Creep, Shadow!

Garden City, 1934. From the Bart Auerbach Collection. Small marginal stain on two pages, but a very good copy. 8vo . O riginal black cloth, spine lettered and decorated in "shadowy" green. First edition. Presentation copy to the dedicatee-who-should-have-been, inscribed by the author in purple ink on the verso of the half-title: "To my dear friend Arthur G. Learned who heartens me with his approval & to whom this book really should have been dedicated. May his Shadows always be swell ones. Affectionately, A Merritt." The book has no printed dedication. 'Creep, Shadow!' is the sequel to Merritt's more famous 'Burn, Witch, Burn!' and deals with witchcraft and horror detection. "Merritt's influence on the science-fiction and fantasy world is less through his storylines, which tended to be unoriginal at best, or through excesses of his style than through his genuine imaginative power in the creation of desirable alternative worlds and realities. He was extremely popular during his life... His [eight complete] novels are still regarded as classics, and Sam Moskowitz, in Chapter 12 of 'Explorers of the Infinite ' (1963), probably represents many readers in his view that Merritt was the supreme fantasy genius of his day.. . " ('The Science-Fiction Encyclopedia', p. 394). With the recipient's ownership inscription in pencil on front endpaper; bookplate of a later owner, the industrial chemist and book collector Alvin Higgins Lybeck. Currey, p. 364; Bleiler (1978), p. 138. (BA).