First Edition: 194 pages, woodcut printer's device on the title page, original black cloth titled gilt along the spine, a very good copy in the dust jacket which is torn at the top of the spine - the jacket is printed on thick stock paper and spirit varnished, designed by Ronald Clyne, with the price $3.00 at the top of the front flap.
The colophon on the final unnumbered page reads, 'Three thousand copies of this book have been printed from Intertype Garamond by The Collegiate Press, George Banta Publishing Company, Menasha, Wisconsin, the paper is Winnebago Eggshell. The binding cloth is Holliston Black Novelex.'
The bibliography records 3118 copies as the total edition the extra copies being explained as printer's overruns.
Editor's note on the dust jacket, 'The delightful tall tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens are so widely-known and so much appreciated by the audience for whom they are clearly meant that any introduction to a new collection of them is superfluous. Sometimes grim, sometimes comic, sometimes macabre, often whimsical and utterly strange, always incredible, the travel tales of Mr. Jorkens have a quality of enduring charm which has endeared them to thousands of readers.
'Here are tales of science-fiction in the outré concepts and inventions of Dr. Caber—Making Fine Weather, The Strange Drug of Dr. Caber, and others of the frankly supernatural—The Haunting of Halanahstown, Jorkens in Witch Wood, Mylamu; tales of the principle of evil, like A Deal with the Devil; and there are tales which defy classification. This fourth collection of Jorkens' tales is fully up to its predecessors.
'British reviewers have been understandably enthusiastic. Writing in the Irish Times, Temple Lane says: "It is long since I have been able to lose myself so completely in a book. No single formula will fit all Lord Dunsany's persuasive fantasies." And others agree: "Lord Dunsany gives us, as one would expect, examples of the rarer kind of short stories—good stories delicately written and shaped, and with a twist that knots them into piquancy forms."—The Schoolmaster. "Full of charm and atmosphere; fancy runs riot. Lord Dunsany has a neat, elusive trick of style."—The Illustrated London News.'
'Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 1878–1957), eighteenth Baron Dunsany, occupies a unique place among the great imaginative writers of the twentieth century. Soldier, sportsman, traveller and dramatist, he is best remembered as one of the founding masters of modern fantasy literature. Long before Tolkien and C. S. Lewis achieved fame, Dunsany was creating richly imagined worlds peopled by strange gods, forgotten kingdoms and dreamlike landscapes, written in a distinctive prose style of lyrical beauty and quiet irony.'
- Overall Condition: Very good
- Size: 8vo (193 mm x 138 mm)
