Minor foxing, bookplate to front pastedown; cloth with minor rubbing to extremities but overall very good.
6 plates by H.R. Millar.
Provenance: Sir Ignatius John O’Brien (armorial bookplate).
£295
A Christmas Ghost Story
London, Newnes, 1904.
First edition. 8vo. Contemporary cloth.
One of the best-selling authors of her era, Corelli’s supernatural and moral tales influenced popular fiction around the turn of the century. This novella is not generally ranked among her most “serious” works, rather one in the popular tradition of the Victorian era Christmas ghost stories, but it exemplifies her popular appeal and her use of moral supernaturalism. Uncommon.
In stock
Minor foxing, bookplate to front pastedown; cloth with minor rubbing to extremities but overall very good.
6 plates by H.R. Millar.
Provenance: Sir Ignatius John O’Brien (armorial bookplate).
Detective Fiction
Vickers (Roy, pseud. William Edward Vickers) The Pearl-Headed Pin
London, Newnes, n.d..
Early reprint. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
An attractively jacketed edition of this crime thriller, originally published in book form under the pseudonym David Durham in 1925.
Modern Literature
London, Collins, 1933.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
More in the vein of the author's most famous work, The Blue Lagoon (1908).
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Newnes, 1936.
First edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
Sci-fi crime thriller aimed at a younger audience.
Detective Fiction
Beynon (John, pseud. John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, aka John Wyndham) Foul Play Suspected
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Two further Jordon mysteries went unpublished, which may explain the author's pivot to carnivorous plants.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.
Detective Fiction
London, Newnes, n.d. [c.1903].
8vo. Original pictorial wrappers, stapled internally.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigate a missing treasure, a secret pact from colonial India, a one-legged man, and a mysterious islander. An attractive and uncommon wrappered edition.