A Night in the Lonesome October

by Roger Zelazny

SIGNED | Limited Edition | Easton Press | 1993

“To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad”

The skies they were ashen and sober;
      The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
      The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
      Of my most immemorial year;

by Edgar Allan Poe

A Night in the Lonesome October is perhaps the best Halloween story you can read. Written by the late, great Roger Zelazny–himself a literary titan–the characters and settings are heavily borrowed from the great names of gothic, horror, mystery, and science fiction. Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu mythos all make appearances.

The story itself is broken into 32 chapters. One for every day of October, plus an introductory chapter that introduces our protagonist, Snuff the Watchdog. The entire story is told through his eyes. And though the story revolves around the motives of the literary characters–the action takes place with Snuff and the menagerie of animal familiars Bubo the rat, to name a few.

Without spoiling too much of the plot–since discovering how events unfold along with our characters is part of the delight in reading this story–the basic premise is that the rare blue moon on Halloween night will open a hellmouth between worlds. And what that means for Snuff, his master, and the many inhabitants of the strange community they have formed together.

In fact, it’s become somewhat of a tradition for Zelazny fans to re-read the story every year–one chapter a day over the course of October. Repeatedly coming back to it and trying to parse out all the very many literary and cinematic references he wrote in. And I’ll admit, I have a whole document of my own outlining my own thoughts as I read the story. I felt much like a literary Sherlock Holmes of my own, which added to the experience tremendously.

The beautiful Easton Press edition of this story is bound in blood-red leather, adorned in gilt, and illustrated by Gahan Wilson. It’s also signed by Zelazny–and considering he passed only a few short years after the publication of this story–that makes it a treasure beyond imagination. A collectible edition you can pull out every Halloween until time immemorial.

Battling the Wind; Or, Ted Scott Flying Around Cape Horn

by Franklin W. Dixon (John W. Duffield)

First Edition | Grosset & Dunlap | 1933

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When the Orville Brothers first set flight in 1903, the world of literature also took flight along with them. Especially in the realm of juvenile literature. But it was Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight that really propelled the genre of aviation stories into the book zeitgeist.

Boys’ Series, as they are now colloquially called, were primarily the invention of Edward Stratemeyer, whose Stratemeyer Syndicate reshaped juvenile fiction during the first half of the 20th century. Making use of an army of ghostwriters, the Syndicate pumped out many popular series that are still beloved today–Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and, of course, Ted Scott. Many of the most enduring series were detective stories, but as Ted Scott shows, the aviation craze sparked by Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, was a sub-genre that took off in 1927.

Based on the persona of Lindbergh fed to the American public, Ted Scott was depicted as an ideal of youthful masculinity. Quietly patriotic, modest of his achievements, but always pursuing knowledge, Ted was meant to inspire young boys to enter science, engineering, and aviation fields.

In fact, John Duffield–the actual “Franklin W. Dixon–was himself an aviation buff. And the books were littered with the lingo of flight, and in the fashion of Moby-Dick, included asides on the science of aviation. In fact, actual passages from Aviation, the New York Times, Aero Digest, and Science were included in the books, copyright notwithstanding.

Many of Ted’s adventures were lifted straight from headlines or echoed Lindbergh’s own achievements. The very first book of the series, Over the Ocean to Paris, sets this tone and it is kept up through all twenty volumes of the Ted Scott Flying Series. Ted *is* Lindy–but less myth and more man. A hero for young boys that they could relate to and aspire to be.

But also a hero they could touch, literally hold in their hands. The books were modest, as all Stratemeyer books were–meant to be affordable to their young readership–but also beautiful. Hardbound, stamped with images on the covers, pictorial endpapers, internal illustrations, and, perhaps most importantly, evocative and bright dustjackets that depicted the worlds of each series. And in the case of Ted Scott, that world was the soaring imagination of the sky.

Star Trek: Logs One–Ten

by Alan Dean Foster

SIGNED | First Editions | Ballantine and Del Rey | 1974-1978

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The Star Trek: Log books are the complete novelization of all 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series (colloquially referred to as TAS by fans). It is the first English-language TV series to be completely adapted into literary form. All ten books are signed by Alan Dean Foster.

The Logs have a really unusual publishing history. Which, as both a book nerd and a Trekkie, I find really interesting. Published from 1974-1978, the first six paperbacks each contain three novella-length episode adaptations, which were written as linked stories. The final four books were adaptations of individual episodes that contained original components and extended plots. So the end result is a series that contains a mix of straightforward recaps and original storytelling.

To make things even more interesting, the original publisher, Ballantine Books, began the print run using Filmation cells from the show as the cover artwork. With white wraps and colorful text, the animation stills clearly delineated the books as TAS stories. However, sometime in 1976, a decision was made to change the book design. So Logs Nine and Ten feature starship artwork by Stanislaw Fernandes, who had recently moved from Corgi Books the UK–where, as Art Director, he mostly likely signed off on the designs for the UK editions of Logs One through Five (the deal to reprint Logs Six through Ten fell through, so the UK editions aren’t a complete set).

To add a further complication to matters, Ballantine shifted the Star Trek Logs to their newly created imprint, Del Rey, in 1977. So the colophon and trim size varies slightly in Log Ten, compared to the previous volumes.

In the present day realm of book collecting, this results in a very unique outcome–you cannot get a full matching set of first edition Logs. They just don’t exist. A full matching set of Fernandes cover designs are available. Later Del Rey editions were redesigned with his starship artwork on brightly colored, solid backgrounds, resulting in a psuedo-rainbow effect when the volumes are lined up on a shelf. And though the background colors have occasionally changed over the years, (somewhat marring the flow from one color to another) the starship designs have not. They remain a matching set.

And maybe you’re asking yourself. Why is any of this important? What’s so interesting about first edition book designs that don’t match?

And I suppose the answer is it’s a really good story. And kinda familiar–the Logs are the first books of their kind to be a complete television novelization, but it’s a bit hodge-podge in makeup and the covers don’t quite match. And yet, like a certain crew, they belong together. So as one enterprising first officer might say, “Fascinating, Captain.”

The Bunny’s Nutshell Library

by Robert Kraus

First Edition | Harper & Row | 1965

Update: This book has been sold!

Robert Kraus did not begin his career in the realm of children’s literature. Though he did start as a child himself. At age ten he won a local cartoon contest, by 12 he was employed at the Milwaukee Journal, and by 16 he was working for The New Yorker. So maybe it’s no surprise that, after spending 15 years with the magazine, Kraus pivoted his career and founded a small publishing house, Windmill Books, in 1965 (eventually purchased by Simon & Schuster in the 1980s) and turned his eye to the whimsical world of children’s literature.

Gone were the portraits of gritty New York City and its denizens, replaced with rabbits and easter egg houses. With a penchant for anthropomorphic animals and life lessons, Kraus’ oeuvre of children’s stories evokes The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Hundred Acre Woods, The Wind in the Willows, and Frog & Toad. Small stories for small people (and animals!) that are well known to this day.

But of all his works, perhaps none was so charming as The Bunny’s Nutshell Library, which he wrote and illustrated. One of three Nutshell Library collections published by Harper & Row in the 1960s–Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library in 1962, Hilary Knight’s Christmas Nutshell Library in 1963, and, finally, Robert Kraus’ The Bunny’s Nutshell Library in 1965–Kraus’ Nutshell Library consists of: The Silver Dandelion, The First Robin, Springfellow’s Parade, and Juniper, gentle stories about bullying, being accepted, loneliness, and friendship.

The four charming tales in his collection, paired with their cozy illustrations, reflect that same childhood nostalgia that lives in all of us. When the world was very, very small and so were we–but our imaginations were oh so big.

A Coven of Vampires

by Brian Lumley

SIGNED by Author and Illustrator | Limited Edition | Fedogan & Bremer | 1998

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Brian Lumley (1937-2004) was an English horror author of the Lovecraftian tradition, having discovered the author as a teenager through a pastiche found in a British science fiction magazine–namely, Notebook Found in a Deserted House, by Robert Bloch–as well as becoming a avid collector of the author’s works while serving in the Corps of Royal Military Police as a young man.

It was Lumley’s passion for collecting that eventually led to him becoming an author in his own right. In order to complete his collection, Lumley began corresponding with HP Lovecraft’s original publisher in America, Arkham House (named after the fictional New England town where Lovecraft set many of his stories). Lumley included some of his own Chthulu pastiches in his letters, and Arkham was so impressed with the young writer that he was invited to contribute some of his own writing to an upcoming anthology called Tales of the Chthulu Mythos. Thus began a forty year career steeped in the weird, the macabre, and, most notably, the Lovecraftian.

A Coven of Vampires, however, is a very unique collection of stories by an author best known for his work within, and adding to, the Cthulhu mythos. Previously published in various sci-fi and horror anthologies, these stories were all gathered together in a beautiful hardcover by Fedogan & Bremer–a publishing house that worked closely with Arkham over the years and that specialized in weird tales. A perfect fit for any of Lumley’s works.

This limited edition book is beautifully designed with a black and gold slipcase featuring a skull, stake, and hammer. The endpapers are blood red with a repeating bat design in black, while the interior is illustrated by the nine-time Hugo award winner Bob Eggleton. Signed by both Lumley and Eggleton, it’s the perfect collector’s item for anyone who loves Dracula, Carmilla, Lestat, Buffy, or truly any vampire stories modern or historic. And perhaps the start of your own career as writer, finding inspiration in the most unlikely of places.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

OR The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering

by W. Y. Evans-Wentz

First Edition | Oxford University Press | 1927

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This Oxford University edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, though published less than a century ago, has a publication history that spans a millennium. The book’s original content is credited to Padma Sambhava, a Buddhist teacher, mystic, and prophet, who dictated the text to the Tibetan princess Yeshe Tsogyal in the 8th century. These writings that would become The Book of the Dead were called Bardo Thodol in Tibetan, and discussed Buddhist ideas of the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, as well as states of existence between death and rebirth called bardos. If this story is true, Bardo Thodol pre-dates even the writing of Beowulf.

As the story goes, Padma Sambhava prophesied that the book was not right for the current time, but would be discovered some 500 years later when it was most needed by Tibet and the wider world. Indeed, in the midst of the bubonic plague’s devastation of the 1300s, a boy named Karma Lingpa came across the place where Yeshe Tsogyal had hidden the text. He disseminated Bardo Thodol across Tibet and other Buddhist nations, and it quickly became a staple text in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

Bardo Thodol‘s English title comes from Walter Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist, writer, and spiritualist known for his work bringing the philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism to prominence in the western world. While Evans-Wentz’s name graces the cover of the first English translation (which you see here), published by Oxford University in 1927, his involvement with The Tibetan Book of the Dead are controversial for many reasons. For one, Evans-Wentz himself did not do the actual translation work, which was performed by Kazi Dawa Samdup. While Bardo Thodol literally translates to “Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State,” Evans-Wentz chose to make reference to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which was popular among spiritualists — one of many ways in which he imposed his own views and spiritualist philosophy on the text. This first translation, as a result, strays so far from Padma Sambhava’s original ideas that it no longer resembles true tenets of Tibetan Buddhism.

Despite — or maybe because of — Evans-Wentz’s departures, The Tibetan Book of the Dead developed a following and significance of its own. The book’s spiritual notions lent themselves well to the American counterculture movement of the 1960s, which popularized the use of psychedelics to achieve states of consciousness that ascended earthly existence, much like the bardos of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1964, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book that linked Evans-Wentz’s version of Buddhist principles to the use of psychedelics to achieve ego death, among other subjects.

Later translations of Bardo Thodol have stayed truer to the original text, adding another layer of significance and uniqueness to this first edition copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is both a work of literature and an artifact of history, with seeds of influence that have proliferated and will continue to proliferate in spiritual, philosophical, and cultural corners of thought in years to come. In all its years of complex publication history, this book has made its way to the Dawn Treader’s shelves — come by the store to see for yourself!

The Trail of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

First Edition, First Printing | Arkham House | 1962

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In 1962 Arkham House published The Trail of Cthulhu, which collected five of August Derleth’s interconnected stories into one volume for the first time. This book, its author, and its publisher are all historically significant in the genre of “weird” fiction — a difficult-to-define style of speculative writing that blends elements of horror, macabre fantasy, the supernatural, and a general suspension of the laws of nature. Think Edgar Allan Poe, Stranger Things, or H. P. Lovecraft, who is credited with popularizing the term. August Derleth, who did much to develop the genre, was a correspondent and disciple of Lovecraft; theirs was a relationship that significantly shaped the trajectory of Derleth’s life’s work.

Lovecraft’s influence is perhaps most evident in those of August Derleth’s books that feature Cthulhu, a cosmic deity that resembles part green octopus, part dragon, and part human, whom Lovecraft wrote into existence in 1928. The stories in The Trail of Cthulhu — all previously published in Weird Tales — take place in Arkham, Massachusetts, a fictional town central to Lovecraft’s writing, where one may encounter the Great Old Ones. Several writers in Lovecraft’s circle adopted Cthulhu and the rules of Arkham’s sur-reality into their own works, including Derleth, who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe this shared fictional universe. In literary dissections of this mythopoeia, Derleth’s interpretation of the world differs from Lovecraft’s — while Lovecraft’s Mythos serves to convey the meaninglessness of human supremacy, Derleth’s represents a struggle between good and evil with elements of hope for humanity.

Differences aside, the Cthulhu Mythos — and Lovecraft himself — would live in relative anonymity today if not for Derleth. In 1937, Derleth and Donald Wandrei established Arkham House explicitly for the sake of posthumously publishing Lovecraft’s writing, which hadn’t been popular during his lifetime. The publishing house went on to become a stalwart in the weird fiction landscape for the next 70 years, continuing to Lovecraft’s work alongside names such as Robert E. Howard, H. Russell Wakefield, and August Derleth himself.

Arkham House’s first printing of Derleth’s The Trail of Cthulhu produced 2470 copies. One of these has made its way, over the years, to the shelves of the Dawn Treader, where it sits next to a first edition of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, published by Arkham House in 1964. Come by the store to find these and many other weird and wonderful fictions!

Williwaw

by Gore Vidal

SIGNED | First Edition | E. P. Dutton & Company | 1946

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Gore Vidal was many things: novelist, screenwriter, sometimes-actor, attempted politician, and a problem child of belles-lettres, to name a few. He wasn’t shy about picking fights with literary giants — there’s even a section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to “Feuds.” Opinionated and polemical as he was, Vidal had an undeniable influence on culture and the writing landscape. He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, when he was only nineteen, thus beginning a prolific career.

Vidal wrote much of Williwaw during his time as an officer in the Army Transportation Corps, stationed near the Aleutian Islands, where the novel’s titular wind phenomenon occurs. Williwaw takes place in the same setting on the margins of World War II, during the local storm season. Its minimalist style and exploration of nature vs. human nature recalls writers such as Hemingway and Stephen Crane, and the novel’s success placed Vidal in an elite category of young post-war novelists like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote (a comparison which would likely spark Vidal’s ire — see “Feuds“).

Despite Vidal’s military upbringing and his own personal involvement in the army, his political views often circled back to a belief that the United States’ militaristic, imperialist foreign policy had turned the country into a disgraceful, failed experiment. In the post-9/11 years, in particular, he vocally opposed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Not just in the case of war but in any cause towards which he felt a twitch of passion, Vidal nestled snugly into the self-appointed role of “tremendous hater.” He was a man in touch with all the world’s ups and downs, who believed the “downs” to be most prevalent, and who wrote about it all in a body of work equally satirical and deadly serious.

With this first edition of Gore Vidal’s first novel, we can see the seeds of a storied career. The Dawn Treader’s copy even bears his own handwriting — a note to Charles Abramson, an old Broadway Angel and friend of Vidal’s, and his signature — the enduring mark of a prolific provocateur.

(Visit us in the store to see our signed first edition of Gore Vidal’s novel Creation!)

Nine Stories

by J.D. Salinger

First Edition | Little, Brown and Company | 1953

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In 1948, J.D. Salinger wrote a story so good that the New Yorker requested first rights to publish every subsequent story he would write. Five years later, the famed “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was given first billing in Nine Stories, Salinger’s story collection follow-up to his smash hit novel, The Catcher in the Rye. If Catcher in the Rye earned Salinger his membership in the annals of literary history, Nine Stories cemented it, establishing him as a writer with uncommon abilities to draw out the joys and sorrows of the human experience. The collection explores themes that were particularly poignant in the aftermath of WWII (in which Salinger himself fought), complicating conceptions of innocence and culpability, violence and trauma, death, madness, genius, and love. Many of these stories — seven of which were published in the New Yorker, per the magazine’s wishes — are classics among not only readers but writers as well, who study their innovative voice, their structure, and their play between the dark and the light.

The stories in Nine Stories are not only linked thematically, but by family ties. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” introduces readers to the Glass family, who would go on to occupy Salinger’s creative mind for the rest of his literary career. Seymour Glass is a veteran with all the hallmarks of PTSD, which displays itself in bouts of strange and concerning behavior. He returns in many of Salinger’s later stories: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Seymour: An Introduction, and Franny and Zooey. Likewise, other members of the Glass family weave through the pages of Salinger’s various stories and collections — Franny and Zooey Glass, Walter Glass, and Beatrice Glass Tannenbaum, to name a few. “Buddy” Glass, who narrates Zooey and is a protagonist in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction, is revealed to be the writer of at least three stories from Nine Stories, and is considered by many to be a stand-in for Salinger.

While pieces of truth from Salinger’s life are scattered throughout his stories, the author himself was famously resistant to public perception. He published his last story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” in 1965, but continued writing for years, reportedly completing many more novels and stories for his own pleasure or to be published posthumously. Some of these featured members of the endlessly compelling Glass family. It is widely agreed that Salinger’s fascination with the creation of these Glass lives, loves, and tragedies influenced the future of the literary landscape and redefined the possibilities of what a short story can do.

Come touch a piece of this history in the Dawn Treader’s first edition of Nine Stories, in which you can see Seymour Glass’s very earliest appearance between the boards of a book.

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

by J.M. Barrie, illustrated by Arthur Rackham

Second British Edition | Hodder & Stoughton | 1907

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In 1902, Scottish playwright and novelist J.M. Barrie wrote The Little White Bird, a novel for adult audiences that addressed and honored the idea of “the eternal child.” Six chapters in the middle were particularly beloved, telling the story of an infant who was part bird but needed to learn how to live without flight. Barrie repurposed and republished these six chapters in 1906, in a children’s book called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Thus, the timeless character of Peter Pan made his way into the world.

To this day, Peter Pan and his fantasyland can be found on children’s bookshelves across the globe. But the Peter Pan we know and love would not be who he is without the illustrations of Arthur Rackham, which adorned the pages of the first, second, and other early editions of this book.

Rackham’s illustration of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens came at a significant time in his career. The previous year, he illustrated a version of Rip van Winkle that established him as the preeminent decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period. After seeing these illustrations in an exhibit at the Leicester Galleries in London, where they were displayed to great acclaim, J.M. Barrie commissioned Rackham to illustrate his new children’s book, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The following year, Rackham illustrated an edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the success of which boosted his career, ensuring he would go on to illustrate many more beloved tales such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1908), Mother Goose (1913), and Cinderella (1919).

In these early years of the 20th century, Rackham took advantage of evolving technology to create his own unique style of illustration. He no longer needed to rely on an engraver to imperfectly copy his illustrations, because they could now be photographed and reproduced mechanically. This also meant he could use watercolor — a skill he greatly improved during these years thanks to the instruction of his artist wife, Edyth Starkie — to bring life and light to his signature ink line drawings.

Rackham excelled at capturing whimsy, fantasy, and the softly grotesque, turning Kensington Gardens into a fairyland of willowy sprites, gnarled villains, and anthropomorphized trees. It is said that his illustrations paved the way for how the world and characters of Barrie’s Peter Pan were portrayed in the host of film and book adaptations that would follow, especially Disney’s version of Barrie’s 1904 play (and 1911 novel), Peter and Wendy. To this end, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is more than just a book. Together, Barrie and Rackham created a world that would have lingering impacts on childhood imaginations for a century and counting.

(A fun fact that we love: Despite a warning that this book’s “sale and exhibition in France is prohibited,” the Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens found at the Dawn Treader was inscribed to “Mademoiselle Evelyn” in French in 1907!)