DUNSANY, Lord.

£2,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Time and the Gods. Signed limited edition, number 81 of 250 copies signed by Dunsany on the preface and by Sime on each plate. Dunsany was "unquestionably one of the most important writers of heroic fantasy of the century" (Bleiler). First published in 1906, Time and the Gods established him as "the founding father of fantasy tales" (Magill, p. 161).The artist Sydney Sime, "a master of the macabre and the sinister finished with a beautiful cold pen line" (Houfe, p. 301), illustrated Dunsany's first book The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and nine others. Sime stayed with Dunsany at his Irish castle while illustrating each of the books, proving an entertaining and popular guest.Time and the Gods continues the series of "sometimes semiallegorical, sometimes frankly mythopoetic" tales involving the deities first established in The Gods of Pegāna. The title is derived from a line in Swinburne's poem "Hymn to Proserpine": "Time and the Gods are at strife".

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