ULSTER FOLKLORE

London, England: Elliot Stock, 1913. First Edition. Hardcover. Good. Octavo, 8.75 in. x 5.75 in., pp. xiii, [3], 121. Illustrated with tissue-guarded frontispiece, eleven additional plates, and two drawings. Dark red-brown cloth boards with gilt title to front and spine. Rubbing to extremities. Bottom corners bumped. Slight spine lean. Previous owner's bookplate ("J. Johnston Abraham") to front pastedown. Bookshop label ("The Time Book Club, London") and ink stamp, dated 1914, to rear pastedown. Spine cracked, but holding. Age-toning to pages. NOTE: This is NOT a traditional collection of tales, but rather an approachable, and rather peculiar, tour of Northern Ireland that introduces the important sites, characters, and folk-stories relevant to the regional folklore.

From the book's 1913 review published in the journal "Nature": "This dainty volume is made up of a collection of papers communicated to various societies and journals. As much of the information was collected at first hand, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature of Irish folklore. The expressed purpose kept in view was to find, and show, some correspondence between the description of Irish fairies and that of actual pigmies found, dead and alive, in various parts of the world, and that purpose gives unity to the work, which is more of a monograph than a folklore drag-net.The correspondence made out is certainly very striking. There are also rare pigmies to be met with in Ireland as well as elsewhere. But of the actual existence of pigmy communities in Ireland no evidence is given. The fairies there, as elsewhere, haunt 'raths and souterrains.' They occupy Neolithic megalithic structures. The photographs, plans, and descriptions of some fairy souterrains give the work special value. One recognises the invariably oriented creepway."

The bookplate belongs to James Johnstone Abraham (1876 - 1963), an Irish surgeon and writer whose later writings included history, biography, autobiography, and many newspaper articles on medical achievements, later republished under the pseudonym ‘James Harpole'. (from Dictionary of Irish Biography).