TALES OF THE DEAD. PRINCIPALLY TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH. London: Printed for White, Cochrane, and Co., Fleet-Street, 1813. Octavo, pp. [1-2] [i] ii [iii] iv-viii [1-3] 4-248, early nineteenth-century three-quarter red leather and marbled boards, spine panel titled and tooled in gold. First edition, first printing. Possibly the most important nineteenth-century anthology of weird fiction, as it was this (in the French version) which, read aloud on rainy afternoons at the Villa Diodati in 1816, inspired the guests there (Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron and Polidori) to undertake the ghost story contest which produced not only FRANKENSTEIN but also Polidori's THE VAMPYRE and Byron's intriguing "A Fragment." Five of the six stories here (all but "The Storm") are translated from a French anthology of 1812, FANTASMAGORIANA; OU RECUEIL D'HISTOIRES D'APPARITIONS, DE SPECTRES, REVENANS, FANTOMES, &C., which in turn professed to be a translation by "an amateur" (since identified as J. B. B. Eyries) from German originals. Includes "Dumb Love" here as "The Spectre-Barber" by J. K. A. Musaeus (this is probably the first appearance in English). The present work contains both a two-page "advertisement" by the English translator (Utterson) and her translation of the original four-page preface by the French translator. The stories of the anthology have a good deal of vitality and are well-worth reading for their own sake. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 1575. Block, The English Novel 1740-1850, p. 243. Garside and Schöwerling 1813: 60. Bleiler (1978), p. 197. Reginald 14400. Summers, A Gothic Bibliography, p. 527. Eaton catalogue, volume 3, p. 338. Binding worn and rubbed but sound, bound without the half title leaf, a very good copy with tight, clean interior. (#179066).
Price: $3,750.00
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