About this Item
First edition. 312 pages + 4 of ads and a 31-page catalogue dated 8th May 1915. The book is reasonably firmly bound in the publisher's blue cloth, lettered in lighter blue, the cloth is marked and rubbed, the spine is sunned and cocked, the rear hinge is tender, the extremities are bumped and there are minor tears to the cloth. The text block is age browned, slightly marked and foxed, with numerous dog-eared page corners and creasing to some page edges. Formerly the property of notable author and weird fiction and horror anthologist, Peter Haining, with his bookplate to the front pastedown. Haining's bookplate is laid on the centre of another much older decorative bookplate from 1916, which in turn looks to have been pasted over another even older, this combined with the condition of the book and a single faint reference stamp to the rear pastedown would tend to indicate that it was originally a circulating library copy. Loosely inserted is a copy letter from one of Ransome's literary-executors, Rupert Hart-Davis, sent to Ernest Hecht of the Souvenir Press, dated 1981 and regarding a possible reprint of 'The Elixir of Life', with a note to the top that a copy should be sent to Haining. This, presumably the copy of the book which was to be the basis of the new edition, a project which seems never to have come to fruition as there are no records of a 1980s reprint. A historical Gothic horror novel, with philosophical digressions, regarding a strange, evil seeming yet compelling man, who lures a young man, adrift in the world, to his isolated house, and then reveals to him the dark secret of immortality. It was Ransome's first published novel, which he appropriately enough dedicated to his mother. According to Hammond, one of 1200 copies bound by the publisher, out of a print run of 1500, the remaining 300 "wasted". This, not an especially well-preserved example, though with some interesting provenance by way of compensation.
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