JUMBEE AND OTHER UNCANNY TALES

First Edition: xii, 394, (i colophon) pages, woodcut printer's device on the title page, original black cloth titled gilt on the spine - the top corners are lightly bumped, foxing on the page edges, previous owner's signature and date 11/18/44 in ink on the back free endpaper, a very good copy in the dust jacket designed by Charles Frank Wakefield - the jacket is printed on thick stock paper and spirit varnished, it is sunned to light brown on the spine and lightly worn along the edges and it is not price clipped with the price $3.00.

The colophon on the final unnumbered page reads, 'This book Jumbee and other Uncanny Tales was composed, printed and bound by the Collegiate Press, George Banta Publishing Company, Menasha, Wisconsin. It is composed in Linotype Caledonia and printed on White Winnebago Eggshell. The cloth is Holliston Novelex.'

The bibliography records 1559 copies as the total edition.

Editor’s note from the flap of the dust jacket: The memorable tales of obi and voodu in the West Indies written by the late Rev. Henry S. Whitehead have not merited the obscurity and neglect into which they have fallen during the past decade. Few contemporary writers have managed so ably to catch and put down the feeling of West Indian life, to bring to life the fears and superstitions of the people in the West Indies, to portray with such a conviction of reality the strangeness of inexplicable events there. There are in this first collection of Whitehead’s tales many stories deserving of a place among the best in the literature of the macabre — such tales as Cassius, for instance, with its casual but no less startling horror; as Seven Turns in a Hangman’s Rope, a novelette of piracy and supernatural vengeance; as The Shadows, with its weird ghosts; as Mrs. Lorriquer, a remarkable tale of psychic possession. Not only is Dr. Whitehead’s background always authentic, coming as it does from his own life in the West Indies, but his prose style is far superior to that of many of his contemporaries. The deceptive leisureliness of his style detracts not at all from the way in which his stories hold to memory. Though now more than a decade dead, Dr. Whitehead’s position as the third of the great triumvirate of Weird Tales contributors, including also Lovecraft and Smith, has never been challenged, and his place in the pages of that magazine has never even been approached. Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales is a book Arkham House is proud to publish.