THE WALLET OF KAI LUNG. New York: George H. Doran Company, n.d. [1923]. Octavo, original pictorial orange cloth with pictorial paper onlays. Second U.S. edition. The first Kai Lung book. "Kai Lung is a Chinese storyteller who tells one of his tales whenever he gets into a tight spot [like Scheherezade, as Ashley points out]. Bramah's China bears about the same amount of resemblance to the real China as Walter Scott's England of Ivanhoe bears to the real English twelfth century ..." - Waggoner, The Hills of Faraway, p. 149. "The stories are mannered and playful, less moralistic than they pretend to be, and constitute a unique series of literary confections." - Barron, Fantasy Literature 3-48. Bramah's best-known fantasy creation is the Kai Lung series, stories of the "impossibly romanticized Old China narrated and inhabited by professional storyteller Kai Lung." - Clute and Grant (eds), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, p. 136. Ashley, Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, pp. 42-3. Barron (ed), Fantasy Literature 3-48. Schlobin, The Literature of Fantasy 979. Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature II, pp. 827-30. Reginald 01829. Not in Bleiler (1948; 1978). Edges lightly rubbed, a very good copy. (#177469).
Price: $35.00
No statement of printing.