New Arabian Nights
London: Chatto & Windus, 1882. Very Good. Item #49729
London: Chatto & Windus, 1882. First Edition, undetermined issue with new endpapers. Two octavo volumes; bound in 20th-century blue half morocco; five raised bands; gilt tooling; top edge gilt; new endpapers; [10],269; viii,234pp., retaining half titles but lacking advertisements to rear of volume II. Light wear to edges with very brief exposure; mild stress to front joint of volume II; bindings sound; pages unmarked; a Very Good set.
First edition of the author's collection of stories first published in various periodicals between 1877 and 1880, including his first piece of fiction, "A Lodging for a Night." The stories, chiefly published and signed simply "R.L.S." in The Cornhill Magazine and London magazine, had an immediate and lasting effect. As one contemporary recalled upon reading the first appearance of "A Pavilion on the Links," "some of us felt...satisfied that a new and fresh power had arisen in English literature." Years later Arthur Conan Doyle himself wrote to Stevenson, "Ever since the first R.L.S. began to appear in Cornhill [magazine], long before I knew your name I longed to meet you. Shall I ever forget the enthusiasm with which I read 'The Pavilion on the Links.' I look on it as the first short story in the world."
Barry Menikoff, "New Arabian Nights: Stevenson's Experiment in Fiction," published in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 45, no. 3, Dec. 1990, p. 342.
PRIDEUX 8.
Price: $750.00