IN THE VERY SCARCE WILLIAM NICHOLSON DUSTWRAPPER

MANNING-SANDERS, Ruth; William NICHOLSON [Dustwrapper] ~ Huccas Moor.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Faber and Faber, London: 1929.

8vo., publisher's light brown cloth, lettered and triple-ruled in black to upper cover and spine; in the striking unclipped pictorial dustwrapper designed by William Nicholson (7/6 net to front flap); THE BOOK very good, slight mottling to boards and pushing to spine tips; a little spotting to the outer edges of the text block and prelims; THE WRAPPER fair to good only, suffering from rather extensive worming causing loss mostly to the spine and outer edges of panels, though mysteriously avoiding much of the lettering (likely the ink not paletable to insects); still seldom found at all, and scarce thus. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. FIRST UK EDITION. A very early novel by the poet and folklorist, Ruth Manning-Sanders. Born in Wales, Manning-Sanders spent her summers as a child in a farmhouse in the Scottish Highlands, 'Shian', which she later claimed 'means the place where fairies live'. It was not until the 1960s that she began to publish dozens of fairy-tale anthologies, 'A Book of...', beginning with 'A Book of Giants' in 1962, and ending with 'A Book of Magic Horses' in 1984. Together, these retellings of mythological folklore became her best-known, loved, and major body of work, incorporating witches, wizards, dragons and ghosts in the process, with dark undertones, much to the appreciation of her young readers. 'Hucca's Moor' is unusual for being one of her earliest works, published forty years before this time, and tells the tale of 'man's unsuccessful attempt to lose his own soul'. A pedlar who is 'ineffectual in body and mean in mind', the protagonist Zephan lives together with his patient wife, Deborah, his twenty-six year old daughter (convicted of murder and sent to an asylum), and a gigantic bed-ridden miner, Bendigo Scoffern, who possesses all that Zephan does not - self-esteem, integrity, and uprightness. The book is accompanied by the William Nicholson dustwrapper which, despite its faults, is exceedingly rare in commerce.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Fair/Good