Sci-Fi & Fantasy
or, the Modern Prometheus
London, John Dicks, 1884.
In Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, vol.III. 4to. Contemporary half straight-grain morocco lettered and ruled in gilt to spine.
An uncommon serialised edition of Shelley's classic of sci-fi horror; the volume also contains Percy Bysshe's Zastrozzi, both illustrated by the well-known illustrator Frederick Gilbert.
Detective Fiction
London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1928.
'Cheap Edition'. 8vo. Original orange cloth decorated and lettered in black. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.
Eleven early Poirot cases (including 'The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb' and 'The Kidnapped Prime Minister'), collected from their original magazine appearances in The Sketch and first published in book form by the Bodley Head in March 1924 for Christie's fourth book, and the earliest to gather her short fiction.
This is the 1928 "Cheap Edition," a third setting reduced to 2/- and to a smaller trim size than the original 7/6 first edition, in the second of two recorded binding states: red cloth bearing John Lane's monogram to cover and spine, with updated endpapers and copyright page, as distinct from an ostensibly transitional first state in blue cloth without these revisions, seemingly assembled in part from older printed stock ahead of a full reprint. The jacket abandons the original edition's W. Smithson Broadhead illustration, itself reprinted from a 1923 Sketch drawing, in favour of new artwork by Wyndham Payne (1884–1974), the self-taught English illustrator and printmaker best known for his Methuen jacket to The Wind in the Willows, who designed a run of Bodley Head covers for Christie in this period; his archive is now held at the V&A.
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.
Art & Architecture
Essex & Co. Ltd A sample catalogue of over 330 wallpaper designs
, , 1923.
Oblong thick 4to. Firm blue cloth boards with riveted leather straps to spine, leather clasp to fore-edge present but inoperative.
An excellent wallpaper pattern book, dated the year Essex & Co. was acquired by Sanderson, and bringing together more than 330 designs, most printed on the reverse, spanning registered design numbers 2001 to 2338. The sequence opens with the firm's "cameoid" range: raised, textured papers for relief decoration in the manner of Anaglypta, before broadening into a much wider repertoire of pattern and colourwork. Stylistically the book moves fluidly between Arts & Crafts sensibilities, Art Nouveau line, and an emerging Art Deco or modernist idiom. Several designs feel so far ahead of their moment that a modern eye might place them a decade later, in the 1930s, a testament to how forward-looking the firm's output had become by this point.Essex & Co. was founded by Sir R. Walter Essex, who around 1893 brought the architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey on board to produce wallpaper designs for the firm over the following decades. A good number of the patterns in this book are either by Voysey's hand or clearly derivative of his style. The range is remarkably comprehensive, touching nearly every domestic setting and taste: dense floral chintzes in the Morris tradition sit alongside crisp modernist one- and two-tone colourways, while Chinese and Japanese influenced designs featuring birds and foliage, and faux-tile patterns intended for bathrooms, cluster particularly towards the back of the book. Essex & Co. built its reputation as a foremost name in "art wallpaper," and is arguably rivalled only by William Morris & Co. in terms of influence on British wallpaper design of the period.The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a substantial collection related to the firm, 62 works dated between 1850 and 1941, including several Voysey-designed papers produced by Essex & Co. that illustrate the collaboration referenced above, among them The Saladin (1897), The Merle, The Fairyland, Feudal, and Cibber (1901). These pieces, several gifted to the museum by Courtaulds Ltd, offer useful comparative material for dating and attributing designs in this pattern book, and situate it within the firm's broader design output from the 1890s through to its absorption by Sanderson in the 1920s.
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.
Victorian Literature
Dickens (Charles) The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
London, Chapman & Hall, 1839.
First edition in book form. 8vo. Half-title. 19th century half calf with marbled boards, spine elaborate gilt compartments within raised bands decorated in gilt.
Dickens's third novel follows the fortunes of young Nicholas Nickleby, thrown on his own resources with his mother and sister after his father's death, his path taking in the brutal Yorkshire boarding school Dotheboys Hall under the tyrannical Wackford Squeers, an itinerant theatrical troupe, and the machinations of his miserly uncle Ralph.
Conforming to the issue points: p. 123 'visiter' instead of 'sister'; p. 160 'latter' instead of 'letter'.p.245 'flys' instead of 'flies'; p. 272 'visiters' instead of'visitors'; p. 586 'suprise' instead of 'surprise'. The first four plates bear the imprint of'Chapman and Hall'.
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.'
Children's Books
London, Longmans, Green, 1927.
New Impression. 8vo. Original burgundy cloth blocked in blind to upper cover and gilt to spine. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
The eighth of Andrew Lang's twelve "Coloured" Fairy Books, first published in 1903, gathering thirty-six tales drawn from Hungary, Russia, the Baltic states, Finland, Iceland and Tunisia among other sources, compiled with the substantial uncredited assistance of his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang.
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.
Modern Literature
London, W. Collins Sons, 1930.
First edition, second impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
A work of humorous fantasy by Ernest Elmore (1901–1957), published under his own name rather than the "John Bude" pseudonym under which he later became known as a detective novelist. Elmore did not turn to crime fiction until 1935, when The Lake District Murder and The Cornish Coast Murder launched a series of thirty novels as John Bude, mostly featuring Inspector William Meredith and reprinted in recent years by the British Library Crime Classics series; contemporary critic and Detection Club president Martin Edwards has judged Bude's early work smooth and accomplished for a debut. This Siren Song belongs instead to the small group of comic fantasies Elmore wrote in his own name, alongside The Steel Grubs (1928) and The Lumpton Gobbelings (1954).
The dust-jacket was designed by Margaret Macadam (1902–1991), a Royal Academy Schools-trained illustrator active through the 1920s and 30s whose other credits include the first edition of Agatha Christie's Giant's Bread (as "Mary Westmacott," 1930) for the same publisher.
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.
Modern Literature
and other stories
London, Secker & Warburg, 1967.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A collection of ten short stories by Yukio Mishima (pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, 1925–1970), gathering pieces that had previously appeared in Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Japan Quarterly and elsewhere; this is the first UK edition, following the US first edition issued the previous year.
Detective Fiction
London, Newnes, 1902.First edition. 8vo. Original red cloth blocked in elaborate gilt to upper cover and spine, with inset black silhouette of the Hound to upper cover.A great copy of without doubt one of the most thrilling and atmospheric adventures of everybody's favourite consulting detective, a glorious blend of goth pseudo supernatural and definitive Holmesian deductive scene stealing, The Hound of the Baskervilles exists very much in a realm of its own.The novel, the third of four featuring Holmes, was the first tale to be published after Doyle threw his most notable creation off a waterfall, and its considerable commercial success was really the catalyst for Holmes' triumphal return to life. With more plots than Varney the Vampire (actually five in all, including red herrings...so we're exaggerating, because everyone knows Varney has about 750), it seems very much a harking back to the Victorian style of creeper, very Le Fanu or Wilkie Collins, with its diary entries, and letters, unearthed manuscript and doom laden portents uttered by gloomy locals staring out of windows overlooking marsh land. It's glorious and deeply enjoyable, and pretty scarce in this bright condition.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1953.
Reissue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Widely regarded as one of Christie's masterpieces and a landmark of Golden Age crime fiction. Poirot investigates a murder aboard the famous international train stranded by snow, discovering that the crime is far more complex than it initially appears.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1933.
First edition, sixth impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket. Priced 1/-.
The first Miss Marple novel, in which the body of the unpopular Colonel Protheroe is found shot in the vicar's study in the village of St Mary Mead.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1933.
First edition, fifth impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
One of Christie's early non-Poirot, non-Marple mysteries, valued for its atmospheric Dartmoor setting and tightly engineered plotting.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1934.
First edition, fifth impression. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
A group of friends known as the Tuesday Night Club gathers together regularly to share and solve mysterious cases. Each member takes turns presenting a baffling puzzle or crime for the others to unravel.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1931.
First edition, fourth impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.
Village doctor James Sheppard narrates Poirot's investigation into the murder of the wealthy Roger Ackroyd in King's Abbot, the novel's celebrated twist revealing the narrator himself as the killer.
Detective Fiction
and other stories
London, Odhams Press, 1933.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A collection of twelve stories, mostly tales of fate and the supernatural rather than orthodox detection. Features the first-book appearance of 'The Witness for the Prosecution,' later adapted into a hit stage play and Billy Wilder's 1957 film with Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich.
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.
![Alternative view of Arthur (T.C.) [i.e. Arthur Travers Crawford]. Reminiscences of an Indian Police Official](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88436_2-300x300.jpg)
London, Sampson, Low, Marston, 1894.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original wine-red cloth.
A realistic look at colonial practices and prejudice. The author claims that the tales recorded [some highly disturbing] are not 'stories' or in any sense inventions.
Detective Fiction
London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1928.
'Cheap Edition'. 8vo. Original dark orange cloth blocked in black. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.
Poirot is summoned to Merlinville-sur-Mer in northern France by the wealthy Paul Renauld, only to arrive and find his client stabbed in the back and buried in a shallow grave near the golf links... This is the 1928 Bodley Head "Cheap Edition" at 2 shillings, a reissue predating Christie's move to Collins with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. These Bodley Head cheap-edition jackets are exceptionally scarce survivals.