Madman’s Island. (First edition, in dust jacket, with a signed presentation inscription by the author)

A$11,000 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

First edition · Signed · Limited edition · In dust jacket

Sydney : Cornstalk Publishing Company, 1927. Octavo, bright original red cloth (slightly pushed at head of spine), lettered in black on upper panel and spine, in the original dust jacket with illustration by Edgar A. Holloway (edges slightly rubbed), advertisements of Some interesting books to lower panel and flaps, printed advertisement for The Famous Bellbird Series of Books for Boys and Girls verso (old sellotape reinforcements to folds verso); ownership wet stamp of J. G. McCredie, Woollahra to front free-endpaper, collection bookplate of Ralph O. Warne to half-title; signed presentation inscription to the title-page To Ralph Warne, a true story. Ion Idriess ; pp. 228; frontispiece illustration and one additional illustration facing p. 60 by Holloway; top- and fore-edges with spotting, scattered foxing (largely confined to the preliminaries), a fine copy. The author s first book, a legendary rarity in Australian literature. Madman s Island is the first novel published by Ion Idriess. As the author s inscription in the present copy suggests, the core of the story is autobiographical in nature, although at the insistence of his publisher, George Robertson, certain aspects of the narrative were fictionalised and romanticised. In the novel, Jack Burnett and his friend George decide to go prospecting for gold and minerals on an uninhabited island in the Great Barrier Reef, North Queensland. After the pair have subsisted for months on a diet of speared fish and giant crabs, Geo

• Binding: Hardcover

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