Modern Literature
Boston, Little, Brown, 1955.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Leonard Wibberley's Cold War satire, in which the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States meaning to lose and collect the reconstruction aid - only to win by seizing the ultimate weapon. Filmed in 1959 with Peter Sellers in three roles.
Modern Literature
Translated by Dr. Joseph Collins
London, Cassell, 1929.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
The first English translation (of Climats, 1928), a novel of love and jealousy by André Maurois (1885–1967), the French novelist and celebrated biographer of Shelley, Byron and Disraeli.
Modern Literature
London, Martin Secker, 1929.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Paul Alverdes's quietly powerful First World War novel, following three throat-wounded soldiers - German and English - convalescing together in a military hospital, their breath whistling through their wounds. A humane counter to nationalist war writing.
Modern Literature
Translated from the French by E. Ibbetson James
London, Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The first English edition of the first novel by the French humorist and journalist Georges de La Fouchardière (1874–1946). The source for two landmark films: Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931) and Fritz Lang's American noir Scarlet Street (1945). It's a mordant Parisian tragedy of a downtrodden middle-class man (an amateur painter) besotted with a young prostitute and destroyed by her and her pimp - each character narrating his own part, as the "He / She / The Other Man" indicated by contents page. La Fouchardière was a celebrated L'Œuvre columnist and creator of the 'Bouif' series. This English edition is genuinely uncommon
Modern Literature
A novel
London, Constable, 1935.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Naomi Mitchison's most controversial and long-suppressed novel, drawing on her 1932 visit to the Soviet Union to treat contraception, abortion, rape and sexual politics with a candour few 1930s publishers would touch. Victor Gollancz refused it outright, warning that "publication of the book would cause a real outcry"; it was passed over elsewhere, extensively rewritten and toned down, and reached print only through Constable - and even then the government privately weighed a prosecution, as files declassified in 2005 revealed. A landmark of interwar feminist and socialist fiction, uncommon in the first edition in jacket.
Modern Literature
London, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1935.
[Second edition] 'Cheap (3/6) Edition'. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original red cloth.
Signed presentation copy from the author, inscribed on the title-page.
"A full-blooded story of that part of West Africa known as the Gold Coast is unfolded in Kathleen Hewitt's latest novel Fetish" (South African Review, vol.79, 1934).
Modern Literature
London, Brentano's, 1928.
First UK edition, first impression. Inscribed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
The sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, narrated this time by Lorelei's friend Dorothy and again illustrated by Ralph Barton; this the first English edition. With a contemporary gift inscription from the author to the front free endpaper.
Modern Literature
The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady
London, Brentanos, [1926].
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A highly collectable edition of Anita Loos's Jazz Age comic masterpiece, the diary of gold-digging Lorelei Lee. First serialised in Harper's Bazaar and published by Boni & Liveright in 1925, this is the first English edition, with Ralph Barton's celebrated illustrations. A transatlantic phenomenon, it was the second best-selling American book of 1926 (outselling The Great Gatsby) and was admired by an extraordinary roll-call: Edith Wharton called it "the great American novel," James Joyce read it through failing eyesight, and Faulkner, Huxley and Santayana all paid tribute. Filmed in 1928, staged as a hit musical in 1949, and immortalised in the 1953 film with Marilyn Monroe, whose famous song 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' is took inspiration from a line in the novel used here to caption the frontispiece.
Modern Literature
A novel
London, Chatto & Windus, 1902.
First edition. 8vo. Title printed in red & black, advertisements. Original pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to spine.
A searing insight into the economic & moral pressures of life in the Staffordshire Potteries in the late 19th century. Against the vitality and harshness of the Five Towns, Bennett's narrative is a compelling delineation of his heroine's attempts to gain freedom and independence from her father and the repressive regime of Methodism. The first of Bennett's 'Five Towns' novel, the sequence that made his name.
Modern Literature
London, Andre Deutsch, 1965.
First edition. 8vo. Original brown boards. Dust-jacket, priced 21s.
The first of only three novels by the Nigerian playwright, novelist and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, set in the 1960s, in post-independence and pre-civil war Nigeria, mainly in Lagos. In 2024 Soyinka's 90th birthday was marked worldwide with two documentaries and a feature film.
Modern Literature
London, Andre Deutsch, 1956.
First English edition. 8vo. Original brown cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 15s.
Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1886–1968) was an Italian physician and colonial administrator (personal doctor to the Duke of Aosta, and wartime Governor of Tripoli) who came to writing late in life. A Grave for a Dolphin followed his acclaimed English-language debut, A Cure for Serpents (1955), and gathers stories and recollections from his years in Italian North and East Africa (the title tale is set on the Red Sea coast). The book was among David Bowie's favourites and is generally credited as a partial inspiration for his 1977 song 'Heroes.'
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1936.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Nikolai Gubsky was a Russian émigré novelist working in English in London through the 1930s; his other fiction includes The Gladiator, The Greatest of These, Foreign Bodies and Its Silly Face, and he published an autobiography, Angry Dust (OUP, 1937). He also wrote as Michael Goring, the name under which his Matthew's Passion was issued. Surprise Item traces the political and emotional awakening of a complacent young Mayfair husband who, stirred by chance events toward thoughts of social justice and communism, abandons his idle life and is drawn through his passion for an enigmatic woman to a violent climax — the publisher condensing its theme as "Thought + Emotion = Action."
Modern Literature
Diver (Maud, pseud. Katherine Helen Maud Marshall) Ships of Youth:
A study of marriage in modern India
Edinburgh & London, Blackwood & Sons, [1931].
First edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, second issue priced 3s6d.
A novel of the North-West Frontier and of marriage among the British in India, set in 1928-29 and drawing on actual events of those years; the author's own note states that every Indian episode in the book is founded on fact, while disclaiming any relation between her characters and the men involved. Maud Diver (born Katherine Helen Maud Marshall, 1867-1945) was born at Murree, where her father served as an officer in the British Indian Army, and grew up in India and Ceylon; she was a lifelong friend of Rudyard Kipling's sister Trix Fleming, married an officer of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and published her first novel, Captain Desmond, V.C., in 1907. She was a bestseller in her day and the leading practitioner of the imperial romance, though unlike Kipling she has been almost entirely forgotten since.
Modern Literature
London, Hutchinson, [1938].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
McKenna (1888–1967) was a prolific chronicler of English upper-class society whose 1917 novel Sonia: Between Two Worlds was a major bestseller (the tenth-best-selling novel in the US in 1918, filmed in 1921, and running through numerous UK printings). Breasted Amazon is one of several later McKenna novels centring on a highly cultured artist-protagonist with feet of clay, a recurring preoccupation of his 1930s work.
Modern Literature
A problem in autobiography
London, Allan Wingate, 1955.
First edition, first impression. With related postcard loosely inserted. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Hamnett (1890–1956), the Welsh painter known as the "Queen of Bohemia," moved in the Paris circle of Modigliani, Picasso and Cocteau and was closely associated with Gaudier-Brzeska, who sculpted her. This is her second memoir, following the bestselling Laughing Torso (1932); it carries a real poignancy as her last book: she died the year after publication, having fallen from the window of her London flat.
Modern Literature
London, The Book Club, 1980.
Foyles Book Club issue. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Opens the 'Levant Trilogy' (1977–80), the second half of Manning's six-novel 'Fortunes of War' sequence tracing the Pringles' wartime displacement from the Balkans to wartime Cairo. Anthony Burgess ranked the sequence among the finest fictional treatments of the war in Europe and the Middle East, alongside Waugh and Powell.
![George Douglas, The House with the Green Shutters, [1932]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88493-300x300.jpg)
London, Collins, [1932].
8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
A brutal realist portrait of small-town Ayrshire life, deliberately written against the sentimental "kailyard" school then dominating Scottish fiction. Brown (1869–1902) died the year after publication, aged 33, leaving this his sole major work; it is credited as an influence on the Scottish Renaissance and remains a landmark of early twentieth-century Scottish literature. Originally published in 1901.
Modern Literature
New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1939.
First US edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The novel that brings Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, Fifth Earl of Ickenham - "Uncle Fred" - to Blandings Castle for the first time, in a plot to steal back the Empress of Blandings from the egg-throwing Duke of Dunstable. Widely rated among the strongest of the Blandings sequence and a key entry point for the Uncle Fred character, who would go on to headline three further novels.
Modern Literature
New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1940.
First US edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.00.
The US edition collects thirteen stories against the UK edition's nine, dropping 'All's Well with Bingo' and 'Romance at Droitgate Spa' while adding six others - Wodehouse's British and American publishers routinely assembled his story collections differently, which here extends to both differing in title and content from the related 1937 collection Lord Emsworth and Others (US: The Crime Wave at Blandings). Features Bingo Little, Mr Mulliner and Ukridge among others.
Vol.61 No.365
London, Newnes, May 1921.
8vo. Original pictorial wrappers.
Includes 'The Uncharted Coast. VI - A Worker of Wonders' by Arthur Conan Doyle and 'The Coming of Gowf' by P.G. Wodehouse.
![Olivia Manning, [The Balkan Trilogy], first editions, 1960](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88470-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of Manning (Olivia) [The Balkan Trilogy]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88470_2-300x300.jpg)
Modern Literature
comprising: The Great Fortune; The Spoilt City; Friends and Heroes
London, Heinemann, 1960; 1962; 1965.
3 vols. First editions, first impressions. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jackets, first 2 with price-stickers to inside front flaps.
The Balkan Trilogy is semi-autobiographical, drawing loosely on Olivia Manning's own wartime experiences with her husband, R. D. "Reggie" Smith, in Romania and Greece during the Second World War. Anthony Burgess, in his Ninety-Nine Novels, called it "probably the most important long work of fiction written by a woman since the war," adding that it stands as "one of the finest records we have of the impact of that war on Europe."Manning continued the story in a second sequence, the 'Levant Trilogy' (The Danger Tree, The Battle Lost and Won and The Sum of Things), which follows her recurring couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, on to Egypt as they flee the Nazi advance through the Mediterranean. Together the two trilogies make up the six novels published as Fortunes of War, widely regarded as her masterwork. Adapted for television in 1987.
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1935.
First edition, first impression. With signed autograph letter from the author loosely inserted. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Thorne's first novel, a comedy of English tourists stranded by a bus strike in the fictional, sleepy Spanish town of Querinda, forced by circumstance into an unaccustomed intimacy with one another and with a place time seems to have passed by. The accompanying letter from the author is giving directions to the Keats Grove in Hampstead.
Modern Literature
London, Robert Hale, 1967.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The author's second novel, set in New Zealand. Holden would become most famous for her 1971 novel, The Witnesses. In Val Biro jacket.
Modern Literature
London, Collins, [c.1922].
Film tie-in edition. Small 8vo. Original red cloth, gilt spine. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-. Accompanied by a promotional, pictorial book-mark.
Attractive edition published to tie-in with the 1922 film, starring in Lon Chaney as Fagin and Jackie Coogan as Oliver Twist. The book-mark also features Jackie Coogan as Twist.
Modern Literature
(Paris edition)
Paris, The Olympia Press, 1958.
The Traveller's Companion Series. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 15/-.
The first Olympia Press hardback edition, with the text that had been removed from the previous year's UK edition restored. Banned both in Ireland and the United States of America for perceived obscenity. The work was first published in Paris by the Olympia Press, as part of their Traveller's Companion series, normally reserved for risqué erotica, much to the chagrin of Donleavy. The author ended up in long-running legal wranglings with the publisher, finally actually taking ownership of the publishing house when it came up at auction.
Modern Literature
A play in three acts
London, Encore Publishing, 1960.
True first edition (preceding the Metheun hardback edition of the same year). 8vo. Original wrappers. Accompanied by the souvenir programme for the first performance of the play at the Arts Theatre Club (27th April 1960).
The true first edition of Pinter's play, issued by Encore Publishing in stapled wrappers ahead of the Methuen hardback published later the same year. The Caretaker was Pinter's first significant commercial success, running for 444 performances after its Duchess Theatre transfer and establishing him, alongside Beckett, as a defining voice of the new British theatre. It was first performed at the Arts Theatre Club on 27 April 1960, with Alan Bates as Mick, Peter Woodthorpe as Aston and Donald Pleasence as Davies, the last two reprising their roles (alongside Robert Shaw as Aston) in Clive Donner's 1963 film version.
Modern Literature
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.
Modern Literature
London, Collins, [1922].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, unpriced possibly for colonial issue.
Pickthall is one of the genuinely extraordinary figures of English letters: the Suffolk clergyman's son whose Near Eastern fiction, Saïd the Fisherman above all, was admired by Wells and later praised by E.M. Forster as the real thing; who publicly embraced Islam in 1917 while England was at war with the Caliphate, and whose Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930), produced in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, remains among the most used English renderings a century on.
As Others See Us is late fiction from the threshold of that final vocation, and the title declares the method of his best work: the observing eye reversed, the English seen as others see them: a trick few other novelists of his generation could perform without lapsing into condescension.
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1953.
'Uniform Pocket Edition'. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s.6d.
An attractive edition of Lawrence's autobiographical masterpiece: Nottinghamshire coalfield, the Morel marriage of gentility and pit, and Paul torn between his mother and every other woman he attempts. First published by Duckworth in 1913, famously with Edward Garnett's editorial scissors having removed roughly a tenth of the text, a cut not restored until the Cambridge edition decades later.
![Belloc Lowndes (Mrs [Marie]) The Lodger](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88389-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of Belloc Lowndes (Mrs [Marie]) The Lodger](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88389_2-300x300.jpg)
Modern Literature
London, The Readers Library..., [1927].
Readers Library movie tie-in edition. Small 8vo. Original gilt-stamped red cloth. Dust-jacket.
The novel, expanded in 1913 from a magazine story, is the great Jack the Ripper book written at one remove: the Buntings, genteel ex-servants sliding toward destitution, take in a soft-spoken gentleman lodger just as "The Avenger" begins murdering women in the London fog, and Mrs Bunting's slow, unspeakable suspicion does the work a hundred crime scenes couldn't. This little Readers Library volume earns its place for the film it advertises: Hitchcock's 1927 The Lodger, starring Ivor Novello - the picture Hitchcock himself called the first true Hitchcock film.
Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The novel centres on Joseph Mbagawa, an East African student and chief's son with artistic leanings, living in a London hostel with other African students; chafing against its insularity, and against the aggressive race-consciousness of his influential friend Aiyedumni, he moves to a boarding house, setting himself at the intersection of two worlds.
Modern Literature
An autobiography
New York, Modern Age Books, 1940.
First US edition, first printing. Signed & dated by the author on half-title. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Uncommon in the jacket, let alone signed. The author has signed 'Haru Matsui' in English and Japanese, written in hiragana (for the given name Haru) and kanji (for the surname Matsui, 松井).
Ayako Ishigaki (1903–1996) was an Issei journalist, activist, and feminist, born Tanaka Ayako in Tokyo, the daughter of a college professor; she first came to the United States in 1926, moved to New York, and married the painter Eitaro Ishigaki in 1931; she adopted the pseudonym Haru Matsui to protect her family in Japan from possible retaliation for her left-wing activism. Restless Wave is a semi-autobiographical memoir detailing Ishigaki's coming of age in a privileged Japanese family, her rebellion against strict codes of women's behaviour, her political awakening, and her immigration to the United States; her critiques of Japanese society and militarism brought negative attention from the Japanese government, while the book was widely praised in the US.
Modern Literature
London, Macmillan, 1925.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green blind-tooled cloth after design by Charles Ricketts, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket repeating the Ricketts design, priced 10/6.
Gathering Yeats' early poetry and prose fiction, including the Celtic Twilight material, 'The Secret Rose', and the Stories of Red Hanrahan, as well as the lyrics of his first period.
Modern Literature
London, Macmillan, 1923.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green blind-tooled cloth after design by Charles Ricketts, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket repeating the Ricketts design, priced 10/6.
Gathering Yeats' major prose writings on the Irish dramatic movement alongside six plays including 'The Countess Cathleen', 'The Land of Heart's Desire', and the Four Plays for Dancers ('At the Hawk's Well', 'The Only Jealousy of Emer', 'The Dreaming of the Bones', and 'Calvary').
Modern Literature
London, John Murray, 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The debut novel of the author of On the Night of the Fire (1939). He remains chiefly remembered for Odd Man Out (1945), which spawned a film adaptation in 1947 directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason.
Modern Literature
London, Constable, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Rural novel set in the village of Thornhill, dominated by the violent farmer-squire George Raker. The land itself is the true tyrant - binding all the characters, including Raker's wife, Esther Marlowe, James Baxter, and a labourer called Shandy, through possession or toil to its impersonal seasonal rhythms.
Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The novel centres on Joseph Mbagawa, an East African student and chief's son with artistic leanings, living in a London hostel with other African students; chafing against its insularity, and against the aggressive race-consciousness of his influential friend Aiyedumni, he moves to a boarding house, setting himself at the intersection of two worlds.
Modern Literature
A tale of an island
London, George Allen & Unwin, 1927.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Constance Antonina "Nina" Boyle (1865-1943) was a militant suffragette (a leader of the Women's Freedom League, imprisoned three times), a journalist, a pioneer of women police (she co-founded the Women Police Volunteers with Margaret Damer Dawson in 1914), and, most strikingly, the first woman to attempt to stand for election to the UK Parliament, submitting a nomination at the 1918 Keighley by-election and so opening the way for women candidates. A contemporary Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted the feminism The Rights of Mallaroche carried over from her suffragette days (she had by the 1920s moved politically rightward).
Modern Literature
London, Secker & Warburg, 1956.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), one of the towering figures of modern Japanese literature, first published Tade kuu mushi in serial form in 1928–29; widely regarded as his most autobiographical novel and among his finest.
Modern Literature
Jackson (Neville, pseud. Gerald Marcus Glaskin) No End to the Way
London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1965.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A novel chronicling a homosexual relationship, published under the pseudonym Neville Jackson by Gerald Marcus Glaskin (1923–2000), a Perth-born Australian author; it is recognised as the first overtly gay Australian novel, and was banned in Australia for over a year after publication despite remaining in print in Britain for twenty years.
Modern Literature
London, Andre Deutsch, 1965.
First edition. 8vo. Original brown boards. Dust-jacket, priced 21s.
The first of only three novels by the Nigerian playwright, novelist and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, set in the 1960s, in post-independence and pre-civil war Nigeria, mainly in Lagos. Professor Soyinka recently celebrated his 90th birthday and a host of events were staged around the world to commemorate the occasion including the release of two documentaries and a feature film centred around his work and life.
Modern Literature
London, Selwyn & Blount, 1926.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A relatively obscure title, seemingly involving a love triangle in bohemian London.