Non-Fiction
The science of the super-normal
London, G. Bell & Sons, 1933.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Hans Driesch (1867–1941) was an eminent German experimental embryologist and philosopher, famous for the neo-vitalist concept of "entelechy" and for his Gifford Lectures (The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, 1907–08); he was also a serious psychical researcher, a member of the Society for Psychical Research from 1913 and its President in 1926–27. He was also, in 1933, the first non-Jewish academic to be dismissed from his chair (at Leipzig) by the Nazi regime, on account of his pacifism and open hostility to Nazism. Translated by Theodore Besterman. With a foreword by physicist & prominent spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge.
Detective Fiction
London, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1950.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
One of this US author's most enduring works, and a genuine landmark: a noir told largely from inside the head of its killer, Dix Steele, an embittered ex-airman prowling post-war Los Angeles, widely regarded as one of the first modern serial-killer novels and a strikingly proto-feminist subversion of the form.
Antiquarian
Practical Man (A) The Vintner’s, Brewer’s, Spirit Merchant’s and Licensed Victualler’s Guide
London, W. Wetton [&c.], 1826.
First edition. 12mo. Half-title. 19th century full calf with gilt-roll border to covers, spine gilt compartments within gilt-decorated raised bands, with contrasting leather title label.
This work collects hundreds of recipes for fermented beverages - wines (foreign and domestic), malt liquors, cider, perry, vinegar, spirits, liqueurs, cordials, and compounds - alongside a wealth of supporting information. It opens with a history of wine and a treatise on brewing (porter and various ales), then turns to the fermentation and distillation of spirits "of every denomination," including alcohol, brandy, rum, geneva (gin), and whisky. A fourth section covers cider, perry, mead, and vinegar, followed by chapters on cellaring wines, beers, porters, ales, and spirits, with guidance on refining and managing flavour, colour, and concentration as they age. The book closes with three technical chapters: data on hydrometers and saccharometers for the distiller, the Parliamentary laws governing licensed vendors (innkeepers and publicans among them), and several tables for converting weights and measures.
Detective Fiction
London, Secker & Warburg, 1978.First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.Originally published in the US as a Dell paperback, this hardback edition is considered one of the scarcer Leonard editions, particularly in such good condition.
Translated by Claud W. Sykes
London, The Ace Publishing Co., [1938].
First English edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
FFA 17 memoir, drawn from the author's own combat reports and illustrated with photographs he took on observation duties - jaunty in tone against a grim backdrop of heavy casualties, and the second of a trilogy of his air-war memoirs.
Detective Fiction
Latham, NY, British American Publishing, 1990.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced $19.95.
The American author's first novel, published when he was 26. The author has gone on to win multiple awards for his tightly wrought thriller fiction.
Detective Fiction
London, Ward, Lock, 1937.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author on title-page. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped, with publisher's code '743' on spine.
An early work by the creator of the Poldark saga, opening in Raj India and Singapore, before finding its true centre in Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. Uncommon, especially signed. The jacket artist Nina Miller Davidson (1895–1957) was a Scottish watercolourist and stained-glass designer who also produced a number of book jackets.
Children's Books
London, Methuen, 1948.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The third of Enid Blyton's six Malory Towers boarding-school novels (1946–51), set at a clifftop Cornish girls' school modelled on Benenden, where Blyton sent her daughters.
![Alternative view of [Phillipps (Thomas)] Scenes and Occurences in Albany and Caffer-Land, South Africa](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88294_2-300x300.jpg)
London, for William Marsh, 1827.
First edition, issue with corrected frontispiece title. 8vo. Later half morocco with marbled boards.
The frontispiece was erroneously published with the title 'Entrance to the Rownie River'. This copy has the corrected title pasted down - 'Entrance to the Kowie River'. Anonymously published selection from the letters of the 1820 settler, Thomas Phillips, to his sister, Mrs Catherine Richardson.
Detective Fiction
London, John Long, [1948].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 6s.
John Creasey (1908–1973) was one of the most prolific authors who ever lived: around 600 books under his own name and some two dozen pseudonyms, and the founder of the Crime Writers' Association and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. The Toff is the Hon. Richard Rollison, his debonair gentleman-sleuth, who began in the story-papers in 1933 and ran to nearly sixty novels.
Detective Fiction
A Peter Chambers Caper
London, Boardman, 1964.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
One of the 'American Bloodhound Mystery' series. Another hardboiled Chambers caper, in the Denis McLoughlin jacket.
Detective Fiction
A Peter Chambers Caper
London, Boardman, 1963.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
One of the 'American Bloodhound Mystery' series, in the jacket by collectable artist Denis McLoughlin.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1959.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s6d.
'Victor Gunn' was one of several pseudonyms of Edwy Searles Brooks (1889–1965), a phenomenally prolific writer (estimated at some 40 million words) who, under his own name and as Berkeley Gray, supplied the Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee story-papers, created the St Frank's school stories, and wrote the Berkeley Gray 'Norman Conquest' thrillers. As Victor Gunn he created Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell of Scotland Yard, who this title features.
Detective Fiction
London, Ward, Lock, 1937.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, with code '736' to spine, price-clipped.
The Wonderful Scheme (issued in the US the same year as The Wonderful Scheme of Mr. Christopher Thorne) belongs to Keeler's Marceau Case sequence, offering "a third solution" to that case.
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).
statistically determined from the latest extensive word counts
Tokyo, Matsumura Sanshoho, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket.
A quietly significant book that its obscurity belies. Lawrence William Faucett (1892–1978) was, alongside Harold E. Palmer and Michael West, one of the three most influential figures in the development of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching between the wars; he worked in China and Japan, wrote The Teaching of English in the Far East (1927) and the Oxford English Course (1933), the first UK-published general EFL course. Decidedly scarce in the jacket.
Poetry
London, L, & V. Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1931.
Number 270 of 350 signed copies. Early issue with comma after 'L' in imprint. 8vo. Original patterned wrappers with printed title label. Original plain glassine dust-jacket.
George "Dadie" Rylands (1902–1999), Cambridge literary scholar, King's College fellow, Shakespeare authority and theatre director (later famous for coaching John Gielgud and directing the Marlowe Society) who moved in the Bloomsbury and Cambridge Apostles circles and briefly worked as an assistant at the Hogarth Press in 1924. The Woolfs published two volumes of his verse, Russet and Taffeta (1925) and this collection of pastoral lyrics, together with his dissertation Words and Poetry (1928).
![[Lang & Pollock], He, first edition, 1887](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88284-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of [Lang (Andrew) and Walter Herries Pollock]. He](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88284_2-300x300.jpg)
Victorian Literature
London, Longmans, Green, 1887.
First edition. 8vo. Original pictorial wrappers, rebacked in later paper.
Lang & Pollock's presumably affectionate parody of Rider Haggard's She. Lang (of the Fairy Tale multi-coloured books fame) and Haggard worked together on subsequent projects.
New York, Young Poale Zion Alliance of America, [1935].
8vo. Original printed wrappers.
Nachman Syrkin (1868–1924), born in Mogilev, was the principal theorist and founding figure of Labor (Socialist) Zionism, a leader of the socialist faction at the First Zionist Congress of 1897, an early advocate of the Jewish National Fund, and the first to propose that Jewish immigrants to Palestine establish collective settlements (the intellectual seed of the kibbutz movement).
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.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1941.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A scarce wartime Crime Club first edition. Farjeon was known for his keen humour and flashing wit but he also used sinister and terrifying storylines quite freely.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1939.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Superintendent Wilson mystery, set on a high-minded cultural cruise around the Greek islands, on which a popular lecturer and broadcaster, secretly leading a double life as a spy, is stabbed to death.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1941.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Christie's wartime spy thriller and the third outing for Tommy & Tuppence Beresford (after The Secret Adversary, 1922, and Partners in Crime, 1929). A dying British agent's cryptic clue sends Tommy and Tuppence to the seaside guesthouse Sans Souci in pursuit of two German fifth-columnist masterminds, "N" and "M."
![[Lang & Pollock], He, first edition, 1887](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88278-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of [Lang (Andrew) and Walter Herries Pollock]. He](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88278_2-300x300.jpg)
Victorian Literature
London, Longmans, Green, 1887.
First edition. 8vo. Original pictorial wrappers, rebacked in later paper.
Lang & Pollock's presumably affectionate parody of Rider Haggard's She. Lang (of the Fairy Tale multi-coloured books fame) and Haggard worked together on subsequent projects.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1939.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A Superintendent Wilson novel; a country-house mystery braiding romance with detection, offering up two blackmails, two murders, two bigamies, two detectives and a set of twins...
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1940.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Collectable Collins title by the Oxford economist and leading Fabian G.D.H. Cole and his wife Margaret Cole, socialist writer and politician.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1941.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Room Number Six (Crime Club no. 211 in the series) is a chase-and-romance mystery in prolific author Farjeon's characteristically Hitchcockian vein.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Rapp & Whiting, 1970.First UK edition. Ex-Library. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced £1.40.The first UK 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.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1937.First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original orange cloth.A solid Collins Crime Club first UK edition. Campbell (1887–1955) was a suffragist & socialist in New York, relocating to Paris then England; she published nineteen detective novels between 1928 and 1950, several with French settings, and has been revived in recent years by Dean Street Press.
Detective Fiction
A Detective Story
New York, Chelsea House, 1925.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
An uncommon first edition novel about the criminal underworld, by the prolific author who created Zorro.
Art & Architecture
of the celebrated Mr. Pennant's Description of the British Capital, and its Environs
London, for the editor; and sold by W. Bentley, 1790.
First edition. 8vo. Contemporary half calf.
Wallis's abridged and cheaper octavo redaction of Pennant's famous work on London, issued the same year with prefatory notes, additions and observations, designed to bring Pennant's expensive illustrated work within reach of a wider public; effectively a popular companion to the original.
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."
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917.
1/- edition. 8vo. Original decorative boards. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
This is the third collection of Sapper's First World War stories and sketches (after The Lieutenant and Others and Sergeant Michael Cassidy, both 1915), first published 1916, offering trench tales that are realistic and at times shocking yet deliberately leavened with humour. McNeile would of course go on to create Bulldog Drummond, one of the great interwar thriller heroes. Rare in the jacket.
American Literature
London, Cassell, 1947.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8s6d.
Mary Jane Ward (1905–1981) was an American novelist whose semi-autobiographical The Snake Pit was made into an Oscar-winning film. The novel was based on Ward's involuntary committal to Rockland State Hospital in upstate New York in 1941, and it generated public support for important political reforms in psychiatric institutions and mental health care.
African literature
London, Faber & Faber, 1946.
First edition, second impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
"...the story of a brilliant West African boy and his search for what he conceived to be success by Western standards. We watch with delight young Folu's progress through the mission school, where by his shrewdness and wit he quickly makes his mark." (jacket blurb)
Victorian Literature
London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1898.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Title printed in red & black. Original cloth, recased.
Somerset Maugham's second book, a historical romance set in late-15th-century Italy, narrating how Filippo Brandolini comes to be venerated as a saint after a conspicuously unsaintly life. One of 2,000 copies (Stott A2).
Detective Fiction
London, Methuen, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
An uncommon Golden Age detective novel, and a more intriguing one than its obscurity suggests. Though The Author's & Writer's Who's Who records the author as one "Peter Redcliff Shore," born Hampton 1892 and Oxford-educated, that persona appears to be a fiction: research has established the author as Helen Madeline Leys (1892-1965), daughter of the barrister-novelist John Kirkwood Leys and far better known under her other pen-name, Eleanor Scott.
A Somerville College graduate and teacher, Leys wrote mainstream novels and the didactic Adventurous Women and Heroic Women (1939), but her enduring reputation rests on the ghost-story collection Randalls Round (1929), comprising tales, several reportedly drawn from her own dreams, which have been likened to M.R. James.
The bibliographer & anthologist Richard Dalby, who reconstructed the few known facts of her life, ranked her among "the best, but ultimately least known, writers" of supernatural fiction of the era, and contemporary reviewers praised her uncanny grasp of feminine psychology.
The Death Film itself is one of very few Golden Age mysteries to set a murder in a cinema - a victim killed during a film screening - though the book is so seldom seen that little more about it has been recorded:
"...it is, apparently, an extremely scarce title and the only thing we know about it is that someone is killed during the screening of a movie. So that makes a grand total of... two cinema mysteries? Two and a half, if you count the one by Christie?" (Beneath the Stains of Time)
The other one and "a half" being One Remained Seated (John Slate [pseud. John Russell Fearn], 1946) and The ABC Murders (Agatha Christie, 1936) respectively. Genuinely scarce.
Detective Fiction
London, Hurst & Blackett, [1922].
First UK edition. 8vo. Ink-stamped 'With the publisher's compliments' to title-page. Original cloth.
An uncommon cinema-related title by the author of When It Was Dark (1903), under the pseudonym 'Guy Thorne'.
Detective Fiction
Fredericks (Arnold, pseud. Frederic Arnold Kummer) The Film of Fear
London, Robert Hayes, [c.1921].
First UK edition. Small 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
Number 10 in the publisher's 'Hayes' Copyright Novels' series. The plot follows film star Ruth Morton, the target of escalating anonymous threats to ruin her beauty, with series characters the Duvalls called in to investigate. The work is widely cited as the first novel centred on the motion-picture industry, though set around the early film-making world of New York and New Jersey rather than Hollywood
Detective Fiction
The Chronicles of Delancey, King of Thieves
London, Ward, Lock, 1931.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Later issue dust-jacket.
In this companion to Sing Sing Nights, Ward Sharlow agrees to impersonate the late son of a wealthy man, a device framing a sequence of nested tales about Bayard DeLancey, a Raffles-like gentleman-thief styled the "King of Thieves."