Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
Moon in Aquarius; Mars in Leo; Saturn in Libra; Venus in Taurus; or, yours Zodiacally, W. B. Yeats [#78199]
Yeats’s obscure but excellent Stories of Red Hanrahan is one of my favourites. In it Yeats, ever the hungry mythographer, conjures up his own folkloric figure, a wandering poet (or “gleeman”), the passionate, bitter and generally out-on-his-arse Owen Hanrahan, and sends him careering across ancient Ireland, loving, hating, drinking, grubbing food, stealing wives and weaving both spells and curses with his magic words. It’s worth a read. Fourteen years later, in The Tower (1928), Yeats would remember his creation in some of his best lines:
“I myself created Hanrahan
and drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
…
He had but broken knees for hire
and horrible splendour of desire”.
As such, it was a great privilege when I was thrown a first edition of this book (Dun Emer Press, 1904), inscribed by Yeats himself, and was asked to decode the inscription:
Plainly enough it was inscribed to a Mrs Worthington “from her friend the writer, with pleasant memories of the Hudson”. The recipient was an American society hostess, and W.B. would have met her on his American literary tour. No surprise, really – Jack Yeats described her as “a sort of duchess over here”, and W.B. had a thing for aristocrats. The trouble, or the fun, came with the symbols beneath Yeats’s signature:
A layman might recognise in the first a moon (or banana), and perhaps in the fourth and seventh the standard signs for Male and Female. After some time engaged in that feverish process of alchemical research whereby the bookseller turns from layman into professor, I worked out that these symbols were astrological. They are comprised of four sets of two – with four celestial bodies and four zodiacal signs. The male and female ones are in fact Mars and Venus, and the whole set reads thus: Moon in Aquarius, Mars; Saturn in Libra; Venus in Taurus. The third character is hard to decipher, but the seven provide enough information to find the link to Yeats – these are the zodiacal positions of the celestial bodies as they were on June 13th 1865, which was Yeats’s birthday, making this his Zodiacal signature. Anyone who knows about Yeats’s dealings with the Golden Dawn, who understands the obsession with alchemy that governed Yeats’s imagination in the second phase of his life as surely as the gods of Gaelic folklore had governed it in the first, or who has read A Vision (1925, in which he codified in particular how one’s astrological birthmark dictates the thematic arc of one’s life), will appreciate the resonance of this inscription. We know of no other book so inscribed.
“His eye fell on the yellow book” (from The Picture of Dorian Gray) – a superb first edition copy in the original yellow wrappers of A Rebours by Joris Karl Huysmans [#59280]
One of the especially innervating experiences of working in this world is that you occasionally run across real copies of books that you had only hitherto encountered within other books – the whole thing tends to bring the world of fiction that much closer to reality, which is probably not healthy. Nevertheless, here at Dover Street we have a little yellow book – unremarkable, perhaps, except that this is the “yellow book” that “absorbed” Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray into a world of utterly abandoned sensual decadence. The yellow wrappers were used in Paris to signify lascivious content, and, by the time Wilde was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Huysman’s A Rebours (1884) had become the notorious archetype of such books. It tells of a Parisian aristocrat who devotes his life to aesthetic experimentation. He keeps, as two infamous examples, a garden of poisonous flowers and a jewel-encrusted tortoise (which eventually dies under the weight of its decorations). I shall give you Wilde’s incantation of it here:
“His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He … flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.”
All bit sickly perhaps – but thankfully the book is locked behind glass, and I have only schoolboy French, so I should be safe.
“The Devil can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent” – The Cat and the Devil, by James Joyce [#99491]
James Joyce is not generally known as a children’s book author (though once can tell perhaps from the opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist that he had a feel for it). He did, however, write just such a book, The Cat and the Devil, which told of a small Loire-side town’s pact with the Devil, and how it resulted in an unlikely feline friendship. It was written especially for his grandson Stephen, and was never published in his lifetime. This is the first UK edition, wittily illustrated by Gerald Rose, and would make a great gift for Joyce-freaks, cat-lovers, and Satanists alike.
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
Arthur Rackham is often deferred to as the undisputed king of book illustration, reigning over its Golden Age in the early 20th century, and I would not wish to lay any challenge against his broad, fairy-filled demesne. However, I would say that it is hard to point to one single Rackham book that stands preeminent above all other illustrated books. Not so with the somewhat lesser known Kay Nielsen, whose masterpiece, East of the Sun, West of theMoon (1914), is in my opinion the great illustrated book of the period. I say this not only because, being myself 1/8th Danish, I have an atavistic yen for all things Scandinavian – but moreover that I feel Nielsen’s extraordinary aesthetic (his “exquisite bizarrerie”, as the Preface has it) combined styles to create something undeniably beautiful and strikingly new. He took the spidery definition of Rackham’s lines, dripped them in the dreamy colours of Dulac, and gave them a formal composition that feels almost Japanese (watch out for Hokusai waves). There is something more extreme about the product than anything in Rackham, moving Nielsen’s work away from the gentle parochialism sometimes associated with book illustration, and towards the realm of book art.
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
It should be noted that his painstaking working method demanded he use a four-plate colour process (trumping Rackham’s three), something you can see in the collections of original Nielsen copper plates that we have found and framed.
It is also interesting to know that Nielsen, having exhausted his book-illustrating career in barely 15 years, left for California in 1939 and ended up working for Disney as a concept artist. We are to be grateful for his work on the “Ave Maria” and “Night on Bare Mountain” sequences of the original Fantasia (1940) film, and also for the enthusiastic background work Nielsen did towards a Disney adaptation of his fellow Dane’s classic tale The Little Mermaid, which, though never realised in his lifetime, was resumed when Disney finished the film in 1989. This snow-white copy of the hugely valuable signed limited edition of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, is one of the star items in our brand-new Children’s Catalogue, which is currently on display at 43 Dover Street. Do come by and I’d be more than happy to flick through it with you – in the meantime, here are some of the plates to keep you going.
This dramatically-illustrated series of Kung-Fu pamphlets were issued from Malaysia in 1958. They purport to teach a special brand of Chinese Kung-Fu, “Karato (Atado)”, under the aegis of an Honourable Master Leong Fu, who is boldly trumpeted thus: “Retired undefeated Chinese Kung-Fu champion of the world, the greatest living authority of the ancient Chinese art of self-defence Kung-Fu, conqueror of more than 100 of the world’s best professional Kung-Fu exponents of various styles, schools, sects, caves and monasteries, retired-undefeated world renowned oriental heavyweight champion wrester and founder of the Karato (Atado) system of lightning self-defence.” Inside the individual numbers (the covers of which have fantastic illustrations, one showing a warrior smugly uprooting a tree with his bare hands, another battling a leopard) are plenty of demonstrative figures, and I don’t doubt that following them would lead one to gain a more confident grasp over the art of self-defence than, for example, reading Keats’s Endymion. However, there is something in the phrasing of the descriptions that belies the solemn discipline usually associated with Eastern martial arts mastery, and seems instead to be playing up to the violent paranoia of the 1950s Western city-dweller.
Examples include: “Kung Fu Karato Method to Throw out an Unwanted Person Without Causing Any Disturbance During a Party”, “A Clever Move to Make a Bully Who Pushes You on the Chest Cry With Pain and Beg for Mercy”, “How to Deliver A Secret Kung Fu Karato Blow So Hard and Fast That a Punk Will Think That His Head Has Suddenly Exploded”; “How to Paralyze the Breathing Mechanism of an Assailant Who Tries to Kill You With A Wicked Looking Dagger”, “How To Throw a Hoodlum Up To Fifteen Feet”, “How to Snap a Punk’s Ligaments Like Guitar Strings and Make Him Howl with Great Pain”, “How to Smash to Pulp The Nose of a Sadistic Ruffian”, “How to Inflict Serious Injury and Unbearable Pain to a Dangerous ‘Teddy Boy’ who tries to Disfigure you with a Broken Bottle”, “How to Turn the Table on Two Hooligans Who Caught you by Surprise, Force you to the Ground and Attempts to Smash you to a Bloody Mess”, “How to Protect Yourself, Your Girl Friend, Your Wife, Your Children and Those Who Depend on You For Protection from Insults and Attacks by Thugs, Bullies & Maniacs”, the exceptionally filmic, “How to Deal with Kidnappers Who Disguising as Police Officers Performing Their Duties, Tricked you into the Back Seat of a Car between Strong-Armed Thugs”, and the pleasingly general “How to Fight with Sadistic Maniacs”.
Research into the backstory of this extraordinary production has revealed two interesting aspects. Leong Fu Lee (1932-91) was indeed a martial arts practitioner of Chinese parentage, who opened his own school in Malaysia, teaching his own brand of martial arts amalgamated from various styles (including, apparently, Japanese karate learned from officers who invaded Malaya during WWII). His students included Western servicemen stationed in the Far East after the war. He did have an international wrestling career, and continued to teach into his 50s. His method was disseminated to the English speaking world through productions such as this, and there are apparently still a few practitioners teaching in the UK.
What adds colour to this picture, however, is an April 1968 editorial in the international self-defence magazine Black Belt, attempting to discredit Leong Fu’s claims to world mastery: “With a brightly coloured Malaysian-printed booklet, Leong Fu has been posing as master of the art… let us put you on guard against these claims, one of the many which are cut out to turn your interest in self-defence and the martial arts into an oversize bankroll… From what we have learned, Leong Fu was a moderately successful wrestler and as you know, wrestling today, at least in the professional ranks, is highly suspect as a competitive sport. Old prize fighters have turned into wrestlers, but until now, we never knew what old wrestlers have done… If you get the booklet in the mail, report it to the post office.” I must say I sympathise more with the old wrestler than the supercilious magazine editor.
Still, even if not perhaps wholly creditable, Leong Fu’s original Kung-Fu training series nonetheless constitutes a highly characterful martial arts item, and a rare thing, with no copies recorded in any libraries internationally, and no trade records in the usual channels.
This is one of my favourite photography books – it captures, with tenderness and style, that rare and elusive innocence that resides (or can reside) in the heart of drunken revelry. Swedish photographer Anders Petersen, for three years in the late 1960s, captured the lives of the denizens of a Hamburg bar – what he produced (presented here in a near-fine copy of the first edition, in the original glassine wrapper) is regarded as a seminal work in the development of European photography, chiefly for its intimacy.
Petersen himself said revealingly of the work: “the people at the Café Lehmitz had a presence and a sincerity that I myself lacked. It was okay to be desperate, to be tender, to sit all alone or share the company of others. There was a great warmth and tolerance in this destitute setting.” If that isn’t cool enough – the front cover was used as the cover of Tom Waits’s 1985 album, Raindogs.
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
Katherine Ainslie – Votes for Catherine Susan and Me, (1910) – BOOK SOLD
Our children’s books section isn’t all fairies and rainbows – it does have its nasty elements. Katherine Ainslie’s adorable series of illustrated books about the adventures of two Dutch “peg dolls”, Catherine Susan and Me, took a turn to the dark side when the author turned her mind to the suffragette movement then raging, and decided that any potentially uppity young girls among her readership would profit from a cautionary tale. So much for solidarity. These expressively-drawn pictures suffice to give the general impression of the story. Ainslie’s telling has the whole issue of women’s suffrage being raised merely as a symptom of bourgeois ennui (incipit: “Catherine Susan and Me hadn’t anything much to do, so…”), and closes, after putting the girls through a correctional stint in prison, with ultimate deference to the authority of men in top hats and tails: “But we cheered up when the Home Secretary and the Governor came to see us. And when they said “Will you go home quietly”? we said “Yes” – and we did.” The End, and let’s here no more about it. Ainslie’s book serves to remind us of a troubling truth: that some of the most trenchant opponents of history’s liberating movements have been those who stand to benefit.
Whitney Darrow Jr – The New Yorker Cartoons complete collection (1943-66) – SOLD
Nothing beats a good New Yorker cartoon, and for over half of the 20th century, Whitney Darrow Jr (1909-99 – whose father, incidentally, was a friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald) was the New Yorker cartoon, contributing over 1,500 cartoons, and publishing 18 books including four New Yorker collections. On a quiet day at Dover Street (if ever such a day should arise) one of my favourite browsing choices here would be this superb complete set of his New Yorker cartoon collections, each copy wonderfully inscribed by Darrow with an original illustration to his Random House editor, Pat Read.
His particular genius appears to have been a taste for bringing the absurd disquietingly close to home – that and poking fun at Modern Art and Married Life in equal measure. Let this blog post serve as an excuse to reproduce some of his best examples:
“Miss! Oh, Miss! For God’s sake, stop!”
“It certainly makes one realise how insignificant you are.”
“Bird in Flight.”
“Marge, is it yellow or gray you look like hell in?”
GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH – 18th-century antiquary William Cole’s own heavily annotated copy of the first English edition of Monmouth’s British History (1718) – ITEM SOLD
I’m something of a freak for anything to do with King Arthur. Sad, perhaps, but true – there comes a time in life when one must suck it up and accept such things. So, when this copy of the first English edition of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae (completed 1139) came across my desk, I was delighted. It is one of the earliest and most important historical sources we have that tells of King Arthur and of Merlin (also, incidentally, of King Lear, who eventually reached Shakespeare via Holinshead, 1587). So much the more exciting, then, when I descried the ownership inscription of William Cole, the learned 18th century scholar to whom Horace Walpole would refer as his “oracle in any antique difficulties”. A man who knew his facts about the past – and here he has annotated Monmouth’s History throughout, clarifying obscurities and correcting faults. What an epistemological spectacle, to witness the objective mind of the Enlightenment encountering the misty mysteries of the mediaeval past. The Romantics and pre-Raphaelites preferred to enjoy, not to say wallow in, this mystery; not so Cole, who provides, in a lovely loopy hand, the following utile gloss on the life and death of Arthur:
“King Arthur being mortally wounded, was carried to Glastenbury, where he died, aged 90 years, 76 of which he had spent in the Continual exercise of armes. Tho he had reigned but 34 years yet before he mounted the throne, he had long commanded the British armies under Ambrosius. He is supposed to have instituted the Order of the Knights of the Round Table. He was born at Tindagel in Cornwell, in 452, or 453, and died in 542. He was buried at the monastery of Glastenbury in Somersetshire, where there was found an Inscription upon a leaden cross with Arthurs Epitaph upon it, in Henry 2nd’s Reign.”
Also enjoyable, is Cole’s full quotation of the sceptical Catholic poet Alexander Pope’s opinion of this English translation (copied from a letter to Edward Blount dated Sept 8 1717):
“I have very lately read Jefferey of Monmouth… in the Translation of a Clergyman in my Neighbourhood. The poor man is highly concerned to vindicate Jeffery’s veracity as an Historian, & told me, he was perfectly astonished we of the Roman Comunion could doubt of the Legends of his Giants, while we believed those of our Saints! I am forced to make a fair Composition with him; and, by crediting some of the wonders of Corinaeus and Gogmagog, have brought him so far already, that he speaks respect|fully of St.Christopher‘s carrying Christ, and the Resuscitation of St. Nicholas Tolentine‘s Chickens. Thus we proceed apace in Converting each other from all manner of Infidelity. Ajax and Hector are no more compared to Corinaeus and Arthur, than the Guelphs and Ghibelilines were to the Molochs of ever dreadful memory. This amazing Writer has made me lay aside Homer for a week, and when I take him up again, I shall be very well prepared to translated with believe, and reverence the Speech of Achilles’s Horse.”
Pope’s witty sign-off, “believe there is nothing more true (even more true than anything in Jeffery is false) than that I have a constant Affection for you, and am, &c”, gives a fair indication of the prevailing sense in the 18th century that Monmouth’s “History” was of a value perhaps more literary than historical.
Here at Peter Harrington Dover Street we like to showcase the very best in rare books, encompassing everything from the keenest heights of political economy to the most nostalgic depths of children’s literature. There really are some astounding things here and, since it would be a little selfish to keep them all to ourselves, we have decided to share a special selection of three exceptionally interesting items every week with the wider world. I hope you enjoy reading about these books from time to time – you can click through from the picture to the full entry on our website, where you can also browse our entire gallery and rare book stock. Additionally, if you find yourself in the area, please drop by 43 Dover Street and I’d be happy to show you around.
Windows back to the Summer(s) of Love – fine copies of the original festival programmes for Monterrey (1967) and Woodstock (1969).
These two imaginatively produced programmes emblemise in book form the two most famous music festivals of the 1960s, which in themselves need no introduction. What is interesting is that, where the “Monterrey International Pop Festival” programme is a treasure trove for pure musicos – full of band photographs, extraordinarily lysergic advertisement art from record companies, some articles on the music scene (Paul Jay Robbins) and the making of the festival (Derek Taylor), occasional literary effusions by the likes of Al Cooper, and a cheerful endorsement drawing from Sgt. Pepper – the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair” posits itself as something more. Subtitled an “Aquarian Exposition: 3 days of peace & music”, the 1969 Festival had a much more millennial ambition. The programme offers a more gesamt corpus, with original poems introducing the acts (Joan Baez, Canned Heat, Ravi Shankar, Jeff Beck, The Band, Credence Clearwater, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Incredible String Band, and Jefferson Airplane – whose page also incorporates the instructions and material for an actual fold-up airplane) as well as political articles (one entitled “the hard rain’s already falling”, addressed to those wishing to be “hip to what been going down lately” with “The Law and Order apes and this senile dinosaur we call a government” by Abbie Hoffman, author of Revolution for the Hell of it). Both, indeed, utilise Shakespeare, but Monterrey’s choice, from The Merchant of Venice, is tellingly aesthetic: “Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music / creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night, / become the touches of sweet harmony”, whereas Woodstock’s, an obscure selection from Henry VIII, expresses the distinctly political idealism of the event: “every man shall eat in safety / under his own vine, what he plants; and sing / the merry song of peace to all his neighbours.”
Flight of Fancy – the original maquette for Cecil Beaton’s classic wartime propaganda photobook Winged Squadrons (1942).
This is one of my all-time favourite items here at Dover Street. What is extraordinary about Winged Squadrons (1942) is the way that Cecil Beaton, as an official war photographer, turned what could have been a fairly quotidian government-sponsored propaganda piece into a work of high sensibility and style.
The photographs are masterpieces, and here we have 12 original prints with Beaton’s hand-written captions and the censor’s stamps passing them for publication, all accompanied by the final hand-corrected typescript. A hugely-valuable piece, both in the history of photography, and as a historical document of the Second World War.
It is particularly amusing to note, in comparing the original photographs with those in the finished publication, that the censors have cropped the following image to hide the nude pin-ups on the airman’s bunk room wall.
The Biggest Little Prince – an extremely rare presentation copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s much loved classic, with an original drawing.
This is one of the very best “Children’s Books” that Peter Harrington Rare Books has ever handled – though of course The Little Prince is much more than a book for children. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s enchanting parable of what is worst and best in human nature was composed and published in New York while war was raging in Europe.
There was a very small window of time between its publication in April 1943 and the day when its author departed to serve (and die) as a pilot in the Free French Airforce in North Africa and Corsica. Consequently, presentation copies are extraordinarily rare – but here we have one, and what a one! It is inscribed with an original drawing of the Little Prince, looking very sullen having landed on Earth, complaining pessimistically (in French, but I translate): “You’d have to be completely crazy to have chosen this planet. It is only pleasant at night when the inhabitants are asleep…” Wonderfully, the author here counters his character’s misanthropy: “The Little Prince was wrong. There are on earth some inhabitants whose straightforwardness, sweetness, and generosity of heart make up for the avarice and egotism of the others. For example, Dorothy Barclay”.
The fortunate recipient was an assistant to New York Times reporter Helen Lazeroff, a friend of Saint-Exupéry. While composing the chapter in which the Little Prince meets a madly acquisitive businessman counting stars as if to own them, the author became curious as to how many stars can be seen from Earth. He asked his friend Lazeroff, whose assistant picked up the matter and telephoned the Hayden Planetarium. She provided the answer (9,096 to the naked eye, according to a recent Yale University calculation) to Saint-Exupéry, and for her “straightforwardness, sweetness and generosity of heart” she was gifted this exceptional book and its moving inscription.
Some might think collecting Mary Shelley books a daunting task. The first edition of her most important and well-known book, Frankenstein(1818), is rare and so valuable as to be out of the reach of many collectors. However, there are many other opportunities to collect her published works.
Frankenstein was almost immediately popular with the public. In 1823 the novel was turned into a stage melodrama by Richard Brinsley Peake. Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein was performed at the English Opera House, a production attended by Mary and her father William Godwin. Playbills from this and other popular early productions are attractive ephemera for collectors of Mary Shelley’s books.
Partly as a result of the success of the play, Godwin arranged a second edition of Frankenstein (1823), the first to name Mary Shelley as author. As Mary was living in Italy, Godwin made the textual amendments himself, though Mary accepted those and used it as the basis for her extensively revised third edition of 1831.
The third edition has the important new preface, in which Mary gives a full account of the tale’s genesis in the famous storytelling competition with Byron and Polidori at the Villa Diodati, and a vivid frontispiece. It was published as one of Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels, two years ahead of his Jane Austen editions in the same series.
Frankenstein was reprinted several times throughout the 19th century, but a major boost to its persistence in popular culture was the 1931 film version directed by James Whale, and starring Boris Karloff as the creature. Karloff’s memorable portrayal is captured in book form in the photoplay edition issued in 1931. An American illustrated edition in more sophisticated vein features the powerfully dramatic wood engravings of Lynd Ward (1934).
Frankenstein was not Mary Shelley’s only pioneering work in the science fiction genre. Her novel The Last Man (1826) is set in the 21st century, when a cataclysmic plague seemingly destroys every person on earth except the narrator of the novel.
Valperga, or, The Life and Death of Castruccio Castracani (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) are both historical novels, set in 14th-century Italy and 15th-century English respectively.
Lodore (1835), her fifth novel, and Falkner (1837), her sixth and final novel, shift away from supernatural or historical settings to contemporary stories offering critiques of the limitations of the conventional Victorian class and legal systems. These are both worthy titles for anyone interested in collecting Mary Shelley books that may not be apparent to the layperson.
Lodore is probably the novel in which Mary Shelley gives her least disguised portrait of Byron, though Raymond in The Last Man was also clearly modelled on him. Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s discarded lover, believed that Byron’s “vile spirit” haunted all her novels.
Mary Shelley’s literary career is of course inextricably linked with that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her first book is primarily her revision of their elopement journal, along with some added material including P. B. Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc”, published anonymously as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany (1817).
After his death, her carefully edited collection, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 vols, 1839), includes her annotations that place his works within their historical context. Her edition is regarded as a turning point in the acceptance of P. B. Shelley as a major author.
Mary also published several dozen reviews, short-stories, and poems in prominent London journals and the then popular annuals, such as The Keepsake.
“Miss! Oh, Miss! For God’s sake, stop!”
“It certainly makes one realise how insignificant you are.”
“Bird in Flight.”
“Marge, is it yellow or gray you look like hell in?”
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