Tales of Mystery and Imagination

A SCARCE UK EDITION PRINTED IN LONDON
CONTAINING POE'S TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
INCLUDES RARE ARTWORK NOT FOUND IN MOST ANY OTHER ISSUE
CONDITION IS GORGEOUS

The tales of Mystery and imagination are without question some of the best ever compiled for a Poe book. This edition is a hard-to-find copy and has been exceptionally well preserved. Tales of Mystery & Imagination (often rendered as Tales of Mystery and Imagination) is a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist, and poet Edgar Allan Poe and was the first complete collection of his works specifically restricting itself to his suspenseful and related tales.

In 1839, during Poe's lifetime, a collection of his strange tales was published, but it did not include some highly regarded tales which were written later, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "A Descent into the Maelström". The first posthumous collection of Poe's works was compiled in 1850 and included a memoir from Rufus Wilmot Griswold, but this did not confine itself to his tales of suspense and related tales. Several collections of Poe's prose and poetry followed. The precursor to Tales of Mystery and Imagination was a collection of Poe's works entitled Tales of Mystery, Imagination, and Humor. The title "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" was first used by "The World's Classics", London, and printed by Grant Richard, 48 Leicester Sq. in 1902. The title of this collection was then adopted by Padraic Colum in 1908 in view of the growing reputation of Poe's taste for suspense, especially in the context of what his French critic M. Brunetiere called events "on the margin" of life.[2] The original collection, in keeping with its title, deliberately excluded Poe's poems, comedies, and essays. In his introduction to the 1908 edition, Colum cites a reason for his adoption of this selection: his opinion that "tales" as opposed to "short stories" were so short that they tended to lack descriptions of socially important experiences. Colum hence also left out two works as too lengthy, these being The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall".

Although this book lacks a print date, historical records show this publisher released this edition in 1912 in London. I have included the original advertisement for it, as seen in photo #10 from the newspaper The Publishers Circle, which can be found in the Google Books Literary Archives. The advertisement was published on March 2nd, 1912.