Tales of the wonderfully weird and superbly supernatural, with titles by well-known masters of the genre to all too often overlooked & unsung geniuses and one-hit wonders.
Weird & Supernatural
Edited with an introduction by Maurice Richardson
London, Dent, 1946.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Twenty uncanny stories selected by Maurice Richardson from W. F. Harvey's three earlier collections: Midnight House (1910), The Beast with Five Fingers (1928) and Moods and Tenses (1933). According to the jacket, the tales are arranged to build to "two climaxes, one in the middle and one at the end". "Miss Cornelius", which the editor thought Harvey's best, stands at the centre, with the psychological studies "Mrs Ormerod" and "Miss Avenal" either side of it. Warner Bros.' film The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), starring Peter Lorre, revived interest in his work, and this selection appeared the same year.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Methuen, 1900.First edition. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth.Weird and supernatural tales by Richard Marsh, author of The Beetle (1897), the novel that at first outsold Dracula. They include "A Psychological Experiment", "The Photographs", with its ghostly prison portraits, and "The Houseboat", in which a holidaying couple witness the re-enactment of a murder. "Marsh" was the pseudonym of Richard Heldmann (1857–1915), a convicted forger turned prolific author and grandfather of Robert Aickman. Not reprinted for over a century after 1900
Weird & Supernatural
London, Wishart, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.
A satirical fantasy by Sherard Vines (1890–1974), poet and professor of English, turning on the demon Belphegor loosed upon modern society.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Gollancz, 1964.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Aickman's first novel and his only conventional one - a love story that shades into the ghostly - quite distinct from the "strange stories" for which he is celebrated. As Aickman (1914-81) has become one of the most collected of modern weird-fiction authors, this, his scarcest trade title, is decidedly uncommon in the first edition and particularly so in the dust jacket.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Gollancz, 1977.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A collection of Robert Aickman's inimitable "strange stories," the form in which this master of the uncanny did his most admired work.
Weird & Supernatural
Strange tales
London, Gollancz, 1968.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
An attractive presentation copy of this early and highly regarded gathering of Aickman's 'strange stories,' including 'The Inner Room,' 'Never Visit Venice,' 'The Wine-Dark Sea' and 'The Cicerones' the last later filmed (2002) with Mark Gatiss. Aickman (1914-81), grandson of Richard Marsh and co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association, is one of the acknowledged masters of the English uncanny; his first editions, and signed copies above all, are keenly collected. A presentation copy inscribed by the author.
Weird & Supernatural
...translated from the Italian by Edward Storer. With an introduction by Sir Leonard Rogers
London, Lovat Dickson, 1933.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A journalistic survey of leprosy and the world's leper colonies, translated by Edward Storer, with an introduction by the eminent leprologist Sir Leonard Rogers.
Weird & Supernatural
Strange Tales
London, Gollancz, 1980.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
An attractive presentation copy of this late collection of Robert Aickman's "strange stories" - the oblique, dreamlike supernatural tales on which his large and still-growing reputation rests - published the year before his death, with a jacket by Andrzej Krause. Aickman (1914–1981), grandson of the sensation novelist Richard Marsh (The Beetle) and co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association, is now among the most collected of 20th century weird-fiction writers, and signed material is actively pursued.
![Elliot (Frances [Minto]) The Red Cardinal. A Romance](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88561-300x300.jpeg)
![Alternative view of Elliot (Frances [Minto]) The Red Cardinal. A Romance](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88561_2-300x300.jpeg)
Weird & Supernatural
[with] The Story of Sophia. A Novel
Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1884.
Tauchnitz 'Copyright Edition'. 8vo. Late 19th/early 20th century green cloth lettered in gilt to spine.
The first work, a Gothic romance of the Tuscan hills with vampiric vibes, is a considerably darker book than its title suggests. An English Catholic gentleman travels to Siena to visit the friend of his schooldays, the Marquis Gonzago, and finds him a recluse in a vast villa deep in an ilex forest where nothing flowers, no bird nests, and the very worms are said to die in the shadow. The villa was built by the Marquis's uncle, Cardinal Flavio, who abducted a peasant girl from beneath a pagan satyr in the woods, went through a sham marriage with her in an outbuilding, and had her murdered, inevitably leaving a curse that she will haunt the head of the house until a life is taken for a life. Elliot builds the haunting with unusual patience and by corroboration: the dead girl's cold hand laid on her grandfather's in the night; a jewelled figure in a mud-draggled white robe beckoning two men from the trees; the sham marriage re-enacted before a terrified traveller, the door opening of itself on a tall figure all in red with attendants bearing lights.
What raises the book above the ordinary revenant tale is the manner of the killings. The Marquis's betrothed is found dead a week before their wedding, visited by a slight veiled stranger with a quantity of fair hair, purple marks like the impress of small fingers on her throat; and the novel closes with a second body discovered beneath the ruined satyr, unmarked save for two small purple marks low on the throat over the windpipe, a few threads of yellow hair clutched in the dead hand which shrivel to dust at a touch. Frances Minto Elliot (1820-98), better known for her social histories of Italy and her Diary of an Idle Woman volumes, moved in a considerable literary circle: Wilkie Collins dedicated Poor Miss Finch to her, and Marian Halcombe's conversation in The Woman in White is said to be founded on her. The 1884 F.V. White edition carried a printed dedication to F. Marion Crawford, then at the outset of the career that would produce 'For the Blood is the Life' - likewise a tale of an Italian revenant. This Leipzig Tauchnitz Copyright Edition was issued in the Collection of British Authors for continental circulation; Tauchnitz published by agreement with authors and paid royalties at a time when international copyright was weak, issuing its editions close to first publication rather than as later reprints.
19th century literature
London, Blackie & Son, n.d..Reissue. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket,Wilkie Collins's first collection of six short stories, originally published in 1856. The book is a series of tales supposed to be told to poor travelling portrait-painter, William Kerby, who is forced to abandon his profession for six months in order to save his sight.
Weird & Supernatural
1911-1924
Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1965.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The first of the five volumes of Lovecraft's correspondence, covering from 1911, when he was 21, to 1924 and the collapse of his brief marriage, with letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, Maurice W. Moe, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith and his aunt Lillian D. Clark.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1923.8vo. Original turquise cloth, upper cover bordered in blind with gilt lettering, spine lettered in gilt. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.A scarce edition of Le Fanu's five celebrated tales, presented as cases from the papers of Dr Martin Hesselius: 'Green Tea,' in which a clergyman is pursued to madness by a spectral monkey visible to no one else; 'The Familiar,' where a sea captain is stalked by a dwarfish figure out of his past; 'Mr Justice Harbottle,' a hanging judge tried and condemned by a monstrous version of himself; 'The Room in the Dragon Volant,' a mystery of premature burial; and 'Carmilla,' Le Fanu's vampire novella and the most consequential of them all, preceding Dracula by a quarter of a century and establishing the female vampire and her erotically charged pursuit of a young woman as a permanent fixture of the form. The influence runs directly to Stoker, and onward through the whole subsequent tradition of the vampire in fiction and film. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) stands with Maturin at the head of the Irish Gothic line, and In a Glass Darkly, first published in three volumes in 1872, is his most enduring book. This 1923 Eveleigh Nash & Grayson edition is a scarce imprint, possibly the earliest achievable appearance of the collection in a dust-jacket, preceding the Peter Davies edition of 1929 illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.
Weird & Supernatural
A volume of nature stories
London, Macmillan, 1912.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original pictorial dark green cloth lettered in gilt.
A collection of short stories centred on nature, mysticism, and the numinous, Pan's Garden exemplifies Blackwood's distinctive fusion of supernatural fiction with spiritual and psychological inquiry. Blackwood (1869-1951) came to fiction late, publishing his first collection at thirty-seven after farming dairy cattle and running a hotel in Canada, prospecting for gold in Alaska, tending bar and reporting for the New York Evening Sun; long interested in Buddhism and the supernatural, he joined several occult societies including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and brought a practising occultist's seriousness to the weird tale. Mike Ashley, his bibliographer, calls the volume the definitive gathering of Blackwood's short stories, and it is entered in the standard genre bibliographies.
The drawings, the frontispiece and one heading each story, are by Walford Graham Robertson (1866-1948), painter, illustrator and author, costume designer for Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, a major collector of William Blake who gave over twenty works to the Tate.
Weird & Supernatural
London, John Long, 1906.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-
A collection of 14 stories, among them 'A Pet of the Ballet,' 'Staggers,' 'That Foursome,' 'Two of a Trade' and 'The Thirteen Club,' opening with the ballet girl Lizzie Emmett, her worn-out shoes and her straitened circumstances, and the arrival of a dapper and opaque stranger. Richard Marsh (1857–1915) was born Richard Bernard Heldmann, and is best known today for his weird horror tale The Beetle (1897).
Weird & Supernatural
A narrative...through the trance mediumship of Richard E. Pugh, Bulawayo
South Africa, Central News Agency, [1941].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Presented as "a true narrative" of the history of Great Zimbabwe communicated through the trance mediumship of Richard E. Pugh of Bulawayo, this is a curiosity of interwar Rhodesian spiritualism, an example of the "psychic archaeology" fringe genre that attached itself to the Zimbabwe ruins controversy of the period.
Weird & Supernatural
London, John Murray, 1910.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Phillpotts' pre-war Murray collections are considerably scarcer than the interwar Hutchinson volumes: Phillpotts's staggering productivity (some 250 books) means his individual titles were rarely hoarded, and the early ones simply wore out. Sound copies from this period, jacket or no jacket, turn up far less often than the man's ubiquity would suggest
Weird & Supernatural
A New Volume of Short Stories
London, Hutchinson, [1927].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Phillpotts' shorter work is where the strangeness lives: the man who wrote The Grey Room - the country-house bedroom that kills its occupants - kept an uncanny streak his rural sagas concealed, which is what puts this volume on the supernatural shelf and keeps Phillpotts, admired in his day by no less than Borges, alive with genre collectors after his mainstream reputation faded.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Robert Holden, 1927.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Australian writer Knowles' best work appears in the three books of stories and sketches, The Street of Queer Houses and Other Tales (1925), Here and Otherwhere (1926) and Silver Nutmegs (1927), notable for their humour and satire. Knowles's work is in the tradition of Richard Garnett and has affinities with the work of Lord Dunsany and Donald Corley, but he affects a more naive and relaxed style than any of these. Uncommon in the jacket.
Weird & Supernatural
in the beliefs of mankind
London, George Allen & Unwin, 1933.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A sober scholarly survey of afterlife beliefs across the world's cultures and religions - heaven and hell, reincarnation, the immortal soul - drawing on religious texts, philosophy and history.
![Alternative view of [Randall-Stevens (H.C.)] The Book of Truth](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88269_2-300x300.jpg)
Weird & Supernatural
or The Voice of Osiris. Set down in the House of El Eros-El Erua, they being male-female, born according to the laws governing the Dhuman-Adamic race, this being their fourth incarnation
London, Rider & Co., [1925].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 16'-.
Hugh Clayton Randall-Stevens (b. 1896), a British esotericist who wrote as "El Eros" / "El Eros-El Erua" and later founded the Order of the Knights Templars of Aquarius. The text purports to be automatic writing and automatic drawings received over a period in 1925, dictated by the Egyptian deity Osiris - a cosmological narrative of the gods, the destruction of Atlantis and Lemuria, and the spiritual history of the "Dhuman-Adamic race."
Weird & Supernatural
Twenty-One Tales
London, Percival Marshall, [1951].
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Rare collection of weird tales by Irish author Barker, perhaps best known for his ghost story 'Whessoe'. Inscribed by him to the front free endpaper.
Weird & Supernatural
drawn from various trials...edited by the Rev. Montague Summers
n.p., John Rodker, 1929.
One of 1275 copies. 8vo. Title-page printed in red & black, rubricated initials. Original boards with paper-covered covers. Dust-jacket, priced 25/-.
First published in 1590, An Examen of Witches describes the witch trials conducted by Boguet and includes a chapter on the procedure necessary to a judge in trials for witchcraft. It is one of a group of important witchcraft texts published by John Rodker (who also issued Summers's translation of the Malleus Maleficarum), a publisher often associated with modernist works & authors.
Weird & Supernatural
A Study of Master Matthew Hopkins commonly call'd Witch Finder Generall...together with a Reprint of The Discovery of Witches from the rare original of 1647
London, at The Cayme Press, 1928.
First edition. Small 4to. Original wrappers with printed title label to upper cover.
Summers' introductory narration on Matthew Hopkins's The Discovery of Witches, an essay by the notorious seventeenth-century witch hunter who was the driving force behind the execution of more than a hundred alleged witches in the 1640s.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Arthur Barker, 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Second issue dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
A dark Gothic novel set on a Cornish farm, Raven's Brood centres on old John Pentreath's fear of God and love of the flesh & drink - a far cry from the work usually associated with the author of the Mapp & Lucia series. Rare in the jacket.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Selwyn & Blount, 1926.
First edition, third impression. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, correctly priced 2/- and stating 'third edition'.
The first volume in Thomson's landmark 'Not at Night' anthology series, which ran to eleven volumes (1925–1937) and introduced British readers to American pulp weird fiction from Weird Tales and similar magazines. The series was highly influential in shaping British taste for supernatural horror and is a cornerstone collection in the history of the genre. This copy is the first edition, third impression with contemporary dust-jacket, which is notably scarce.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1901.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth.
A seemingly extremely rare collection of 'barrack room' short stories, some with supernatural content. Only four copies recorded in institutional holdings (all in the UK), and no records found at auction. An introductory note from the author reads:
"The following stories are chiefly based upon incidents and experiences connected with a rather lengthened professional career. It is hoped that the book may serve to enliven a dull hour, and may perhaps also enhance the widespread interest recently revived in all phases of military life. Some of the stories have already appeared in The United Service Magazine and The Church Monthly."
Weird & Supernatural
London, Hamish Hamilton, 1940.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.
A prolific playwright, drama critic and author active in English literary circles from around 1910. This ghost story is one of the author's few dalliances with the supernatural.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Dent, 1919.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Rare. A collection of psychic tales, mostly dealing with astral projection, out-of-body experiences and, in some cases, travel to 'other worlds'. Allen Clarke (1863–1935), also known under the pseudonym Teddy Ashton, was primarily a working-class journalist and novelist of Lancashire industrial life.
Weird & Supernatural
A Two-Fold Romance
London; New York; Toronto, John Lane The Bodley Head; John Lane Company; Bell & Cockburn, 1914.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A late, mostly epistolary novel set partly in the 20th century and partly in the 17th, involving communications between the bewitching Lady Venetia and a young archaeologist, with hints of the supernatural. Paget's last novel.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Jonathan Cape, 1936.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
One of Morton's Beachcomber collections published under his own name rather than the pseudonym, gathering the comic whimsies, parodies, spoof news items and surreal sketches featuring his recurring characters.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Heinemann, 1929.
New impression. 8vo. Original black cloth lettered in red. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
A mystical supernatural novel of reincarnation: the village eccentric and egomaniac Peregrine Sark brings back a terracotta figure of the goddess Cybele to his English country house and becomes dangerously absorbed in worshipping the deity. Attractive jacket artwork by commercial and graphic artist Keely.
Weird & Supernatural
Boston, Mass., Ruth Hill, 1934.First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.A short novel and apparently the only mystery title by an author better known for her work in the American theatre, including for her acquisition of the old Diamond Paper Mill in Millburn, New Jersey, which she subsequently transformed into the Paper Mill Playhouse. The publisher, Ruth Hill of Boston, was a very small imprint of the period specialising in limited and semi-private literary productions.
Weird & Supernatural
London [&c.], Cassell, 1926.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A collection of short stories by an author & playwright best known for his association with mythic tales such as 'The Wandering Jew' and 'The Flying Dutchman'.
Weird & Supernatural
London, for J. Andrews, 1823.
First edition. 8vo. Original paper-covered boards with later title-label affixed to spine.
A significant and now rather scarce compilation belonging to a small cluster of serious ghost-narrative anthologies published in the 1820s. Jarvis is otherwise unknown, and the name may be a nom de plume.
Weird & Supernatural
London, J.M. Dent, 1910.
First edition. 8vo. Title printed in red & black. Original cloth decorated & lettered in gilt.
The first collection of short fiction by William Fryer Harvey (1885-1937), a writer now firmly established in the canon of British supernatural and horror fiction. The collection contains sixteen tales of the weird and supernatural, and is notable above all for containing the first appearance of "August Heat", a story about two men, unknown to each other, whose contemplation of each other's possible future suggests that one will be murdered and the other will be the murderer.
Weird & Supernatural
A Chapter from a Family Chronicle
London, Chapman & Hall, 1889.
One-shilling edition. 8vo. Original pictorial boards, priced one shilling.
An early edition, originally published the previous year, of this ghostly tale about a family curse, written by the Rector of St Alban's, Manchester and later Canon of Worcester Cathedral, author also of The Broken Vow (1887). Scarce in the original boards.
![Alternative view of Riddell (Mrs J.H. [Charlotte]) Idle Tales](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/87829_2-300x300.jpg)
Weird & Supernatural
London, Ward & Downey, [1888].
First collected edition. 8vo. Original red pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to spine.
"A general collection containing Riddell's fine supernatural short story, 'The last of Squire Enmismore'." (Shadows in the Attic, p.423).
![[Creeps series], Tales of Death, first edition, 1936](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/87808-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of [Creeps]. Tales of Death.](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/87808_2-300x300.jpg)
Weird & Supernatural
A collection of uneasy tales
London, Philip Allan, 1936.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
Published by Philip Allan as part of the celebrated 'Creeps' series, Tales of Death gathers macabre and supernatural stories from multiple authors under excellent editorial guidance, extending the interwar tradition of shilling shocker anthologies.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Philip Allan, 1935.
First edition, early issue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
'Tales from a land which is still veiled by occult powers where things are felt but not seen. Unusual and uncanny happenings by a well-known Oriental writer' (jacket blurb). An uncommon title from the Allan stable, who also produced the 'Creep' series.
Weird & Supernatural
London, The Literary Press Limited, n.d. [c.1902].
Early UK edition. 8vo. Original orange cloth. Dust-jacket.
The attempted conversion of a celebrated courtesan by the ascetic monk Paphnuce, a mission that exposes the instability of faith, desire and spiritual pride. One of France's best-known works.
Weird & Supernatural
Westminster, A. Constable & Co., 1894.
First edition, issued as part of the Acme library series. Small 8vo. Original blue cloth lettered and stamped in gilt.
A fine portrait of the lingering belief in the occult that haunted the Victorian Age. The story explores themes of psychological manipulation and control, as the main character finds himself caught in a disturbing and dangerous situation, while struggling to maintain his scientific rationality and personal relationships.
Weird & Supernatural
and other stories of the supernatural
London, John Murray, 1903.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original green pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to spine.
A notable collection of American ghost stories by Mary E. Wilkins (later Wilkins Freeman), whose work brought psychological depth and New England atmosphere to supernatural fiction; a respected voice in late-Victorian/Edwardian weird literature. Wilkins is now recognised as a key work in the tradition that fuses domestic realism with the ghost story, frequently cited in modern horror and fantasy bibliographies.