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Hardcover, quarto, 128pp. First American edition - this was first published as "Book of the Supernatural" (London: W. Foulsham, 1979). In publisher's mustard-colored boards, having a black cloth spine with gold lettering. Decorative dust jacket in brown and gold depicting a gothic door with an "M.R. James" nameplate. CONDITION: Fine book in Near Fine dust jacket, which is not price-clipped, but has some surface scratches. ** An interesting collection of ghost stories and short pieces about their history. Includes a preface by Sir John Betjeman, the British Poet Laureate from 1972 to 1984, ghost stories from M.R. James and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and an introduction by the well-known horror story compiler, Peter Haining. ** M.R. James told his ghost stories on Christmas Eve to members of the "Chit Chat Club" at King's College, Cambridge. The first such gathering in 1893 was so well received that he was invited to repeat the performance every year on Christmas Eve. The tales are well-wrought "Victorian" ghost stories with old-fashioned notions of evil spirits, dire forebodings etc - one imagines them being told by candlelight with the narrator's back to an open fireplace, and a winter storm rattling the window panes. After a few years keeping this tradition, his friends persuaded him to publish those stories, which became his first and most famous collection, "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" (1904).(AJ)
Ref: GHOST 9640
$50.00