MANNING-SANDERS, Ruth. Hucca's Moor. London: Faber and Gwyer. 1929. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine and front board, in the intensely evocative wraparound dust jacket designed by William Nicholson. A somewhat disreputable copy, the jacket having been dished up by insects like the hanging carcass of our idiot protagonist herein, with quite consistent holes along the front panel top- and fore-edge and, less so, to spine and rear panels. Unclipped (7/6 net), the explicit design certainly at least somewhat rolling with the damage. The book itself externally clean and bright, just a trifle marked, the binding tight and square, the contents clean and fine barring a few faint scattered spots, no inscriptions or stamps.
A very early novel by the poet and folklorist, Ruth Manning-Sanders, published about forty years before her major body of work appeared—that being her industrious and remarkable series of ‘A Book of…’, retelling mythological folklore across the world, from witches and wizards to dragons and ghosts. Though these were written for children, her retellings often broke convention and many fizzed with darker tones, to the appreciation of child readers. This novel very much for adults: ‘the tragedy of Zephan Wall, a half-idiot pedlar is that his ludicrous ambitions only accentuate his poverty of mind and body. His patient wife, Deborah, is housekeeper to a gigantic bed-ridden miner, by name Bendigo Scoffern; and his step-daughter, Mabel Best, is an imbecile of twenty-six, who plays with toys and has screaming fits. She is convicted of murder, of which she was innocent, and removed to an asylum.’ [The Spectator]. The protagonist finds escape only by way of what is illustrated on the jacket, a suicide, masterfully rendered in wraparound by Nicholson. Scarce.
MANNING-SANDERS, Ruth. Hucca's Moor. London: Faber and Gwyer. 1929. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine and front board, in the intensely evocative wraparound dust jacket designed by William Nicholson. A somewhat disreputable copy, the jacket having been dished up by insects like the hanging carcass of our idiot protagonist herein, with quite consistent holes along the front panel top- and fore-edge and, less so, to spine and rear panels. Unclipped (7/6 net), the explicit design certainly at least somewhat rolling with the damage. The book itself externally clean and bright, just a trifle marked, the binding tight and square, the contents clean and fine barring a few faint scattered spots, no inscriptions or stamps.
A very early novel by the poet and folklorist, Ruth Manning-Sanders, published about forty years before her major body of work appeared—that being her industrious and remarkable series of ‘A Book of…’, retelling mythological folklore across the world, from witches and wizards to dragons and ghosts. Though these were written for children, her retellings often broke convention and many fizzed with darker tones, to the appreciation of child readers. This novel very much for adults: ‘the tragedy of Zephan Wall, a half-idiot pedlar is that his ludicrous ambitions only accentuate his poverty of mind and body. His patient wife, Deborah, is housekeeper to a gigantic bed-ridden miner, by name Bendigo Scoffern; and his step-daughter, Mabel Best, is an imbecile of twenty-six, who plays with toys and has screaming fits. She is convicted of murder, of which she was innocent, and removed to an asylum.’ [The Spectator]. The protagonist finds escape only by way of what is illustrated on the jacket, a suicide, masterfully rendered in wraparound by Nicholson. Scarce.
