Violet Books

R. M. Ballantyne's The Giant of the North, Pokings Round the Pole, is shown here in what is probably the Canadian first edition (Toronto: Musson, 1881). Its pictorial binding is one of the physically most beautiful books to come my way in some while, with excellent illustration plates within too. This quest for the North Pole is led by a seven foot Eskimo giant, and is probably Ballantyne's only tale of high adventure that can be regarded as fantastic. The author in his youth lived in Canada and worked for the Hudson Bay Company.

Charles W. Hall's Adrift in the Ice Fields (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1877) is a surprisingly poetic work of fantastic adventure. During a quest for the North Pole, there are all kinds of dime-novel shenanigans, eskimo magic, talisman, and so on. The edition is uncertain, but there's a penciled gift inscription on the front flyleaf dated December 25, 1898, and the book probably was issued for the Christmas market that year, as it has an extraordinarily fine binding, rather than the usual fragile dime novel boards. Illustrated by Merrill.

Francis Rolt-Wheeler's In the Time of Attilla (Boston: Lothrop Lee and Shepard, 1928) sports a handsome boards depicting an attacking horseman. Additionally the story's magic sword is shown on the spine and four other plates by the same artist, Frank T. Merrill, are within, two of them depicting fantastic sequences with the magic sword and encounters with angelic spirits.

The Magic-Makers of Morocco (New York: Doran, 1924) is also by Francis Rolt-Wheeler. The elegant pictorial binding shows the tale's djinn. The same illustration is repeated as a full color frontis plate, plus there are three black and white plates (one of these shows a fantasy sequence as well). The book is from the "Round the World with the Young Journalists" series.

Max Pemberton's The Impregnable City: A Romance (London: Cassell, 1895, seen here in an 1898 edition) is a tale of an impregnable city found in Pacific. Futuristic inventions assist in the story's fantastic warfare. Besides the pictorial binding there are five excellent illustration plates by Gordon Browne. Pemberton was later knighted and became Sir Max.

The quest for the North Pole inspired a vast number of adventure fantasies. Thomas Frost, writing as "By the Author of The Realm of the Ice King," but on the binding of this 1883 Dutton edition as "Major Ursa," first published The North Pole, and How Charlie Wilson Discovered It in London in 1876. The highly pictorial embossed binding refers to "The Boys' Own Favorite Series" which consisted of reissues "selected by competent judges" (as the catalog in the back boasts). The edition includes several lovely engravings by W. H. Overend. The story is high adventure with fantastic elements.

Who is more identified with Fantastic Adventure than Jules Verne? And which of his thrilling books is more famous than 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (first published in English in 1873), whether you were first exposed through this famous Windermere Series edition (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1922) or through Kirk singing "A Whale of a Tale" in the Walt Disney film. The binding illustration and the interior color plates are by Milo Winter.

May Johnston's wildly mystical The Exile (Boston: Little Brown, 1927) is seen here in its pictorial dustwrapper. The tale is set after a far future Great War, under a totalitarian government, with a theme of reincarnation as the exile to the mysterious prison island comes slowly to realize he was in this place three hundred years before. The majority of Johnston's stories have historical rather than future settings, lots of bloody mayhem of a swashbuckling sort, yet always a mystic quality too.

Ainslie's Ju-Ju: A Hinterland Romance by Harold Bindloss (London: Chatto and Windus, New Edition 1903) chronicles a Brit's adventures in Africa, with influences of H. Rider Haggard. An aboriginal magic object adds an element of the supernatural to the jungle action-adventure.

Nathan Gallizier was regularly marketed in finely illustrated, elegantly bound editions, as with The Red Confessor: The Adventures of Guido, Lord of Fiorano, and of his Friend and Patron, Benvenuto Cellini (Boston: Page, 1926). Besides the artist and duelist Cellini, this Historical Romance features also Machelangelo and Pope Paul III. An absolutely beautiful book with full color frontispiece and dustwrapper illustration by the great Eric Pape, plus decorations by P. Verburg.

Maurus Jokai's Midst the Wild Carpathians, seen here in its US 1st edition (Boston: Page, 1898) has a color pictorial binding and tissued frontis by J. W. Kennedy. This is a highly colored romance of Dracula's homeland in the 17th Century when Transylvania was a semi-independent Moslem state. It reads, as R. Nisbet Bain says in his introduction, "like a chapter from the Arabian Nights." The femme fatale Azrael is a "demoniacal Turkish odalisk, blasting all who fall within the influence of her irresistible glamour, a Circe as sinuously beautiful and as utterly soulless as her own pet panther," dwelling in her Devil's Garden of "ice-carved paths, snow bridges, boiling streams, fathomless lakes, and rushing avalanches."

Mabel L. Tyrell's Witch's Maiden: A Historical Romance (New York: Harper, 1930) has a full color frontis, dustwrapper illustration, decorative ep, and interior black and white illustrations by Marie Lawson. A well-written historical adventure, the protagonist is a maiden tried for witchcraft and who became the servant of a witch in the troubled days of Oliver Cromwell.