1891 Rare Victorian Edition - The Popular Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
An attractive late Victorian collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s most celebrated tales, including his Gothic masterpieces and pioneering detective fiction, preserved in the publisher’s gilt-decorated green cloth.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe.
Title: The Popular Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
Publisher: Glasgow: Thomas D. Morison; London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1891.
Edition: Third Edition.
Language: Text in English.
Pages: 548 pages.
Size: 8.5" x 6".
Binding: Very good original publisher’s green cloth binding with gilt lettering and decorative gilt panel to spine. Binding remains firm and attractive, with light rubbing and small areas of wear, tearing and fraying at the head and foot of the spine and extremities, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, complete and firmly bound, with the expected overall age-toning to the inexpensive late nineteenth-century paper and some toning to the endpapers, as shown.
Estimate: $175–200 USD.
The book:
The Popular Tales of Edgar Allan Poe offers an unusually extensive single-volume gathering of Poe’s short fiction, bringing together 69 stories across more than five hundred pages. Among the contents are some of his greatest works of Gothic and macabre literature, including The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado, Ligeia, Berenice and The Premature Burial.
The collection also contains Poe’s landmark tales of detection, notably The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter, featuring C. Auguste Dupin, as well as The Gold-Bug, A Descent into the Maelström, MS. Found in a Bottle, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and many of his lesser-known humorous and satirical pieces. A substantial Victorian Poe collection and an appealing example in the publisher’s handsome gilt-decorated cloth.
The author:
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American poet, author, editor and literary critic whose work had a profound influence on Gothic fiction, horror, mystery and the modern short story. His tales explored madness, guilt, premature burial, psychological terror and the supernatural with an intensity and technical precision that made him one of the most distinctive writers of the nineteenth century.
Poe is also widely credited with establishing the modern detective story through the character of C. Auguste Dupin, whose analytical methods anticipated many later fictional detectives. Although his life was marked by financial difficulty and personal tragedy, Poe’s literary reputation grew dramatically after his death, and works such as The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher have become enduring classics of world literature.