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Plain Tales from the Hills
by Kipling, Rudyard
- Used
- Acceptable
- Hardcover
- Condition
- Acceptable
- Seller
-
Didcot, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1915. No dust jacket. Hardcover. Macmillan Pocket Kipling. Red leather boards and spine. Gilt elephant head and Hindu swastika emblem on front board. Gilt decoration, lettering and Hindu swastika emblems on spine. Boards are faded and edge-worn, with several chips. Numerous scores on boards. Front board is almost completely detached from spine. Spine is cocked. Spine ends are worn. Spine head is chipped. Leading corners are worn and split. Minor foxing at front and rear. Small red label and several cracks on front pastedown. Small label on FEP. Hinges are partly cracked. One or two marks on pages. Binding appears intact. Contents are clear. AF. Hardcover. Acceptable. Used.
Synopsis
Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling's stories tell of 'heat and bewilderment and wasted effort and broken faith'. He writes brilliantly and hauntingly about the barriers between the races, the classes and the sexes; and about innocence, not transformed into experience but implacably crushed.
Reviews
On Jul 9 2011, Feeney said:
Rudyard Kipling was 32 when his first collection of short stories, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, was published in 1888. He had first issued 28 of them in the pages of his Anglo-Indian employer, The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India (1886-7). *** The 40 short stories are of high quality and soon won for the young author a readership in India, Britain and America that propelled him to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Most of the characters displayed are British (including Irish) men, women and children. The men are often young Lieutenants (Subalterns) or enlisted men just assigned to a British or Native regiment in Queen Victoria's India. Less often the men are in business or are civil servants, married or not, assigned to running a district of several hundred thousand natives or advising the rulers of Princely States. *** Romance is a major theme. Thus the tale, "The Strength of a Likeness," begins: "Next to a requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and businesslike, and blase, and cynical." A couple of pages later: 'Open and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to any sort of woman." *** From April to October things are so hot in India's Plains that the officers and civilians send their womenfolk and children to cool Hill Stations at 6,000 feet or higher. Thus, Simla, in the Himalyan foothills, became the summer capital of British India. Kipling's newspaper sent him there to file reports. And he observed the going ons of Viceroys, Commanders in Chief, older women who delighted in wrapping subalterns around their fingers and natives interacting with their white rulers. *** PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS contain more than one excellent ghost story, premonitions of death, the trials of boredom, ill health (especially the threat of cholera and typhoid), career frustrations, barely understood relations with the Hindus and Muslims being ruled and miitary and spying adventures in Burma and Afghanistan. *** In my own reading experience and judgment, a dozen or more of the PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS deserve appearing in any anthology of the world's finest short stories. Read a few and see if you agree! -OOO-
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Details
- Bookseller
- PsychoBabel & Skoob Books
(GB)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 466082
- Title
- Plain Tales from the Hills
- Author
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Acceptable
- Publisher
- Macmillan & Co Ltd
- Place of Publication
- London
- Date Published
- 1915
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About the Seller
PsychoBabel & Skoob Books
Biblio member since 2005
Didcot, Oxfordshire
About PsychoBabel & Skoob Books
Didcot, Oxfordshire UK Bookseller specialising in professional collections. Psychology, Psychiatry, Medicine, Law, Literature, Theatre etc
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- Acceptable
- A non-traditional book condition description that generally refers to a book in readable condition, although no standard exists...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Cracked
- In reference to a hinge or a book's binding, means that the glue which holds the opposing leaves has allowed them to separate,...
- Cocked
- Refers to a state where the spine of a book is lightly "twisted" in such a way that the front and rear boards of a book do not...
- Gilt
- The decorative application of gold or gold coloring to a portion of a book on the spine, edges of the text block, or an inlay in...
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