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.
London, Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1881.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original terracotta cloth stamped in black & gilt.
The third and final volume of Verne's non-fiction trilogy 'Celebrated Travels and Travellers,' following The Exploration of the World and The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century; this volume surveys the exploits of real nineteenth-century explorers across the Arctic, Africa and beyond.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Grant Richards, 1909.
'New and Cheaper Edition'. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to upper cover.
One of the author's posthumously published novels, relating the rivalry between two amateur astronomers in small-town American town who attempt to claim a surprisingly valuable comet.
![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.
Detective Fiction
London, Andrew Melrose, [1936].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Seemingly the first crime title by this Hubin-listed author, featuring his recurring character Inspector Hopton. Woodiwiss had also published a collection of ghost stories in 1931.
Selected Poems. With a Drawing by Pablo Picasso. Edited by George Reavey
London, Europa Press & Stanley Nott, [1936].
First edition. Number 254 from 600 copies. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5s.
The first English-language collection of Paul Éluard's poetry, edited by George Reavey and issued by his short-lived Europa Press in partnership with Stanley Nott to coincide with the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in London in June 1936. Éluard (1895–1952) was, with André Breton, among the founding figures of French Surrealism; the volume's translators were a roll-call of the movement's Anglophone circle, including Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, David Gascoyne, Man Ray and Ruthven Todd, with a preface by Herbert Read and a frontispiece portrait of Éluard drawn by Pablo Picasso.
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.
African literature
London, Heinemann, 1965.
Uncorrected proof copy. 8vo. Original green & white wrappers printed in black, with publisher's ink stamp to upper wrapper.
Achebe's fourth novel is a satire of political corruption in an unnamed West African state, narrated by the young schoolmaster Odili as he turns against his former teacher, the venal cabinet minister Chief Nanga. Achebe (1930–2013) remains the foremost figure of modern African letters, the founder of Heinemann's 'African Writers' series and author of Things Fall Apart (1958), and went on to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.
Illustrated Books
Paris, The Olympia Press, 1956.
First edition with the images in the first state. 8vo. Original soft wraps with stiff self-wrappers designed by T. Tajiri and printed in black, grey & yellow.
Black & white photographs printed in gravure and laminated, as opposed to the matte second state. Rare.
A short, largely autobiographical novel recounting Miller's impoverished, sexually adventurous bohemian life in Clichy, Paris, in the early 1930s. The text originated around 1940 as one of two commissioned pieces written for a private American collector of erotica, the manuscripts subsequently going missing for over a decade before resurfacing, and Miller rewrote both at Big Sur in 1956 for this edition. The book is illustrated with photogravure plates by Brassaï (pseud. Gyula Halász), whom Miller had already celebrated in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941) and on whom he partly based a character in Tropic of Cancer; the wrapper design is by the sculptor T. Shinkichi Tajiri.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Seattle, Darkside Press, 2003.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A retrospective gathering of short fiction by John Wyndham, the first in a planned series of Darkside Press "readers" devoted to his shorter work, edited and introduced by John Pelan with story notes by Philip Stephensen-Payne. The 16 stories and novelettes span Wyndham's career from the 1930s to the '60s.
London, Martin Secker, 1910.
First edition, second issue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 10/6.
A critical study by Edward Thomas (1878–1917) examining how women, as inspiration, subject, patroness and muse, shaped English poetry from the medieval period onward, organised into chapters such as 'Women as Poets,' 'Mothers of Poets' and 'Patronesses.'
Detective Fiction
London, Thornton Butterworth, 1940.
"First Edition Cheap Edition" (but really first edition, remainder issue with cancel title-page). 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
A detective novel by Francis D. Grierson (1888–1972), an Irish-born journalist and prolific author of over forty crime novels between 1924 and 1960, most featuring his series detectives Superintendent Andrew Ash, Inspector George Muir, or the pairing of Inspector Sims and Professor Wells.
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.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Garden City, Doubleday & Company, 1969.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $4.50.
The first edition of this novel set in a future 1992 where psychics are common and utilised in corporate espionage while intricate technologies allow recently deceased people to be maintained in a lengthy state of hibernation.
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.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1967.
First edition. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, priced 18s.
Taking its title from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, this later title ranked amongst the author's favourites of her own works.
A complete and detailed account of the amazing criminal activities of this sinister Chairman
London, Hurst & Blackett, [1929].
First edition. 8vo. Original black cloth blocked in orange. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
An omnibus reissue combining Sax Rohmer's first three Fu-Manchu novels - The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1913), The Devil Doctor (1916) and The Si-Fan Mysteries (1917) - under a single cover. An attractive copy.
London, Faber & Faber, 1972.
First edition. 8vo. Original blue, grey & white wrapper lettered in black, priced £1.00.
Heaney's third collection, written substantially during a sabbatical year at Berkeley in 1970-71, marking a widening of his poetic landscape beyond the rural Derry of his first two books and a deepening engagement with etymology, place-names and the linguistic layering of Ulster ("Anahorish," "Broagh," "Toome"), against the backdrop of the escalating Troubles and his own move from Belfast to the Republic.
This is the true first edition, issued in Faber's printed wrappers a year ahead of the hardback, and increasingly scarce in bright, unmarked condition.
Non-Fiction
An autobiography. Translated from the German by E. Osers
London, Harrap, 1957.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 18/-.
The autobiography of Hans Habe (1911–77), born János Békessy in Budapest, tracing his career from Central European journalism through his escape from Nazism, service in the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of war, flight to the United States and naturalisation in 1941, and his subsequent return to Germany with the American occupying forces in 1945, where he founded eighteen newspapers in the US zone, including the influential Die Neue Zeitung. Habe wrote under numerous further pseudonyms over his career and became a prolific novelist in German, several of his later thrillers and historical novels appearing in English translation; this autobiography was first published in German in 1954 as Ich stelle mich: Meine Lebensgeschichte.
Detective Fiction
London, Hutchinson, n.d. [c.1926].
'5th thousand'. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6 and also stating '5th thousand'.
Attractive jacket artwork elevates this later printing of an uncommon, Hubin-listed crime title.
Children's Books
London, Hutchinson, 1970.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
A Fenland ghost story for young adults, widely regarded by admirers of that tradition as one of the finest post-James novels in the ghost-story genre, ranked alongside Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness by James scholar Rosemary Pardoe.
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.
Detective Fiction
Tey (Josephine, pseud. Elizabeth Mackintosh) The Franchise Affair.
Introduction by Antonia Fraser
London, The Folio Society, 2001.
Folio Society edition. Large 8vo. Original blue pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to spine. Plain blue slipcase.
Tey's third Inspector Alan Grant novel, inspired by the real 18th-century case of Elizabeth Canning. The novel was adapted for film in 1951, directed by Lawrence Huntington and starring Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, and was named one of the Crime Writers' Association's Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.
![Alternative view of Attwell ([Mabel] Lucie) Lucie Attwell's Wide Awake Tales](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88437_2-300x300.jpg)
Children's Books
London, S.W. Partridge, n.d. [c.1928].
Small 4to. Original pictorial boards.
A scarce work, seemingly unrecorded in Jisc or the British Library. The work combines Attwell's characteristic colour plates and line drawings, part of her prolific output of annual-style children's volumes for S.W. Partridge in this period.