The Last Devil. This item is unavailable.The Last Devil

TOKSVIG, Signe. The Last Devil. New York: The John Day Company. 1927. 8vo. First American edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in red to the spine and front board, in the dust jacket, a striking design which sadly goes uncredited. A fine copy. The cloth with a couple of minor marks, but clean, bright and sharp, the binding tight and square. The topstain very vivid, the contents fine with mild marks to endpapers, one mark, perhaps tape ghosting, to rear endpaper, but quite trivial. The dust jacket unclipped with stamped price of $2.00 net over printed price of $2.50 net to front panel. All four corners neatly cut, with a couple of minor closed tears and tiny nicks, but made discreet almost entirely by the exceptional design. A marvellous example. The scarce first edition of this, the first of four novels by the Danish author, who despite spending her youth in her native Denmark, wrote exclusively in English, amid her many travels across the world, and more systematically to and fro the Atlantic. This is the first American edition; though there is no established precedence between US and British editions, the author was living in Ireland at the time of publication—we have both editions available. The novel follows an innocent yet adventurous young woman, Christine Tancrede, and her exploits alongside romantic companions in that unknowable region of the Basque Country. Devil-worship, animal torture, snake bites, and ancient curses ensue. Toksvig was motivated by folklore and weird fiction— she wrote one piece for Weird Tales in 1928, entitled ‘The Devil’s Martyr’, and edited an edition of the works of the fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen, about whom she also wrote a biography. While working as an editor at The New Statesman, she met and married one of the magazine’s founders, Francis Hackett. The pair underwent a period of mostly European vagabondage, and it might have been on this half-a-decade-long journey that Toksvig learnt of the Basque witch trials and associated devil worship in the early seventeenth century, of which the crux of the novel is clearly based. By this time, the couple were important and well-connected literary figures both sides of the Atlantic, having settled in Ireland for a decade or so from 1926. They later moved to Ireland, having grown tired of the cultural and political changes at play. Eve’s Doctor, her second novel, was banned; the Dictionary of Irish Biography called it ‘a harrowing critique of the influence of Catholic teaching on Irish obstetric and gynaecological practice, and of Irish indulgence of clientism and mediocrity’. Scarce in the dust jacket and in such sharp condition, fittingly priced.…