![F.W. Rose, Serio-Comic War Map for the Year 1877, revised edition, [1877]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88562_2-300x228.jpg)
Revised Edition London, G.W. Bacon, [?1877].Colour lithographic allegorical map, with printed explanation to lower right in English only; 570 x 430 mm., backed onto card.The first slightly revised edition of Rose's famous 'Octopus' map of Europe, first published in 1877 - the map was rapidly reissued for distribution in other countries, reflected in the imprint and the language of the attendant description. Rose is best known for two such political cartoon maps of Europe, this one and Angling in Troubled Waters (1899). Most of his maps were published as broadsheets and separate folding publications on relatively thin paper, and as a result rarely appear in particularly good condition.Russia sprawls across the continent as a monstrous octopus, tentacles tightening around Finland, Poland, Bulgaria, the Crimea and Persia. Turkey, a turbaned figure lying across the Bosphorus, keeps his pistol drawn to guard the gold watch at his waist - Constantinople - while Greece pinches at his elbow. Germany bristles with weapons, France takes aim across the Rhine, Italy dances in her new freedom and Spain sleeps. Britain looks on from the sidelines, umbrella and claymore in hand, determined at least to save the Turk's watch.
![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.
Detective Fiction
Small (Austin J., aka ‘Seamark’) The Man They Couldn’t Arrest
London, Hodder & Stoughton, [1927].
First edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Early issue dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
A fast-paced thriller concerning Valman Dain, an inventor whose devices include a mechanism for eavesdropping on conversations through the telephone network. Austin James Small (1894–1929) went to sea as a boy, boxed as a Royal Navy heavyweight champion during the First World War, and was encouraged to write by Jack London, adopting the pen name "Seamark" to satisfy Admiralty regulations.
![Alternative view of Seamark [pseud. Austin J. Small] The Vantine Diamonds](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88557_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A travelling salesman's case of soap is exchanged for one containing a quarter of a million pounds' worth of diamonds. Austin James Small (1894–1929), who wrote as "Seamark" in Britain and under his own name in America, ran away to sea as a boy, travelled the world, and served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, where he was a champion heavyweight boxer; he met Jack London, was encouraged by him to write, and took the Seamark pseudonym to comply with Admiralty regulations.
Thriller Fiction
The Story of a Great Conspiracy
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1924.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A non-series thriller turning on a great conspiracy, published in the United States as The White Menace - a title which points plainly enough at the drug traffic that is its subject. This is Street's first book under the Rhode name, preceding the appearance of Dr Priestley by a year, and thus the beginning of a career that would run to something in the region of a 140 detective novels. Street (1884–1964) held the MC and OBE, served as an artillery officer and MI7 propagandist during the First World War and afterwards as Information Officer for Dublin Castle.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1944.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
The 39th Priestley novel, and one of the group of wartime titles in which Street drew directly on Home Front machinery for his settings.
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.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1935.
'Popular Edition', second impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
The fifth appearance of Lancelot Priestley, first published by Bles in 1928 following directly on The Murders in Praed Street, and belonging to the run of late-1920s titles in which the series took its settled shape - Priestley presiding, Harold Merefield in attendance, Inspector Hanslet of Scotland Yard supplying the official view for Priestley to dismantle.
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.
Detective Fiction
Burton (Miles, pseud. Cecil John Charles Street) Heir to Lucifer
London, Collins Crime Club, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Desmond Merrion, an amateur sleuth formerly of Naval Intelligence, and his wife are on holiday in the seaside town of Croylehaven, where the eccentric Croyle family and their crumbling Castle Croyle hold dark secrets and, ultimately, murder.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 8s6d.
Esther Kesgrave, long in service with the Botesdale family, returns from visiting her master - a certified lunatic confined in a mental home - to find the second Mrs Botesdale dead at the foot of the basement stairs. A post-war entry in the long Arnold and Merrion sequence, and one of the last to be issued in America before the series stopped crossing the Atlantic in 1950.
![Alternative view of Little (Conyth [i.e. Constance & Gwenyth]) The Black Thumb](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88548_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1943.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Set in an isolation hospital, where the sharp-witted nurse Norma Gale contends with someone - or several someones - inclined to take an axe to the furniture and, in due course, the occupants. "Conyth Little" is the portmanteau pseudonym used on the British editions for the Australian-born sisters Jessie Constance Little (1899–1980) and Norma Gwenyth Little (1903–85).
Detective Fiction
London, Jarrold, 1936.
First edition. 8vo. Original black cloth lettered in green to spine. Supplied dust-jacket, correctly priced 3/6.
Superb jacket married to a somewhat pre-loved example of the first edition of this Hubin-listed crime thriller. Jessie Louisa Rickard (1876-1963), who published as Mrs Victor Rickard, was an Irish novelist born in Dublin as Jessica Louisa Moore. She began at 18 with a series of hunting sketches for the Cork Examiner, popular enough that the Irish Times took a hunting serial from her, though she did not publish a novel until 1912, aged 36. She went on to produce over forty books, adopting the "Mrs Victor Rickard" style expressly to avoid confusion with a young woman of her own name murdered in the case the press called the Cornish Tragedy.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1955.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, produced 10s6d.
The wealthy Phineas Barnsdale calls on his nephew at the latter's farm and is killed by a savage blow to the head while using the telephone; the interrupted call fixes the time of death precisely, and every suspect but one proves able to account for it. Fifties 'Burton' titles are sometimes harder to find than the pre-war ones, surprisingly, and mostly have no US counterpart edition.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A Russian scientist invents a serum conferring immortality on selected recipients, and a young couple are left to decide whether it should be used; the protagonist's advocacy of the drug is brought to an end when the Wandering Jew appears and describes the cost of being unable to die. Harold E. Scarborough (1897–1935) was an American journalist and author resident in Britain from 1920, and this is the title for which he is remembered in science fiction. The book belongs to a distinct and long-running line of argument within the genre - that immortality would produce social sterility - running from Walter Besant's The Inner House (1888) through Martin Swayne's The Blue Germ (1918) and forward to Huxley's After Many a Summer (1939), and the Wandering Jew device places it equally in the Gothic tradition of Godwin's St Leon, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Mary Shelley's The Mortal Immortal. Noticed by Bleiler in Science-Fiction: The Early Years and Locke's A Spectrum of Fantasy. Published simultaneously in New York by D. Appleton.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1949.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, unpriced suggesting for export.
An elderly woman is discovered lying dead in a hammock by her great-niece - and is then found sitting up and calmly giving an interview to reporters minutes later. The puzzle reaches Desmond Merrion, whose snooping about the neighbourhood leads him to a boathouse containing two bodies, one recent and one a skeleton. The last Miles Burton to be published in the United States, and reviewed in the New York Times as "a fine, intricate puzzle".
![Alternative view of Little (Conyth [i.e. Constance & Gwenyth]) The Black Eye](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88542_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1946.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Eugenia Gates arrives at her friend Mary Fredon's apartment for a fortnight's quiet holiday and finds every prospect of rest destroyed - and then the bodies begin to appear... "Conyth Little" is a portmanteau pseudonym used on the British editions for the Australian-born sisters Jessie Constance Little (1899-1980) and Norma Gwenyth Little (1903-85), who produced twenty-one mysteries between them in a screwball-comedy register, all but the first with "black" in the title and a corresponding black clue in the plot.
![Alternative view of Little (Conyth [i.e. Constance & Gwenyth]) The Black Lady](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88541_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1944.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Marina Hays accepts an invitation to a country house for the weekend and finds herself entangled in two murders, a disappearing swimming pool, and a courtship conducted largely by being handed boards to hold while her suitor saws and hammers, and by being addressed as Maggie and Malvina in preference to her own name. Published in the United States the previous year under the title The Black Rustle.
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.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1935.
'Popular Edition', second impression. 8vo. Original orange cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
First published by Bles in September 1926 as the second appearance of Lancelot Priestley, and described as the first major detective novel by its author - the book in which the machinery of the series is properly assembled. Uncommon in the jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1933.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
The fourteenth Priestley novel, published in America as Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap, and set against the real RAC Motor Rally. Dilys Powell in The Spectator judged that Priestley as usual takes nothing on trust and that Rhode achieves a pretty piece of deduction; Isaac Anderson in The New York Times thought it one of the best of the series, and that no faint praise.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
The Priestley books followed the tradition of Conan Doyle's Holmes and R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke in making scientific detection the centre of the method, and it is the technical ingenuity of the murder means - rather than character or atmosphere, in neither of which Street took much interest - for which the series is valued.
Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900 by various writers
New York, The Macmillan Company, 1903.
First edition. 2 vols. 8vo. Original green cloth.
The foundational document of American housing reform. Lawrence Veiller (1872–1959), working through the Charity Organization Society, mounted a Tenement House Exhibition in 1900 - over a thousand photographs, maps, charts and a vast cardboard model of a Lower East Side block, seen by ten thousand visitors - which secured the support of Governor Theodore Roosevelt and led to the creation of a state Tenement House Commission with Robert W. de Forest (1848–1931) as chairman and Veiller as secretary. Veiller did most of the work; the resulting investigation ran to nearly a thousand pages and produced the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, which set standards for ventilation, sanitation, fire safety and occupancy limits in multi-family dwellings and became the model for comparable legislation across the country. The work sits directly alongside Riis's How the Other Half Lives as a primary source for Progressive Era social conditions, and is the more substantial of the two documentarily, though far less often seen in commerce as a set.
Fairy & Folktales
collected by the Brothers Grimm. Newly Translated
London, Routledge, Warne, & Routledge, 1864.
8vo. Original blind-tooled red cloth with gilt decoration to upper cover and spine.
The Wehnert translation, first published by Addey & Co. in two volumes in 1853 with 240 illustrations, and the version through which several generations of English readers first encountered all things Grimm. It has a long afterlife: Frances Jenkins Olcott, editing the tales for Harrap in the 1920s, still acknowledged this "quaint old-fashioned translation, illustrated with woodcuts by Wehnert" as a source of folk phraseology alongside the more scholarly Margaret Hunt text of 1884.
Detective Fiction
London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1935.
First UK edition, third impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2s6d.
The British title of The Maestro Murders, Frances Shelley Wees's first published novel, which appeared in New York in 1931 and introduced Michael and "Tuck" Forrester, the serial pair she used again in The Mystery of the Creeping Man.
Detective Fiction
London, John Long, [1934].
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Charles Horace Snow (1877-1967) is among the most prolific novelists on record, with some 465 books published under his own name and up to a dozen pseudonyms including Charles Ballew, Gary Marshall, Ranger Lee and H. C. Averill. He spent his early years wandering the western United States and Mexico, supporting himself by mining and prospecting, until he was blinded when an engine he was repairing exploded in his face; after three years he was persuaded by his brother to turn his experience of the West into fiction, studied the rudiments of the craft with the help of his wife and daughter, and sold his first story in 1922.
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).
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.
Historical Fiction
Being the chronicles of John dè Medici
London, Stanley Paul, [1924].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A historical romance of the Italian Renaissance, presented as the chronicles of John dè Medici.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 12s6d.
A very late entry in the Priestley sequence, published seven years before Street's death and belonging to the final phase of the series, in which Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn of Scotland Yard carries the bulk of the investigation and Priestley presides from his study in the manner that gave the armchair detective his name.
Detective Fiction
An Asey Mayo Mystery
London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1935.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green cloth lettered in black to spine.
Eve Prence, the glamorous and relentlessly publicity-seeking proprietor of the Cape Cod Tavern, is found at the foot of the grand staircase claiming that someone has tried to kill her; the town assumes another of her stunts to fill the inn, until the following day she is discovered with a knife in her ribs. Asey Mayo - handyman, jack of all trades and the "Codfish Sherlock" - must make sense of a pair of antique pistols containing antique daggers, what precisely a blind boy heard at the scene, and two dirty indentations on a windowsill. The fourth of the Asey Mayo novels.