Best Ghost Stories

Faber and Faber, Published 1946. Hardcover, 360 pp.; 19 cm; second impression (first published 1945); dust jacket design by Margaret Wolpe. In Good condition with an Acceptable dust jacket. Black cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine; mild shelf and edge wear with some scuffing. Text block sits slightly proud of the boards at the lower edge; crack to binding between pp. 358-359, binding otherwise sound. Previous owner's name in ink on front free endpaper. Whitcombe & Tombs bookseller's ticket on front pastedown, with offset to the facing free endpaper. Half-title leaf sits slightly above the text block, with nicks and small chips along the top edge. Pages mildly toned, otherwise unmarked, with occasional small nicks and tears to edges. Yellow and black illustrated dust jacket price-clipped with a large diagonal cut to the front flap; 1 x 3/4-inch chip to the spine panel and a 1/2-inch chip at the foot of the front panel near the spine; chipping at the head and foot of the front flap fold, further small nicks and tearing; moderate toning, scuffing and soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Eighteen ghost and supernatural stories spanning roughly a century, from Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins to Elizabeth Bowen and John Collier, selected by the poet Anne Ridler (1912-2001), a Faber editor who compiled A Little Book of Modern Verse with T.S. Eliot. In her prefatory note Ridler describes her aim as a collection readable as a whole rather than a comprehensive survey: she avoided the most often reprinted pieces and set stories of subtlety and strangeness beside stories of terror, with one or two in a lighter, burlesque vein. Highlights include M.R. James's "Lost Hearts," Henry James's "The Friends of the Friends," Edith Wharton's "The Triumph of Night," Kipling's "The House Surgeon" and Saki's "The Open Window." Printed to the authorized economy standards of the period. The jacket, with the title built from crumbling Gothic masonry and a skeletal hand reaching from beneath a tomb slab, is by Margaret Wolpe (d. 2006), sculptor, illustrator and wife of the Faber typographer and jacket designer Berthold Wolpe; her work is the subject of the 2023 monograph Margaret Wolpe: The Curious Maker. Contents: Prefatory Note; Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand (J. Sheridan Le Fanu); The Dream Woman (Wilkie Collins); The Friends of the Friends (Henry James); Who Knows? (Guy de Maupassant); The Canterville Ghost (Oscar Wilde); The Triumph of Night (Edith Wharton); Lost Hearts (M.R. James); The House Surgeon (Rudyard Kipling); The Inexperienced Ghost (H.G. Wells); The Face (E.F. Benson); With Intent to Steal (Algernon Blackwood); The Open Window (Saki); Crewe (Walter de la Mare); The Tool (W.F. Harvey); Blind Man's Hood (Carter Dickson); Our Feathered Friends (Philip MacDonald); The Apple Tree (Elizabeth Bowen); Thus I Refute Beelzy (John Collier).…