Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. by Poe, Edgar Allan - [1935]

4to. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1935. 4to, 318 pp. With 12 color illustrations and text illustrations in black and white. Specially bound in a dark blue morocco, trimmed with a gilt floral border, raised bands with compartments stamped in gilt, inner gilt dentelles, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. Faint fading to the backstrip and the top inch of the upper board, faint streak on the lower board, but still a handsome binding and a fine copy within. § Surely the best illustrated edition of Poe’s masterpiece ever published. Unusually dark subject matter for Rackham, he confessed to his model Marita Ross “that his pictures were now so horrible that he was beginning to frighten himself!” Though a far cry from his more familiar, whimsical works the illustrations are, as Hudson notes, “a revelation of the concealed power hinted at in Comus.” Hudson, Arthur Rackham, p. 140. Latimore & Haskell p.72.