Modern Literature
New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1924.
Grosset & Dunlap issue. 8vo. Original dark orange cloth lettered and illustrated in green. Dust-jacket.
Forster's last and greatest novel, published in 1924 after a fourteen-year silence and followed by nothing but silence for the remaining forty-six years of his life - the most dignified retirement in English letters, taken at the summit. A Grosset & Dunlap issue from the year of publication: the reprint house's economics made these simultaneous-vintage copies for readers rather than posterity, and posterity has accordingly thinned them - surprisingly uncommon in jacket.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Chatto & Windus, 1932.
A pillar of the 20th century's dystopian architecture: Huxley acknowledged the book began as a parody of Wells's optimistic utopias, Men Like Gods specifically, before the joke deepened into the World State entire: Bokanovsky-processed embryos decanted by caste, soma, the feelies, Our Ford, and happiness administered until nothing human survives it.
London, John Lane, 1895.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Not scientific romance but Bodley Head belles-lettres, comic dialogues with a worldly uncle lately returned from abroad, discoursing on the fads, manners and small hypocrisies of the nineties with the nephew as straight man. It is Wells the struggling journalist bottling his Pall Mall Gazette manner, in the yellow-nineties livery of Wilde's and Beerbohm's publisher - a bibliographic neighbourhood he would never occupy again.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Macmillan, 1906.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth, lettered in gilt.
The gentlest apocalypse Wells ever arranged: a comet grazes the Earth, its green vapours dissolve into the atmosphere, and humanity wakes from "the Change" cured of jealousy, war fever, class hatred and the whole armature of pre-comet spite, narrated by a Midlands clerk who went into the Change murderous with sexual jealousy and came out of it sane.
The scandal was immediate and entirely deliberate: the transformed world's relaxed arrangements in love were read as an endorsement of free love, the Times Literary Supplement huffed, and Wells, then conducting his Fabian campaigns and his private life on similar principles, declined to reassure anybody.
Horror & Gothic
London, Methuen, 1897.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original red cloth blocked & lettered in gilt.
A very good first edition of this collection of short stories by Wells, comprising ghost stories, tales of horror and even a cautionary tale about an apple.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London & New York, Harper & Brothers, 1899.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Graham falls into a trance in the 1890s and wakes two centuries on to find compound interest has done its patient work - he owns half the world, held in trust by a Council ruling a London of vast enclosed cities, moving ways, aeroplanes and a drugged, screen-fed proletariat. It is Wells pivoting from romance to dystopia, and the twentieth century took notes: the mega-city of Metropolis, and the administered futures of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell, all trace their plumbing here. Wells himself was dissatisfied enough to revise it in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
and particularly how Mr. Bert Smallways fared while it lasted
London, George Bell & Sons, 1908.
First edition. 8vo. First state blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine and upper cover.
Five years after Kitty Hawk, when powered flight could barely lift a man over a hedge, Wells wrote the book in which German airship fleets cross the Atlantic and bomb New York into ruin, air power dissolves the distinction between front and home, and civilisation, its trade and credit systems severed from above, simply stops. With A.C. Michael's plates, in the first state binding, an honest and attractive copy of the foundation stone of the aerial-warfare shelf.
Non-Fiction
Warrior Queen of the Britons
London, Robert Hale, 1937.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Spence was one of the great productive eccentrics of Scottish letters: journalist, poet, pioneering (if increasingly speculative) mythographer of Mexico and the Celts, author of a shelf of Atlantis volumes, and a founding father of political Scottish nationalism. The jacket is by Arthur Barbosa, decades before his celebrated Flashman and Patrick O'Brian wrappers made him the presiding artist of British historical mischief.
Horror & Gothic
London, Edward Arnold, 1931.
First edition. 8vo. Original black cloth.
The first omnibus edition of James' supernatural tales, this canonical gathering was made in the author's lifetime. The four collections - from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) through A Warning to the Curious (1925) - are assembled with additional matter including the disarming essay 'Stories I Have Tried to Write,' in which the greatest ghost-story writer in English cheerfully itemises his failures.
War, Invasion & Spy
London, Jonathan Cape, 1963.
Uncorrected proof copy. 8vo. Original wrappers with publisher's logo motif.
The second outing for Deighton's insolent, nameless working-class narrator Harry Palmer-to-be, though the books never say so, sent to Portugal to salvage a sunken U-boat and finding heroin, currency and unfinished Nazi business in the wreck. It has the distinction of being the odd one out of the early quartet, being the only one that never reached the screen.
Modern Literature
London, Collins, [1922].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, unpriced possibly for colonial issue.
Pickthall is one of the genuinely extraordinary figures of English letters: the Suffolk clergyman's son whose Near Eastern fiction, Saïd the Fisherman above all, was admired by Wells and later praised by E.M. Forster as the real thing; who publicly embraced Islam in 1917 while England was at war with the Caliphate, and whose Meaning of the Glorious Koran (1930), produced in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, remains among the most used English renderings a century on.
As Others See Us is late fiction from the threshold of that final vocation, and the title declares the method of his best work: the observing eye reversed, the English seen as others see them: a trick few other novelists of his generation could perform without lapsing into condescension.
Detective Fiction
London, Stanley Paul, [1939].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Goyne was a career fiction-machine of heroic output: crime under his own name at a rate of several books a year, and, as "Paul Renin," a parallel production line of mildly scandalous romances that kept the circulating libraries in smelling salts; a double life the suburbs of his titles would have understood perfectly.
Horror & Gothic
A Mystery
London, Ernest Benn, 1931.
First edition, 25th impression. 8vo. Original red cloth. Dust-jacket.
Published in 1897, the same year as Dracula, The Beetle comfortably outsold Stoker's novel for years - the reading public having decided that the ancient shape-shifting Egyptian horror pursuing a rising MP through the London fog was the superior nightmare, and only posterity reversing the verdict. This 25th impression is popularity made visible: still selling briskly a third of a century on. Marsh (born Richard Bernard Heldmann, a production-line sensation novelist with a colourful past of his own) has a further claim on the weird-fiction shelf: he was the grandfather of Robert Aickman, connoisseurs' choice for the century's finest writer of strange stories.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1953.
'Cheap Edition'. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 6/-.
The phenomenon in its second wave: two years after publication, Joseph's 6/- cheap edition arrives to meet a demand the first printing plainly hadn't exhausted, with Penguin waiting in the wings - the bibliographical fossil record of a novel becoming a fixture.
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1953.
'Uniform Pocket Edition'. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s.6d.
An attractive edition of Lawrence's autobiographical masterpiece: Nottinghamshire coalfield, the Morel marriage of gentility and pit, and Paul torn between his mother and every other woman he attempts. First published by Duckworth in 1913, famously with Edward Garnett's editorial scissors having removed roughly a tenth of the text, a cut not restored until the Cambridge edition decades later.
Horror & Gothic
London, Grayson & Grayson, n.d..
8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
An attractive edition of Marsh's horror novel in which a shape-shifting ancient Egyptian entity exerts a hypnotic influence over his victims, leading to a series of strange and terrifying events in 1890s London. The novel unfolds through four narrators, each recounting their harrowing encounter with "the Beetle." The novel is often cited as a quintessential example of fin de siècle Gothic fiction, embodying the era's anxieties and narrative innovations. Upon release, it was a sensation, and by 1913 it had gone through fifteen printings. The striking jacket artwork here is by Charles Buchel, a well-known illustrator famed for his theatre posters.
Children's Books
A Tale fir Children of all Growths
London, Chapman & Hall, 1884.
First edition. 8vo. Original blue pictorial cloth lettered in gilt.
Merivale was a well-connected Victorian man of letters: barrister, dramatist, son of the Under-Secretary of State for India. This is his excursion into the great 1880s tradition of the literary fairy tale, offered with the period's characteristic wink to "children of all growths": the Victorians having discovered, post-Alice, that fantasy for the nursery was an excellent cover for entertaining the drawing-room. Illustrated by Edgar Giberne and got up by Dickens publishers Chapman & Hall in pictorial gilt-stamped cloth of exactly the kind that makes Victorian children's books a condition-driven field.
Horror & Gothic
London [&c.], Hodder & Stoughton, 1988.First edition, trade issue. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.Herbert's ghost story proper, and the beginning of his most enduring character: David Ash, professional sceptic and psychic investigator, invited to Edbrook to debunk a haunting by three playful adult siblings and their aged nanny - an invitation that proves to be nothing of the kind, with a closing twist that readers tend to remember decades later with a slight shudder.
Sports & Pastimes
The Lone Trail of a Big Game Hunter
London, Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Solo pursuit narratives being a distinct and preferred subgenre among sporting collectors, free of the safari-party padding, this book comes properly equipped with photographic plates and map endpapers. Lang himself has left almost no other trace, which in the hunting field is perhaps not a defect: the one-book hunter-authors, publishing their single testament and vanishing back into the bush, are precisely the volumes the Africana and sporting bibliographies prize.
London, The Modern Publishing Company, [c.1920].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Advertisement facing title-page. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/- (reissue?).
Platt's contribution to one of the great vanished genres: the aerial future-war romance, running from Wells's The War in the Air through a squadron of imitators, in which mastery of the skies means mastery of everything and some fellow with a monoplane holds nations to ransom. The Modern Publishing Company was a cheap-fiction house whose output survives poorly. Uncommon in jacket.
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
Detective Fiction
New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1926.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The fifth novel by Constance Antonina Boyle (1865–1943), head of the militant department of the Women's Freedom League, census resister, three times imprisoned, co-founder of the Women's Volunteer Police; Britain's first women in police uniform, created over official refusal - and, in 1918, the first woman ever to submit nomination papers for Parliament, at the Keighley by-election; the nomination was rejected on a technicality, but it forced the question and cleared the path for the women candidates that December.
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.
Caribbean Fiction
London, Sands & Co., 1899.
First edition. 8vo. Title printed in red & black. Original (variant?) dark-green cloth illustrated in red and lettered in gilt.
Scarce first edition of this collection of ten short stories by Eden Phillpotts, all set in the Caribbean and most turning on supernatural themes. Published as part of the Universal Library, though this copy's binding does not declare it. Phillpotts, a poet and dramatist, was a friend of Agatha Christie, who dedicated Peril at End House to him.
Sexuality & Erotica
Translated by Meyer Leven
London, W.H. Allen, 1960.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
This novel - based on the author's real-life experiences - is credited as the first candidly lesbian novel, originally published in 1950, that "scandalized mid-century America" (The New York Times). An account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II, it sold four million copies in the United States alone.
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Modern Literature
London, The Readers Library..., [1927].
Readers Library movie tie-in edition. Small 8vo. Original gilt-stamped red cloth. Dust-jacket.
The novel, expanded in 1913 from a magazine story, is the great Jack the Ripper book written at one remove: the Buntings, genteel ex-servants sliding toward destitution, take in a soft-spoken gentleman lodger just as "The Avenger" begins murdering women in the London fog, and Mrs Bunting's slow, unspeakable suspicion does the work a hundred crime scenes couldn't. This little Readers Library volume earns its place for the film it advertises: Hitchcock's 1927 The Lodger, starring Ivor Novello - the picture Hitchcock himself called the first true Hitchcock film.