Violet Books

      

"Walda Nagasta, the Child of Kings." Sigurd Schou provided this impressive full color frontispiece, plus four black & white plates nearly as striking, for Rider's lost race novel Queen Sheba's Ring (New York: Doubleday Page, 1910), one of his more difficult fantasies to find. These lovely illustrations are not to be found in the British first.

      

The Ancient Allan (New York: Longmans Green, 1920) is the direct sequel to The Ivory Child. Allan and Lady Ragnall get stoned on a smokable herb and begin experience earlier incarnations in Babylon and Egypt. The full color tissued frontispiece by Enos B. Comstock is lacking in the London edition.

   

"Slowly she lifted her languid arm and threw it about my neck." Arthur C. Michael has captured the sensuality of Allan's remarkable relationship with Mameena, "the Zulu Helen," which must have seemed fairly shocking in its day. The novel for which this is the tissued frontis is Child of Storm (London: Cassell, 1913), second in the Zulu cycle, following Marie & concluding with Finished. Arthur also contributes two sepia plates to this edition.

      

"Daughter, lead these strangers to me; I would speak with them." This spectacular tissued color frontispiece from When the World Shook (New York: 1919) is by Enos B. Comstock, lacking in the British edition, though both the US and UK editions include four star-charts that show the arrangement of heavens 250,000 years ago when Oro the Atlantean went into suspended animation, compared to what he charted upon awakening in the Victorian world. This is an archly fantastic tale of spirit travel, reincarnation, powers, teleportation, subterranean city, elixir of life -- and having considerable mythic depth as well.