Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, William Heinemann, 1896.
First UK edition, first impression, first issue with rear advertisement for The Time Machine on terminal leaf preceding publisher's list. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth, without publisher's monogram to lower board.
The cruellest of the great scientific romances, and the one Wells himself called an exercise in youthful blasphemy: Prendick, shipwrecked, is landed on an island where the exiled vivisectionist Moreau carves animals into men, the Beast Folk, chanting their Law in the dusk ("Are we not Men?") against the pull of tooth and claw, while their maker works uphill of them in the House of Pain. Published into the white heat of the vivisection controversy, it was received with genuine revulsion (reviewers reached for "perverse" and worse) because Wells had aimed past the surgery at the theology: a creator indifferent to his creations' suffering, a Law that is only fear, and the closing horror that London's faces look no different...
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, 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, 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
London, Heinemann, 1898.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. 32pp. advertisements, undated. Original dark grey/sage cloth.
The cylinder unscrewing on Horsell Common, the heat-ray, the tripods wading up the Thames valley, and the invaders felled at last by the smallest of allies...a template for many alien invasion conceived since, and still, a century and a quarter on, the best executed. Its afterlife is a catalogue of cultural detonations in its own right: Orson Welles' 1938 panic broadcast, the 1953 and 2005 films, Jeff Wayne's improbable and immortal musical version.
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.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, J.M. Dent, 1895.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Title printed in red & black. Original red gilt-pictorial cloth.
A vicar in deepest Sussex, hearing reports of a strange great bird, does what an English naturalist-clergyman must and shoots it; it proves to be an angel, whom he then has to nurse, house, and explain to the parish. What follows is satire of the gentlest lethality: the angel's baffled encounters with property, class, respectability and the vicar's housekeeper indicting village England far more efficiently than thunder could. Wells reportedly took the germ from Ruskin's remark that if an angel appeared in England someone would shoot it.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Newnes, 1901.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Second state blue cloth blocked in black.
Wells's last pure scientific romance of his great run, and his most charming: the bankrupt speculator Bedford and the unworldly Cavor, whose gravity-screening "cavorite" carries their sphere to the Moon - where the satire begins, in the caverns of the Selenites, a functionally perfect insect society whose citizens are grown to fit their jobs.
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.
Modern Literature
Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
London, Jonathan Cape, 1925.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
"A rare bird upon the earth, and most like a black swan" (Juvenal)
Mollie Skinner was the Quaker nurse who, with a friend, ran the Darlington guesthouse where D.H. Lawrence and Frieda stayed on their 1922 Australian visit, a lodging arrangement with consequences: Lawrence took her manuscript about immigrant life in 1880s Western Australia, rewrote it as their joint novel The Boy in the Bush (1924), and remained her advocate afterwards, his letters from Mexico tracking the progress of Black Swans - her first solo novel under her own name - to press with Cape, while Frieda wrote urging her not to mind the critics.
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.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Peter Davies, 1952.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
One of the strangest and most quietly influential books of its decade, from one of its most enigmatic authors: "Sarban" was the mask of John William Wall, a career diplomat in the Foreign Service, who published exactly three volumes of dark fantasy - Ringstones (1951), this, The Doll Maker (1953) - and then fell silent, leaving a reputation entirely out of proportion to the shelf-space. The novella is among the earliest and remains among the most disturbing of Hitler-wins alternate histories: a former POW recounts slipping a hundred years forward into the Reich of the victorious future, an endless forested hunting estate where Count von Hackelnberg, Reich Master Forester, runs human quarry - bred, altered and costumed for the sport - to the sound of his horn.
Detective Fiction
London, Michael Joseph, 1948.
First edition, first impression. Inscribed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 8s.6d.
Bentley came to crime fiction with the best possible pedigree: his father was E.C. Bentley, author of Trent's Last Case, the book that taught the Golden Age detective novel to smile, and inventor of the clerihew besides. The Tongue-Tied Canary is Bentley fils turning from drawing comic thrillers' jackets to writing one himself, in the light, urbane register the surname made mandatory.
Inscribed: "To Dr Lennard Cutler a poor return for what he gave me - a very serviceable wife from Nicolas Bentley". Make of that what you will! (We suspect the doctor in question restored Mrs Bentley to good health, rather than anything more sinister.)
Modern Literature
London, Heinemann, 1935.
Reissue. 8vo. Original red cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3s.6d.
An attractive edition of the masterpiece with the most embattled publication history in modern English fiction: completed during the war, rejected by every London publisher after the Rainbow prosecution, first issued privately to subscribers in New York in 1920, and only reaching an English trade edition in 1921.
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.
Detective Fiction
London, The Bodley Head, 1958.
Reissue. 8vo. Original blue boards. Dust-jacket.
This novel (1924) grew directly out of Christie's 1922 round-the-Empire tour, undertaken with the irascible Major Belcher, who demanded to be put in the book, and got his wish as the 'reprehensible' Sir Eustace Pedler, thereby achieving the immortality his actual career never threatened.
Detective Fiction
London, The Bodley Head, 1958.
Reissue. 8vo. Original green boards. Dust-jacket.
The debut of Tommy and Tuppence, the "Young Adventurers, Ltd." The Bodley Head connection is the story here: Christie's first six books were published under the notoriously mean contract she signed as an unknown and resented ever after, decamping to Collins the moment she legally could - but The Bodley Head kept those early titles, and in the late fifties reissued them in this attractive uniform format with Shackel & Ryder's jackets.
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.
![Belloc Lowndes (Mrs [Marie]) The Lodger](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88389-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of Belloc Lowndes (Mrs [Marie]) The Lodger](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88389_2-300x300.jpg)
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.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Gollancz, 1987.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A surprisingly rare edition of this Asimov collection, which includes one previously unpublished, new story.
"Presented in this volume are several previously uncollected stories, alongside a selection of vintage Isaac Asimov: such tales as 'Little Lost Robot', one of the best of his famous robot series; 'The Feeling of Power', in which Asimov anticipates by over twenty years the development of pocket computers; 'The Ugly Little Boy', a time travel story which may be the most moving tale he has ever written; and 'The Last Question', which Asimov himself chooses as his best story." (jacket blurb)
![Alternative view of Wyndham (John) and Lucas Parkes [both pseuds. for John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris]. The Outward Urge](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88387_2-300x300.jpg)
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1959.
First edition. 8vo. Original black boards lettered in white. Dust-jacket.
The pseudonym saga achieves its final, magnificent absurdity: a collaboration between John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, i.e., between the third & fourth names of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, a man now formally credited with co-writing a book with himself. The fig-leaf logic was branding: this is hard, nuts-and-bolts space fiction rather than the domestic catastrophes the Wyndham name had come to promise, so 'Parkes' was wheeled out as notional technical collaborator to manage expectations. The book itself is a future history in four episodes at fifty-year intervals, following successive generations of the Troon family from the first space stations to the Moon, Mars and Venus, as the powers of the northern hemisphere obligingly destroy each other and leadership in space passes elsewhere. A fifth Troon story, 'The Emptiness of Space,' was added to the 1961 Science Fiction Book Club edition.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1960.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original dark grey boards. Dust-jacket.
The last of the novels published in Wyndham's lifetime under the famous name at full stride, and the one whose reputation has travelled furthest: a lichen extract, the "antigerone," is found to slow human ageing - and the two discoverers split on what to do with two or three centuries of life. A thriller plot wearing a genuinely radical argument about gerontocracy, cosmetics and female emancipation; sixty years on it gets cited in bioethics discussions more than anything else he wrote. Very good in equally good Hugh Marshall wrapper.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Beynon (John, pseud. John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, aka John Wyndham) Planet Plane
London, Newnes, [1936].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
Wyndham's third book and second science fiction novel. Written as John Beynon, it was serialised the same year in The Passing Show as Stowaway to Mars, abridged again in 1937 in Modern Wonder as The Space Machine, cut differently for a 1953 paperback, and finally restored in 1972 as Stowaway to Mars "by John Wyndham".
The plot: it is 1981, a million-pound prize awaits the first interplanetary flight, and a British millionaire launches the rocket Gloria Mundi from Salisbury Plain, bound for Mars. Once clear of the atmosphere the crew discover a stowaway, a woman, Joan Shirning, to their considerable period-typical consternation, carrying a strange tale of a machine of Martian origin. On Mars itself the book turns unexpectedly thoughtful: a dying race, and the machines destined to outlast it, a theme Wyndham was rehearsing fifteen years before anyone was paying attention. He revisited the story in the novella Sleepers of Mars (1938).
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1961.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The mature Wyndham in short form, led by the novella that first appeared sandwiched between Golding and Peake in Sometime, Never (1956) and here gives its name to the collection: a woman wakes in a future without men, the male half of the species eliminated by an escaped virus; her amnesia making her the reader's guide to a society of castes and functions that works perfectly well, which is precisely the problem...