Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants

New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. Very Good+ in Fair dj. (c.1947). First Edition. Hardcover. [minimal wear to book, previous owner's name plus date & place & explanation of purchase in ink at top of front endpaper (six lines of writing), check marks (in both ink and pencil) next to all title in table of contents; the jacket is kind of a mess, although the worst of it is confined to the spine, in which several missing strips have been filled in by amateurish internal tape-repair (which has also been applied all across the top and bottom edges of the jacket); the front panel is substantially complete, with just some wear at the corners]. (pen and ink drawings) Uncommon anthology of undead-themed fiction, containing twenty short stories, two long stories, and one novelette, a substantial number of which had first appeared in the pages of the pulp magazine "Weird Tales." A highlight of the volume is that each story is accompanied by a suitably creepy full-page illustration by Ms. Blaisdell (1904-1994), a noted book illustrator, teacher, and author. Contents: "Carmilla" (.J. Sheridan LeFanu); "Brother Lucifer" (Chandler W. Whipple); "The Metronome" (August W. Derleth); "Uncanonized" (Seabury Quinn); "The Feast in the Abbey" (Robert Bloch); "Clay-Shuttered Doors" (Helen R. Hull); "Amour Dure" (Vernon Lee); "School for the Unspeakables" (Manly Wade Wellman); "The Adventure of the German Student" (Washington Irving); "The Tomb" (H.P. Lovecraft); "Second Night Out" (Frank Belknap Long); "Clarimonde" (Theophile Gautier); "The Seed from the Sepulcher" (Clark Ashton Smith); "For the Blood is the Life" (F. Marion Crawford); "The Story of Ming-Y" (Lafcadio Hearn); "The Quick and the Dead" (Vincent Starrett); "Satan's Circus" (Eleanor Smith); "Miss Mary Pask" (Edith Wharton); "Septima" (Marcel Schwob); "Count Magnus" (M.R. James); "'And He Shall Sing...." (H.R. Wakefield); "Doom of the House of Duryea" (Earl Peirce); "The Room in the Tower" (E.F. Benson). .