Home / Browse / Autographs & Signed Books / Dracula.
STOKER, Bram.
Dracula.
Publisher: Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1897
Stock code: 59374
Price: £125,000 Currency Conversion
First edition, scarce first issue published in May 1897, with no advertisements as issued and printed on slightly thicker stock. Presentation copy to Mrs W. S. Gilbert, with the author's signed inscription on the front free endpaper: "To Mrs W. S. Gilbert with Bram Stoker's very warm regards, 12/7/97". An excellent association: Mrs Gilbert, née Lucy Agnes Blois Turner (1847-1936), was the wife of William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911), of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. Each a theatrical man with some legal training, Gilbert and Stoker were close friends. They had worked together when Gilbert's short Comedy and Tragedy proved an admirable vehicle for the beautiful American actress Mary Anderson at the Lyceum Theatre in 1884. Before settling in London, Stoker had married Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe (1858-1935), a Dublin beauty who was also being courted by Oscar Wilde. Gilbert, who gently twitted Wilde in Patience (1881), always had an eye for the ladies (he was to die of heart failure after swimming too rapidly to save a girl who mistakenly supposed she was drowning in his artificial lake) and he inspired some society gossip by being seen very often in the company of the attractive Florence Stoker while her husband was busy in his job as Henry Irving's business manager at the Lyceum Theatre.
Octavo. Original yellow cloth, titles to both boards and spine in red within a one-line red rule border, all edges untrimmed. Custom black cloth folding case, spine lettered in gilt. Just a hint of fading to the spine, the cloth very slightly finger-marked, wafer-thin crack to front inner hinge extending from foot nearly to head, a sprinkle of foxing to the endpapers only, still a superb copy of a book very rarely found in such fine condition.
