation. The jacket is lettered "Nobel Prize Novel", with a portrait and biography of Hesse on the rear panel.

In Connection with the Voyage of the Airship "Graf Zeppelin" from Germany via Brazil to "A Century of Progress" Exposition in Chicago...and return to Europe
New York, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin G.m.b.H., [1933].

Printed broadside, framed & glazed.

A printed broadside issued in New York by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin for the 1933 flight of the airship Graf Zeppelin (LZ 127) from Germany, via Brazil, to the "A Century of Progress" Exposition in Chicago and back to Europe. It sets out the planned schedule: departure from Friedrichshafen on 14 October, by way of Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro to Miami and Akron, a 20–24-hour flight to Chicago and back, then return via Seville to Friedrichshafen on 31 October. It also gives detailed postal rates and instructions for collectors wishing to send mail by the airship, using German, Brazilian or United States stamps. It announces the special United States 50-cent airmail stamp issued for the visit, noting that "only a limited amount of these stamps will be printed and the plates subsequently destroyed". This is the stamp now known to collectors as the "Baby Zepp" (Scott C18), issued on 2 October 1933.

The Graf Zeppelin reached the Chicago fair on 26 October 1933, circled it for some two hours, and made a brief landing. This was the fifth and last of the airship's visits to the United States. By 1933 the Nazis had come to power, and the airship carried swastika markings on the left side of its fins; its commander, Hugo Eckener, circled the fair clockwise so that spectators would not see them. The flight came during the airship's regular South American service: it had made 64 round trips to Brazil by the time it was retired in 1937.

A Tale of Two Continents
London, John Murray, 1903.

'Author's Edition'. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Title-page within red border. Original red cloth stamped 'Author's Edition' and gilt facsimile 'Yours ACD' to upper board.

Conan Doyle's historical romance of the Huguenots. Inscribed from the author to the head of the title-page, 'Eric Cowan / with best wishes / from Arthur Conan Doyle April/25'.

New York, A.L. Burt, n.d. [1928].

First Burt edition. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket.

The fifth and final collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. It brings together the twelve stories published in The Strand, Collier's and Liberty between October 1921 and April 1927. First published in June 1927, by John Murray in London and George H. Doran in New York. This is the A. L. Burt reprint, "Published by arrangement with Doubleday, Doran & Company", carrying the Doran copyright notice. A. L. Burt, founded in New York in 1883, specialised in inexpensive reprints of popular fiction. The pictorial jacket shows Holmes in silhouette with deerstalker and pipe, and the rear panel advertises Burt's "Newest Books in Popular Copyright Fiction", including Wodehouse's The Small Bachelor.

In The Chaplet; an Elegant Literary Miscellany
London, J. Harwood, n.d. [1845].

First appearance. 8vo. Original sheepskin binding elaborately stamped in gilt and blind.

The first appearance of an anonymous vampire story that went unnoticed for nearly 180 years. It appeared once, in this London gift-book, and was never reprinted in the nineteenth century. The scholar Álvaro García Marín came across it in 2017. He presented it as a lost landmark of the genre in the Journal of Vampire Studies (2023) and made it the title story of his anthology The Vampire of Vourla and Other Greek Vampire Tales, 1819-1846 (Valancourt, 2024).

The story is a sailors' yarn, told aboard a British warship off Sicily by "Lawyer" Tom Gahan, a hard-drinking former lawyer's clerk turned marine, about his late master, Lieutenant Somers. García Marín argues that the story anticipates Dracula by half a century in several respects. The victim is lured to the vampire's isolated dwelling, silent servants ferry him there by night, and the victim wastes away while the doctors are baffled. Above all, the vampire appears to take the form of a bat and feeds at the neck. García Marín identifies this as the earliest known vampire-to-bat transformation in fiction, some forty years before the instance previously credited, in Karl May's In den Schluchten des Balkan (1885-86). The transformation is implied rather than shown, and is filtered through an unreliable, grog-fuddled narrator, which leaves the reader to make the connection between Heira and the bat - the work is also significant for being a rare early pre-Carmilla 19th-century depiction of an autonomous female vampire. The author has never been identified.

The Chaplet is undated. The plates in copies examined by García Marín carry imprint dates of 1 January 1845, and one is dated 1 November 1845. Anthony Hogg, however, has found the volume listed in the book trade as published between November and December 1844 ("Publication Date of 'The Vampire of Vourla'", Journal of Vampire Studies, 2023), so the first issue may date from late 1844.

London, Heinemann, 1939.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8s6d. Publisher's coeval wrap-around promotional band. Housed in custom cloth drop-back box.

First UK edition of Steinbeck's best-known novel. Driven from their Oklahoma farm by drought, debt and the banks, the Joad family set out along Route 66 for California and the promise of work, only to find exploitation, hunger and hostility in the migrant camps. The novel was published in New York by Viking on 14 April 1939 and became the best-selling book of the year, with 430,000 copies printed by February 1940. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was also denounced as propaganda by agricultural interests and banned and burned in places, and the controversy contributed to the American Library Association's adoption of its Library Bill of Rights.

The jacket's rear panel prints an extract from Alexander Woollcott's BBC broadcast on the book, "An American Voice", in which he calls it "an American Les Misérables" and announces that it will be brought out by Heinemann "in the next month or two". It is accompanied here by the publisher's wrap-around promotional band: "Book Society Fiction Choice. Evening Standard Book of the Month. Did you hear Alexander Woollcott's sensational broadcast?"

London, Collins Crime Club, 1942.

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

A wartime Dr Priestley mystery. During an air raid on the village of Yardley Green in December 1940, a diamond merchant is found dead in a bomb crater, but he was alive after the raid, and the diamonds he carried are missing. Jimmy Waghorn investigates and Dr Priestley supplies the solution. Curtis Evans has praised its wartime atmosphere and ingenious plotting. "John Rhode" was Major Cecil Street (1884–1964), also "Miles Burton", whose first editions are now scarce and much sought by collectors.

London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 12s6d.

A late Dr Priestley detective novel. The theft of £9,750 from a locked room at the Fendyke branch of the Capital and Provinces Bank, with no sign of forced entry, has completely baffled Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn. Eighteen months later the murder of Edgar Chelmsford, an unpopular local businessman found dead in a ditch beside his damaged motorcycle, takes Waghorn back to Fendyke.

Julian Symons placed Street among the "Humdrum" school, but Jacques Barzun admired several of the Rhode novels, and Curtis Evans's Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012) has prompted a reappraisal. His books are now scarce and much sought by collectors.

The Chelsea Arts Ball and Bystander Coming of Age Celebrations
[London], , New Years Eve 1924.

4to. Original sewn blue wrappers with inset colour illustration by Edmund Blampied.

A rare original souvenir programme of the 1924 Chelsea Arts Club ball held the celebrations of the Bystander Coming of Age celebrations (it had just turned 21) at the Royal Albert Hall. It was by all accounts a sumptuous affair on the theme of a Venetian Carnival, and was attended by Ivor Novello and Noel Coward. The programme is illustrated by Edmund Blampied, W Heath Robinson, Helen McKie, H M Bateman, Fred Pegram etc, and with menu, music, programme of dances (unmarked), and a page for collecting autographs (unused), and other humorous articles.There were 4000 copies printed (this is number 616), and a tipped in paper at the front states there will be a prize draw and the corresponding programme number will win a trip to Monsieur Peron, the famous couturier of Regents Street, to choose an outfit worth 100 guineas. There would be a second draw after midnight for a further 100 numbers who would win a trip to Babers of Oxford Street, where they could choose a pair of "dainty evening shoes" worth 2 guineas.Music was provided by The Clabon-West Orchestra and London Scottish Pipers and Drummers.This is from the Royal Albert Hall's own archive: "Decorations were designed by Mr Philip Connard ARA and Mr Henry Poole ARA. The Hall was decorated as a Venetian carnival and included a full-size gondola and massive carnival figures. The greatest attraction was a gigantic 30 foot high birthday cake in the centre of the ballroom, with 21 painted candles. At midnight figures on top came to life and distributed from inside the cake 2,000 half-guinea boxes of chocolate donated by The Bystander to celebrate its 'Coming of Age'. The cake was designed and made by sculptor Henry Poole, and the candles painted by Australian artist Fred Leist. Fancy dress was essential for men, but Venetian cloaks were acceptable."A wonderful item of Roaring Twenties ephemera.

Or, The Seven Stages of Stick-It
London, Holden & Hardingham, [1921].

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

A novel by the little-known Beard Francis, author of Higgs & Potter and How Like a Man.

London, Robert Hale, 1984.

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

A historical novel set on Dartmoor and in the Victorian provincial theatre. According to the jacket, Charlotte Wells, who after a hard and lonely childhood on Dartmoor is living an indulged social life with her wealthy aunt and uncle in Exeter, returns briefly to the Moor to visit her troubled stepmother, Leah. At Crick Farm she meets Eddie, the companion of her childhood, but rejects him for a more aristocratic suitor; then, once engaged, she runs off with a gypsy dancer to seek a career on the stage. Among "the tawdry glitter and near-poverty of provincial Victorian theatres" she finds passion, cruelty and hardship, along with "the heady lure of fame".

London, Collins, n.d. [c.1930].

Collins' 6D Novels series. Large 8vo. Original upper wrapper (lacking lower wrapper).

Unusually for Christie, this title was assembled from twelve linked short stories first published in The Sketch in 1924. Her brother-in-law Campbell Christie helped her turn them into a novel during the difficult months after her mother's death and the breakdown of her marriage. The Times Literary Supplement found it "not so much the clearing up of a mystery as a recital of Poirot's encounters" with a gang of international crooks.