The Prince's Darling [original U.K. title: The Rocklitz]

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1930. American Edition Second Printing. Hardcover. [beautiful clean copy with no discernible wear; jacket has small tears and minor chipping/paper loss at spine ends, a couple of short closed tears and associated creasing along bottom edge of front panel]. A "stirring tale, filled with color and movement, the setting being the autocratic life of the great nobles in the most wealthy and dissipated of the German states, Saxony, at the close of the seventeenth century. The story centers around the delicately beautiful Madelon de Neitschütz, who is forced by her unscrupulous father and dissipated brothers to choose wealth and power instead of love." The second of some two dozen novels produced under this pseudonym by this prolific author, whose works in the field of gothic horror/crime fiction (usually written as "Joseph Shearing" or "Marjorie Bowen") are highly collectable. Ferdinand Horvath, who illustrated the dust jacket, was a Hungarian-born illustrator who became a highly-regarded sketch artist at the Walt Disney studios in the 1930s; although not credited, he was known to have contributed to the character designs for SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. .