THE DEATH CAP : A DETECTIVE STORY; Introduced by Peter Main; Annotated by Forbes Gibb

Octavo, 9.5 in. x 6.25 in., pp. 206. Limited edition #149/300. Black cloth boards with gilt title to spine. Unmarked interior. Protected in mylar. First published in 1946 by John Westhouse (Publishers). This is the first re-publication. Ruthven Campbell Todd (1914-1978) was a Scottish scholar, poet and author, in US from 1947-1958, and then Majorca; his most important nonfiction work, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946), effectively argued the imaginative power - when conjoined - of the two subtitled categories, instancing at length the work of William Blake (1748-1827) and John Martin; as R T Campbell, he wrote several detective novels, beginning with Unholy Dying (1945) [none contain fantastic elements, and are not listed below]; and as Todd, two metaphysical tales, both labouring under the 1930s misconception that Franz Kafka wrote allegories. The quest plot of Over the Mountain (1939), which takes its protagonist into a kind of Lost World, is heavily consanguinous with a search for political self-understanding; the protagonist of the surrealist The Lost Traveller (1943), stranded (perhaps posthumously) in a strange Dystopia, finds himself ordered to quest for a brace of auks, becoming - at the moment of his (final?) death - one himself. In his introduction to the 1968 reprinting of the latter, Todd recognized influences from Wyndham Lewis to Rex Warner. The Space Cats sequence for children, beginning with Space Cat (1952), features a runaway Cat who stows away on a Spaceship. (from Encyclopedia of Science Fiction).…