Not at Night

London: Selwyn & Blount (1928) Ltd.. Very Good in Very Good- dj. 1929 (c.1925). 11th printing. Hardcover. [modest wear to extremities, pages tanned with age, but generally a good sound copy of a cheaply-manufactured book; former owner's initials plus date & place of purchase written along edge of rear pastedown (concealed by rear jacket flap); the jacket is a bit soiled on the rear panel, with a handful of tiny nicks and edge-tears, minor paper loss at a couple of corners, and a vertical crease along the left edge of the front panel]. ("Not at Night" series, No. 1) Series A very presentable copy of the first entry in the long-running "Not at Night" horror-fiction anthology series. The series was a publishing hit, as evidenced not only by the fact that this title had gone through eleven printings by November 1929 (the daet of this printing, four years after the first edition), but also that it had already spawned four more entries in the series, all blurbed on the rear panel of what is, perforce, a later-issue dust jacket (with the same front-panel art as the first edition, but with a "No. 1" slug added to the spine, and the blurbs for the first five volumes on the rear panel). The original series eventually numbered eleven volumes, and was capped off by the publication of an additional "Omnibus" volume, published in 1937. (A later series of "Not at Night" paperbacks, issued in the early 1960s, presented selections from the original volumes.) The series derived most of its content from the American pulp magazine Weird Tales (100 out of the total of 170 stories, according to one source, including all the stories in this first number), and provided authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard with their first British (and first hardcover) publication. (Neither author, however, was included in this initial collection.) Contents: "Monsters of the Pit" (Paul S. Powers); "Four Wooden Stakes" (Victor Roman); "The Third Thumb-print" (Mortimer Levitan); "Lips of the Dead" (W.J. Stamper); "The Devil Bed" (Gerald Dean); "Death-Waters" (Frank Belknap Long Jr.); "Black Curtains" (G. Frederick Montefiore); "The Plant-Thing" (R.G. Macready); "His Family" (C. Franklin Miller); "A Hand from the Deep" (Romeo Poole); "The Tortoise-Shell Cat" (Greye La Spina); "The Case of the Russian Stevedore" (Henry W. Whitehill); "The Leopard's Trail" (W. Chiswell Collins); "The Last Trip" (Archie Binns); "The Purple Cincture" (H. Thompson Rich). .