Island Nights' Entertainments.
Consisting of The Beach of Falesá, The Bottle Imp, and the Isle of Voices, with Illustrations by Gordon Browne and W. Hatherell
London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1893. First edition. Leather. This is a finely bound first edition of Stevenson’s collection of three South Seas tales.
Condition
The three-quarters navy Morocco binding features rounded spine with gilt-tooled raised spine bands and gilt rule-bordered compartments, the second and third compartments gilt-stamped with the title and author, the balance featuring a central gilt device, the spine heel printed with the “1893” date of publication. The generous navy corners and spine overlap feature gilt-ruled transitions to the pale blue paper-covered sides. The first edition contents are bound with marbled endpapers, gilt top edges, and silk head and tail bands. Condition of the binding is good plus, the spine only lightly and uniformly toned, the corners square. Scuffing and wear is minimal, though there is wear along the lower front joint, which is still firmly attached, but inclining toward a split beginning at the bottom. The contents are well-suited to the fine binding, mildly age-toned but free of any previous ownership marks, spotting, or soiling.
Three South Seas Stories
This volume collects three of Stevenson's South Seas stories: The Beach of Falesá, The Bottle Imp and The Isle of Voices. "The South Seas furnished Stevenson with fresh themes for his fiction... The Beach of Falesá is "regarded as one of his finest short stories. He described it as 'the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life'. It was collected in Island Nights' Entertainments (1893) with two other tales, 'The Bottle Imp', a German folk story given a Hawaiian setting (which was published in translation in a Samoan missionary magazine), and 'The Isle of Voices', a Polynesian fable. The first full, unbowdlerized version of 'Falesá' did not appear until 1984."
Stevenson
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was best known for his novels Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson cast off his family profession of engineer and led a rather peripatetic, albeit sickly, life (he had tuberculosis), his final years spent in the South Seas, including Tahiti, Honolulu, Gilbert Islands, and Samoa, where he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 44.
Stevenson “was overpraised in his lifetime and immediately after his death, and has been considerably undervalued since. A series of collected editions bore witness to the popularity of his books with the general reader, but from the 1930s onwards he was ignored or patronized by academic critics as merely a writer for children. Slowly the tide has turned. He has been praised by modern writers… and the critics… are beginning to take him seriously again.”
In recent decades, “Stevenson’s reputation drastically appreciated as “a writer of originality and power whose essays at their best are cogent and perceptive renderings of aspects of the human condition; whose novels are either brilliant adventure stories with subtle moral overtones or original and impressive presentations of human action in terms of history and topography as well as psychology; whose short stories produce some new and effective permutations in the relation between romance and irony or manage to combine horror and suspense with moral diagnosis…”
References: ODNB; Britannica. Item #008579
Price: $350.00