THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, VOL. I.

London, England: William Heinemann Ltd, 1951. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1951. First edition. 8 x 5 3/4 inches: pp. viii, 528. Red and white dust jacket with white and black type, Maugham's characteristic beehive symbol in black on bottom edge of front panel. Red cloth with Maugham's characteristic beehive symbol embossed in blind to front board, which itself is titled in gold gilt. Black contrasting panels to spine, with gilt lettering within bearing author's last name and publisher, with title itself being simply gold gilt on the red cloth.

Volume 1 only. Some smudging, rubbing edgewear and a 1/2" chip to bottom of dustjacket spine. chipping to top of spine of dustjacket, and at top of front flap.Original 12s 6d price to bottom of front flap. Light rubbing to extremities, spinecaps and corners of boards. Still-fairly-bright gilt titling to spine.Textblock just lightly age-tanned. Faint, and not displeasing, pipe aroma. Text is unmarked. Binding tight. The first volume of Maugham's collected stories. Maugham writes: "...my stories are of very different lengths. Some are as short as sixteen hundred words, some are ten times as long, and one is just over twenty thousand. I have sojourned in many parts of the world, and while I was writing stories I could seldom stay anywhere for any length of time without getting the material for one or more tales. I have written tragic stories and I have written humorous ones. It has been an arduous task to get some kind of symmetry and at least semblance of a pattern into a collections of a large number of stories of such different lengths, placed in so many different countries and of such different character; and at the same time to make it as easy as possible for the reader to read them...With this intention, where I could I have followed a group of long stories with a group of short ones, sometimes very short, sometimes of five or six thousand words, and so that the reader should not be required to leap suddenly from China to Peru and back again, I have grouped, as well as I conveniently could, stories of which the local (or locale) was in one particular country. In that way I hoped to give the reader a chance to take his bearings in whatever distant land I chose to lead him to."