Thoth Romance, Signed (1 results)

First Edition. First Impression. Octavo (19.75cm); russet cloth, titled in gilt on spine, with titling and pictorial elements stamped in black and gilt within a double-ruled border on front cover; hunter green endpapers; [vi],[1],2-209,[1] + 24pp publisher's catalog. Inscribed by the author to his wife along the upper margin of the front endpaper, around the time of publication: "Jeanie W. Nicholson / from Shield / 15th July 1888." Touch of dust-soil and a few faint foxed spots to text edges, else internally fresh and virtually without wear; very Near Fine.The first of three "fantastic romances" by Nicholson (1850-1927), an English author and economist. An impressive lost race novel, set in the time of ancient Greece, in which "a super-scientific race in the depths of Africa abducts some Grecian maidens and takes them away in an airship" (Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, Vol.1, p.16). ".around 400 BCE, where a city in the North African desert, settled 2,000 years earlier, has benefited from the scientific advances of its ruler, Thoth the First, who remains in suspended animation; but submarines, a rigorous application of eugenics in order to develop giant and pygmy slave classes, and airships fail to save the civilization from fatal degeneration caused mainly by savage misogyny, with women kept in pens as breeders" (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 25 November, 2024). The novel went quickly into a second edition in 1889. The First is uncommon; of the 18 copies found in OCLC, only 7 are in US institutions. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, p.38.