Island Nights Entertainments Consisting of the Beach of Falesa the Bottle Imp the Isle of Voices.

£200 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

“For the last four years of his life Stevenson made his home on his plantation of Vailima, beautifully situated 600 feet above sea-level, on the mountainside among thick woods, with fine views of the Pacific.” Here, he continued to write copiously, including the stories in this little volume. ‘The Beach of Falesá’, [is] regarded as one of his finest short stories. He described it as ‘the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life’ (ibid., 7.161). It was collected […] with two other tales, ‘The Bottle Imp’, a German folk story given a Hawaiian setting (which was published in translation in a Samoan missionary magazine), and ‘The Isle of Voices’, a Polynesian fable. The first full, unbowdlerized version of ‘Falesá’ did not appear until 1984.” (ODNB). A good copy, head and tail caps rubbed and frayed, joints and corners rubbed.

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