STEVENSON, Robert Louis and Fanny Van de Grift.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

New Arabian Nights [and] More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter. First edition in book form of New Arabian Nights together with a first edition of its sequel, finely bound. The fantastical stories were a departure from those expected by Stevenson's readers. In time, they became recognized as some of his finest work: Arthur Conan Doyle described The Pavilion on the Links as "the high-water mark of his genius" (Conan Doyle, p. 647).The stories in New Arabian Nights initially appeared between 1877 and 1880 in the Cornhill Magazine, the London Magazine, and Temple Bar. Several of those in The Dynamiter were the work of Fanny Stevenson. She originally composed them to entertain her husband during a period of illness in which he could not read and remained involved throughout the publication process.When The Dynamiter was published, the reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette declared that "we can only compare the effects of the New Arabian Nights to those of haschisch on the properly adapted constitution. When once we have resigned ourselves to the spell of Mr. Stevenson we are rapt into a delirious country of dreams and visions, where the most impossible things may happen, and where all that happened is beheld with astonishing brilliance and distinctness" (p. 5).

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