THE SONG OF THE SIRENS AND OTHER STORIES. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, [1919]. Octavo, pp. [i-iv] v-ix [x] xi [xii-xiv] [1] 2-348 [349-354: blank] [note: last three leaves are blanks], original red cloth, front panel stamped in gold and blind, spine panel stamped in gold. First edition. "Collects ten short stories of fantasy and horror, all based on nightmares the author had, as he explains in a five-page preface. Most are set in classical Rome or Greece -- not surprisingly, given the author's job as Latin teacher in a Baltimore high school -- and provide detailed glimpses of classical rites and rituals. Two others, set in Renaissance Italy, are gruesome and ingenious contes cruels. The title story, the only one with a contemporary setting, planes a grisly facet from the myth of the Sirens who tempted sailors in the Mediterranean (most famously Ulysses and his crew returning from the Trojan War), a story generally treated in an ethereal manner. All the stories have that blend of strangeness, formality and sweat-soaked intensity that characterizes the work of E. L. White, who should be considered one of the major American authors of the early twentieth-century weird tale. In addition to the present volume, and his better known LUKUNDOO (1927), he left behind a dozen or so unpublished weird tales at his death that were subsequently reprinted by Midnight House." - Robert Eldridge. Ashley, Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, p. 182. Schlobin, The Literature of Fantasy 1109. Sullivan (ed), The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, p. 462. Tymn (ed), Horror Literature 3-256. Bleiler (1978), p. 207. Reginald 15228. Smith, American Fiction, 1901-1925 W-467. Bookplate affixed to front paste-down. Nick to cloth at lower spine end near front joint, front corner tips bumped, gold lettering on spine panel tarnished and dull (a characteristic flaw of the book), a good, tight, internally clean copy. (#170032).
Price: $150.00
No statement of printing.