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First edition thus. Hard cover, 12mo, in publisher's brown cloth boards, with gold lettering to spine. With dust jacket featuring silhouette of Machen with his customary cloak and pipe. COLLATION: viii, 5-183, [5] pp. CONDITION: Near Fine. Clean, bright covers. No inscriptions. Dust jacket price-clipped, and has small closed tear which was repaired by tape, leaving ghost. Now protected in mylar. ** AUTHOR Arthur Machen (1863-1947), had a deep love of his native Wales and its Celtic past, and his early writings such as "The Great God Pan" (1894) evoked the horrors of a parallel world inhabited by demons and pagan unknowables, and the thin wall protecting us from them. Machen spent a year or two when he first arrived in London, subsisting mostly on bread and green tea, to try to produce a literary work worthy of his dreams. He finally achieved that, in his gothic novels, "The Great God Pan" (1894), "The Hill of Dreams" (1907), and his equally remarkable autobiographies, "Far Off Things" (1922), "Things Near and Far" (1923), and "The London Adventure" (1924). ** In "Hieroglyphics", Machen gives us his philosophy of literature - that from the combination of mundane words, the truly gifted author can conjure up angels and demons, and can induce a state of ecstasy in the reader. He lists his favorite authors (including Keats, Dickens, Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, and Cervantes), and outlines why they succeed where others fail. A must-read for any Machen fan. ** REFS: Goldstone & Sweetser (1973) 8m, p. 27.
Ref: AMACH 9306
$95.00