Genius Loci And Other Tales

Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. Very Good in Very Good- dust jacket. 1948. 1st Edition Thus; 1st Edition. Hardcover. Cover Art; This edition limited to 3000 (3047 according to the Arkham House Companion) copies. This book is in Very Good condition and has a Very Good- dust jacket. The book and its contents are in generally clean, bright condition. There is some lightish bumping and rubbing to the spine ends and corners of the book covers. The text pages are clean and bright. There is a previous owner's bookplate on the front pastedown page, and an ink stamped name and address of a publisher (Wehmen Bros. ) at the bottom edge of the title page. The dust jacket is in generally clean condition, but has some light rubbing to the spine ends and corners, and the reverse of the front spine joint has tape residue (but no tape now) where a previous owner had strengthened the joint. (there are no tears) . The book includes the short fiction : Genius Loci, The Willow Landscape, The Ninth Skeleton, The Phantoms of the Fire, The Eternal World, Vulthoom, A Star-Change, The Primal City, The Disinterment of Venus, The Colossus of Ylourgne, The Satyr, The Garden of Adompha, The Charnel God, The Black Abbot of Puthuum, and, The Weaver in the Vault. "At the beginning of the Depression in 1929, with his aged parents' health weakening, Smith resumed fiction writing and turned out more than a hundred short stories between 1929 and 1934, nearly all of which can be classed as weird horror or science fiction. Like Lovecraft, he drew upon the nightmares that had plagued him during youthful spells of sickness. Brian Stableford has written that the stories written during this brief phase of hectic productivity "constitute one of the most remarkable oeuvres in imaginative literature". He published at his own expense a volume containing six of his best stories, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, in an edition of 1000 copies printed by the Auburn Journal. The theme of much of his work is egotism and its supernatural punishment; his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality. " (from Wikipedia) .