STUDIES OF DEATH: Romantic Tales.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original grey bevelled edge cloth boards with illustration stamped in black. Top and fore-edges untrimmed. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with a little rubbing to the extremities, the cloth dusty and with a brown mark to the upper board. The contents, with some toning to the endpapers are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps.

A collection of seven stories with an emphasis on the weird and macabre comprising 'Hylas'; 'Narcissus'; 'The Death of a Vocation'; 'Viol d'Amor'; 'The Egg of the Albatross'; 'The True Story of a Vampire'; 'The Worm of Luck'. One of only four books published during Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock's short but influential lifetime, this being his only collection of short fiction. William Butler Yeats in his anthology 'The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935', (OUP, 1936) describes the author, who died aged 36 as a result of alcoholism and opium addiction, "a scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men". (Bleiler; Locke: A Spectrum of Fantasy; d'Arch Smith: Love in Earnest).