MASEFIELD, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Midnight Folk [together with] The Box of Delights. First editions of the author's influential fantasy "Kay Harker novels". "Long before Harry Potter, The Box of Delights remade children's fantasy" (Torday). "You'd never have J. K. Rowling without John Masefield" (The Telegraph). A pair of first editions is comparatively scarce, and copies in jackets are rare.There were 15,000 copies of The Midnight Folk in the first edition. Inexplicably the print-run for The Box of Delights was only 7,500 copies (in contrast, Masefield's previous novel had a print-run of 10,000 copies, and there were 15,000 copies of the following novel). The Box of Delights is, therefore, a comparatively scarce book.The Kay Harker novels "are such magical books and are so far above the average books for children that a reader may wonder why no adult cult has developed about them" (Sternlicht, p. 121). "In the Kay Harker books children's literature entered a modern age of fantasy and ingenious invention" (Errington, p. 19).Many authors, including Angela Carter, C. S. Lewis, Alan Garner, and Neil Gaiman have noted the influence of Masefield's children's books on their writing. C. S. Lewis first read The Box of Delights in 1959 and wrote to a friend that "it is... a unique work and will often be re-read... The beauties, all the 'delights' that keep on emerging from the box - are so exquisite, and quite unlike anything I have seen elsewhere" (Lewis, p. 1026).

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.