Violet Books

Jules Verne's Victorian first editions are much-sought for their bookmaking excellence. Floating City and the Blockade Runners (New York: Scribner Armstrong, 1874) has bevelled boards, cloth ornately embossed with engraved illustration, and twenty-one supreme illustration plates. Of the two long tales, the first is a fantastic voyage set on a gigantic ship as inspired by Verne's journey to America, while the latter a romance of the Civil War.

Henry Frith's The Captains of Cadets (London: Griffith Farran Browne, 1897) has a binding and interior illustration plates by Davidson Knowles. Mainly a boys' sea adventure, the tale is spiced with such fantasy sequences as an encounter in Africa with amazon sailors and a battle with warlike blue monkeys.

The Lady of Lawford and Other Christmas Stories (Troy, Neew York: H. B. Nims, 1874) is a splendid example of Victorian bookbinding -- bevelled boards with embossed engraving, interior engravings, gold-edged sheets . . . anonymously published, but the author was Nathan Warren. Of the four tales, the title story is an historical legend, and the second tale is justly titled "Lawford Hall; or, The Story of a Haunted House." The book closes with "Hidden Treasure; or, The Good St Nicholas," a dickensian fairy novella.

Madeleine Dahlgren was an anti-suffrage activist and a leader among conservative Catholic women. I'll forgive her, however, because of the excellence of her posthumous collection The Woodley Lane Ghost and Other Stories (Philadelphia: Drexel Biddle, 1898). The greatest of the several supernatural inclusions is "The Judge's Dream" in which the sinister goddess Mother Kali harrasses a judge with this cruel assurance: If he either finds an innocent murderer guilty, or a guilty murderer innocent, She will win his head for Her necklace of skulls.

Lucy Foster Madison's A Maid of the First Century (Philadelphia: Penn, 1900) has a fine art nouveau binding featuring the titular Druid maiden framed by Celtic knots. The tale regards the conflict between Celtic and Roman, Druidic and Christian culture. There are also several interior plates by Ida Waugh.

Wild Adventures 'Round the Pole; or, The Cruise of the Snowbird Crew in the Arrandoon (NY: Armstrong, 1883) was followed by a prequel, Cruise of the Snow-bird (1891). Scottish author Gordon Stables often blended the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson with the content of Jules Verne, as in this adventure of a fantastic journey by ship and balloon. There's a wild array of events: encounters with murderous northern tribes, several battles with bears (twice with intelligent talking bears), a sea serpent, hollow earth journey into a crater by balloon, an intercalated poem about a ghost-rooster.... The present specimen is beat all to hell but still rather cool.

Valdar the Oft-born: A Saga of Seven Ages (London: Pearson, 1895) by George Griffith is a great heroic fantasy classic with super-duper illustrations by Harold Piffard. Valdar, a son of Odin, is a near-immortal who wars and adventures through sundry heroic ages, periodically going into a deathlike slumber to awake in new eras, meeting his often-reincarnated lover along the way.

George Griffith's Olga Romanoff; or, The Siren of the Skies (Ln: Simpkin, 1897; 1st was Tower, 1894) includes sixteen stunning illustrations by Fred T. Jane. A tale of future war, fantastic flight and catastrophe featuring an Amazonian rebel leader. Themes include paranormal abilities; drug-induced zombyism; Antarctic cavern retreat. It's a sequel to (and superior to) Angel of the Revolution regarded by antiquarian science fiction buffs as his best novel.

Mrs L. T. Meade's girls' novels were numerous and many of them are still quite common, but her weird mysteries and medical detective yarns are hard to find. Stories from the Diary of a Doctor: Second Series (London: Sands, 1894; seen here in a 1910 reissue) was co-written with Doctor Clifford Halifax (who also collaborated with Dorothy Sayers). These are medical mysteries spiced with with sufficient speculative science to qualify as "fantastic detection."

Mrs. Meade's other main collaborator for mystery tales was Robert Eustace, with whom she composed, among others, The Gold Star Line (New York: New Amsterdam, 1889), with illustration plates by Adolf Thiede. These are shipboard detective tales with a many macabre touches, as in "The Sacred Chank" with a yellow peril villain and a key clue stemming from an opium-wreathed and addicted parrot.

The Charlatan (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895) by Robert Buchannan and Henry Murray is a satiric occult fantasy or comic gothic of sonombulance, hyptotism, and theosophic nutters. Buchannan wrote the novel as a newspaper serial based upon a play by Murray, performed in the Haymarket Theater while the serial was still running. Later the same year, when book was for sale, the play was on the road to hinterland venues.

G. A. Henty was a prolific author of boys' adventure tales set in sundry historical epics, famous land and sea battles, or uncharted regions of the planet. His archeological fantasy The Treasure of the Incas, A Story of Adventure in Peru (Scribners, 1902) is seen here in its rare first edition. The binding design, tissued frontis and seven other illustrations are by Wal Paget.