Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1970.First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.Durbridge's novel drawn from his six-part BBC television serial of 1965, a taut mystery of murder and mistaken identity.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1958.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original brown boards. Dust-jacket.
A crime thriller by Francis Durbridge, whose ingeniously plotted serials made him a household name on BBC radio and television from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A thriller by Francis Durbridge (1912–1998), creator of Paul Temple and the reigning master of the BBC television thriller serial.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
The thirteenth case for Dr Lancelot Priestley, the armchair scientist-detective of John Rhode, pseudonym of Major Cecil Street, among the most prolific of Golden Age detective novelists.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Wishart, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.
A satirical fantasy by Sherard Vines (1890–1974), poet and professor of English, turning on the demon Belphegor loosed upon modern society.
Biography
Dzherzhynski
London, Peter Owen, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Bernard Bromage's biography of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary who founded and led the Cheka, the Soviet Union's first secret police and forerunner of the KGB.
Modern Literature
Boston, Little, Brown, 1955.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Leonard Wibberley's Cold War satire, in which the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States meaning to lose and collect the reconstruction aid - only to win by seizing the ultimate weapon. Filmed in 1959 with Peter Sellers in three roles.
Modern Literature
Translated by Dr. Joseph Collins
London, Cassell, 1929.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
The first English translation (of Climats, 1928), a novel of love and jealousy by André Maurois (1885–1967), the French novelist and celebrated biographer of Shelley, Byron and Disraeli.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Gollancz, 1964.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Aickman's first novel and his only conventional one - a love story that shades into the ghostly - quite distinct from the "strange stories" for which he is celebrated. As Aickman (1914-81) has become one of the most collected of modern weird-fiction authors, this, his scarcest trade title, is decidedly uncommon in the first edition and particularly so in the dust jacket.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Gollancz, 1977.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A collection of Robert Aickman's inimitable "strange stories," the form in which this master of the uncanny did his most admired work.
Non-Fiction
An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy...a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine
London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Robert Eisler's singular study tracing sadism, masochism and werewolf legend to humanity's shift from herbivore to hunter, delivered as a Royal Society of Medicine lecture and introduced by the psychiatrist Sir David K. Henderson. A cult text in the literature of lycanthropy.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1957.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel, described by Margaret Atwood as his "chef d'œuvre", while the dramatist Dan Rebellato described it as "a searching novel of moral ambiguities" dealing with rape, abortion, motherhood, and the struggle between men and women quite as much as with alien invasion.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Macdonald, 1968.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A collection of Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories; the title tale won the 1967 Hugo Award. This Macdonald printing is the first UK and first hardcover edition, the American original having appeared as a paperback.
![[Clowes], Confessions of an English Hachish-Eater, 1884](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88592-300x300.jpg)
![[Clowes], Confessions of an English Hachish-Eater, 1884 - second image](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88592_2-300x300.jpg)
Victorian Literature
[Clowes (William Laird)] Confessions of an English Hachish-Eater
London, George Redway, 1884.
Redways's Shilling Series. 8vo. Original printed boards.
An anonymous first-person narrative of hashish intoxication - visionary dreams and distortions of time and sensation - written in conscious imitation of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and attributed to the naval writer William Laird Clowes. Issued in Redway's Shilling Series, it is an uncommon piece of Victorian drug literature, sought by collectors of the genre and infrequently offered.
Weird & Supernatural
Strange tales
London, Gollancz, 1968.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
An attractive presentation copy of this early and highly regarded gathering of Aickman's 'strange stories,' including 'The Inner Room,' 'Never Visit Venice,' 'The Wine-Dark Sea' and 'The Cicerones' the last later filmed (2002) with Mark Gatiss. Aickman (1914-81), grandson of Richard Marsh and co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association, is one of the acknowledged masters of the English uncanny; his first editions, and signed copies above all, are keenly collected. A presentation copy inscribed by the author.
Modern Literature
London, Martin Secker, 1929.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Paul Alverdes's quietly powerful First World War novel, following three throat-wounded soldiers - German and English - convalescing together in a military hospital, their breath whistling through their wounds. A humane counter to nationalist war writing.
Modern Literature
Translated from the French by E. Ibbetson James
London, Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The first English edition of the first novel by the French humorist and journalist Georges de La Fouchardière (1874–1946). The source for two landmark films: Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931) and Fritz Lang's American noir Scarlet Street (1945). It's a mordant Parisian tragedy of a downtrodden middle-class man (an amateur painter) besotted with a young prostitute and destroyed by her and her pimp - each character narrating his own part, as the "He / She / The Other Man" indicated by contents page. La Fouchardière was a celebrated L'Œuvre columnist and creator of the 'Bouif' series. This English edition is genuinely uncommon
Weird & Supernatural
...translated from the Italian by Edward Storer. With an introduction by Sir Leonard Rogers
London, Lovat Dickson, 1933.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A journalistic survey of leprosy and the world's leper colonies, translated by Edward Storer, with an introduction by the eminent leprologist Sir Leonard Rogers.
Modern Literature
A novel
London, Constable, 1935.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Naomi Mitchison's most controversial and long-suppressed novel, drawing on her 1932 visit to the Soviet Union to treat contraception, abortion, rape and sexual politics with a candour few 1930s publishers would touch. Victor Gollancz refused it outright, warning that "publication of the book would cause a real outcry"; it was passed over elsewhere, extensively rewritten and toned down, and reached print only through Constable - and even then the government privately weighed a prosecution, as files declassified in 2005 revealed. A landmark of interwar feminist and socialist fiction, uncommon in the first edition in jacket.
Weird & Supernatural
Strange Tales
London, Gollancz, 1980.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
An attractive presentation copy of this late collection of Robert Aickman's "strange stories" - the oblique, dreamlike supernatural tales on which his large and still-growing reputation rests - published the year before his death, with a jacket by Andrzej Krause. Aickman (1914–1981), grandson of the sensation novelist Richard Marsh (The Beetle) and co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association, is now among the most collected of 20th century weird-fiction writers, and signed material is actively pursued.
Detective Fiction
London & New York, W.H. Allen, 1972.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original black boards. Dust-jacket.
Doc McCoy pulls off what he thinks is the perfect bank robbery, but there are things he has forgotten, including a treacherous partner, his amateur criminal wife, and that there is no such thing as a clean getaway... Jim Thompson's noir classic, first published as a US paperback original in 1959; this W.H. Allen edition is the first UK and first hardcover edition, appearing as Sam Peckinpah's film with Steve McQueen reached cinemas.
2 vols.
London, Heinemann, 1937-54.
First editions, first impressions. Second volume initialled presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jackets. Accompanied by a press/agency photographic print of Coward and two friends.
Noël Coward's two-volume autobiography, carrying his life-story up until 1945; the work was a considerable success. The second volume is inscribed & initialled on the title-page by the author to the actress Joyce Carey, 'For Doycie with love love love N':
"In his accustomed manner, Coward redubbed Carey 'Joycie' - or even, in moments of sheer baby-talk, 'Doycie'. The relationship was very old-fashioned, in one sense: Carey was the lady on his arm at premieres, providing the heterosexual bluff that was necessary then. But, more than that, she proved herself, professionally, a perfect interpreter of Coward's world. She first met him when her mother was appearing in The Vortex in 1924. The first night of the play left her 'literally shaking with excitement'. Her first part in a Coward play came with Easy Virtue in 1925, although she did not appear in another until Alison Leggatt fell ill during the run of Tonight at 8.30 in 1936. But Carey was best known for her roles in Coward's films: a touching death scene in In Which We Serve, and the barmaid with pretensions in Brief Encounter." (Independent Joyce Carey obituary, 1993)
The accompanying press/agency photograph is of Coward, accompanied by Joyce Carey and another close friend, Gladys Calthrop, leaving Buckingham Palace on 3rd February 1970 after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Mrs. Calthrop was a pre-war designer and artist who was associated with many of Coward's productions.
Modern Literature
London, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1935.
[Second edition] 'Cheap (3/6) Edition'. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original red cloth.
Signed presentation copy from the author, inscribed on the title-page.
"A full-blooded story of that part of West Africa known as the Gold Coast is unfolded in Kathleen Hewitt's latest novel Fetish" (South African Review, vol.79, 1934).
Non-Fiction
The facts behind the present crisis
London, W.F.T.U. Publications, 1952.
Second impression. 8vo. Original pictorial wrappers.
An anonymous agitprop pamphlet from the Soviet-aligned World Federation of Trade Unions, setting out "the facts behind the present crisis" in Kenya at the outbreak of the Mau Mau Emergency. Early Cold War anti-colonial ephemera.
Non-Fiction
London, for The Kenya Committee, [1954/5].
8vo. Original pictorial wrappers.
A Kenya Committee pamphlet by Ralph Millner, its cover a striking barbed-wire linocut by Bagley. The London-based Committee campaigned against British conduct during the Mau Mau Emergency; title and imagery frame it as a civil-liberties protest on behalf of Kenya's Africans. Uncommon protest ephemera.
Non-Fiction
London, Fabian Colonial Bureau, [1950].
8vo. Original printed wrappers.
A Fabian Colonial Bureau pamphlet by Marjorie Nicholson surveying the nationalist and political "ferment" across Britain's West African colonies at mid-century. Scarce socialist colonial-policy ephemera.
Illustrated Books
London, Hodder & Stoughton, [1920s].
Illustrated edition. Large 8vo. Original gilt-pictorial blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
Barrie's 1902 comedy of a shipwrecked aristocratic household served by its resourceful butler. The Hugh Thomson illustrated edition first appeared from Hodder & Stoughton in 1914; Thomson (1860–1920) was among the most admired black-and-white illustrators of his day.
Children's Books
London, Raphael Tuck, [c.1906].
No. 6256. 4to. Original cloth-backed pictorial boards.
Twelve chromolithographed plates and numerous line drawings by Louis Wain (1860–1939), whose anthropomorphic cats made him a household name and whose later mental illness was dramatised in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), with Benedict Cumberbatch. An appealing example of an uncommon Raphael Tuck colour production.
Modern Literature
London, Brentano's, 1928.
First UK edition, first impression. Inscribed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
The sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, narrated this time by Lorelei's friend Dorothy and again illustrated by Ralph Barton; this the first English edition. With a contemporary gift inscription from the author to the front free endpaper.
Modern Literature
The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady
London, Brentanos, [1926].
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A highly collectable edition of Anita Loos's Jazz Age comic masterpiece, the diary of gold-digging Lorelei Lee. First serialised in Harper's Bazaar and published by Boni & Liveright in 1925, this is the first English edition, with Ralph Barton's celebrated illustrations. A transatlantic phenomenon, it was the second best-selling American book of 1926 (outselling The Great Gatsby) and was admired by an extraordinary roll-call: Edith Wharton called it "the great American novel," James Joyce read it through failing eyesight, and Faulkner, Huxley and Santayana all paid tribute. Filmed in 1928, staged as a hit musical in 1949, and immortalised in the 1953 film with Marilyn Monroe, whose famous song 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' is took inspiration from a line in the novel used here to caption the frontispiece.
Modern Literature
A novel
London, Chatto & Windus, 1902.
First edition. 8vo. Title printed in red & black, advertisements. Original pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to spine.
A searing insight into the economic & moral pressures of life in the Staffordshire Potteries in the late 19th century. Against the vitality and harshness of the Five Towns, Bennett's narrative is a compelling delineation of his heroine's attempts to gain freedom and independence from her father and the repressive regime of Methodism. The first of Bennett's 'Five Towns' novel, the sequence that made his name.
Natural History
In the Lands of the Caribbean
London, Blackwood, 1935.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Claude Wilson Wardlaw (1901-85), the Scottish botanist and plant pathologist, recounts his investigation of Panama disease, the fungal blight then devastating banana plantations across the Caribbean and Central America. First edition.
London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1930.
Illustrated edition. 8vo. Original gilt-pictorial brown cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 12/6.
Illustrated by S. G. Hulme Beaman (1887–1932), the artist, wood-engraver and puppet-maker best remembered as the creator of Toytown and Larry the Lamb for BBC Children's Hour. His angular, boldly stylised designs bring an Art Deco theatricality to Stevenson's fable of the divided self, and his comparatively small body of book illustration makes this one of his more collectable productions.
Non-Fiction
London, The Sheldon Press [for the SPCK], 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The author argues "along strictly scientific lines" for the insufficiency of a merely mechanistic theory of the universe, marshalling physiological, embryological, psychological and astronomical evidence toward a spiritual interpretation that affirms both the existence and the moral character of God and the survival of the human soul - a work of natural theology pitched deliberately at the general reader and independent of scriptural revelation. Issued by the Sheldon Press, the publishing house of the SPCK, it carried notable endorsements: Sir Oliver Lodge found its philosophy "in many respects akin to my own," and it drew approving notices from the Oxford zoologist E. B. Poulton, the King's College physiologist W. D. Halliburton, the British Medical Journal and The Lancet.
Modern Literature
London, Andre Deutsch, 1965.
First edition. 8vo. Original brown boards. Dust-jacket, priced 21s.
The first of only three novels by the Nigerian playwright, novelist and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, set in the 1960s, in post-independence and pre-civil war Nigeria, mainly in Lagos. In 2024 Soyinka's 90th birthday was marked worldwide with two documentaries and a feature film.
Modern Literature
London, Andre Deutsch, 1956.
First English edition. 8vo. Original brown cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 15s.
Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1886–1968) was an Italian physician and colonial administrator (personal doctor to the Duke of Aosta, and wartime Governor of Tripoli) who came to writing late in life. A Grave for a Dolphin followed his acclaimed English-language debut, A Cure for Serpents (1955), and gathers stories and recollections from his years in Italian North and East Africa (the title tale is set on the Red Sea coast). The book was among David Bowie's favourites and is generally credited as a partial inspiration for his 1977 song 'Heroes.'
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1936.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Nikolai Gubsky was a Russian émigré novelist working in English in London through the 1930s; his other fiction includes The Gladiator, The Greatest of These, Foreign Bodies and Its Silly Face, and he published an autobiography, Angry Dust (OUP, 1937). He also wrote as Michael Goring, the name under which his Matthew's Passion was issued. Surprise Item traces the political and emotional awakening of a complacent young Mayfair husband who, stirred by chance events toward thoughts of social justice and communism, abandons his idle life and is drawn through his passion for an enigmatic woman to a violent climax — the publisher condensing its theme as "Thought + Emotion = Action."