PHANTASTES. A Faerie Romace For Men And Women. A New Edition, with Thirty-Three New Illustrations by Arthur Hughes; Edited by Greville MacDonald.
London: Arthur C. Fifield, 44 Fleet Street, E.C., 1905. New Edition. Octavo, original blue cloth lettered and bordered in gold on front panel, spine panel lettered in gold. 320 pp. Frontispiece and thirty-two additional full page black & white plates by Arthur Hughes. Heraldic bookplate of Owen Hugh Smith on inner front cover, with his penciled signature on the front free flyleaf, dated 1911. Light rubbing and small scuffs to the cloth, spine panel lightly tanned; a very good sound copy. This edition, Edited and with an Introduction by his son Greville MacDonald, was published "to rescue the work from an edition illustrated without the author's sanction, and so unsuitable that all lovers of the book must have experienced some real grief in turning it's pages (he refers to the 1895 Chatto edition illustrated by John Bell), as well as "to pay tribute to my father by way of personal gratitude for this, his first prose work, which was published nearly fifty years ago". The editor is please to have secured his father's old friend Arthur Hughes to properly illustrate the book; so, perhaps, while this is not the first illustrated edition of this title, it is the first *authorized* illustrated edition. Greville notes that he has "secured the whole of that edition (the Chatto / Bell edition) and turned it into pulp"; if that is so, there most have been a great many printed as that edition is quite common today - and this one is not. Item #313008
¶ The author's first novel, a vastly influential and seminal nineteenth century work. Allegorical, fantastic, supernatural - one of the first 'modern' fantasy novels. Macdonald was a friend of Charles Dodgson, 'Phantastes' is not only considered to be an influential work upon 'Alice in Wonderland', but also upon later writers - C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin and others. A brilliant work.
Price: $300.00