1927 Rare First Edition - The Kingdom of Faerie (Fairies) by Geoffrey Hodson

Rare first edition of Geoffrey Hodson’s influential Theosophical study of fairies, devas, sylphs, gnomes and other nature spirits, presented as the author’s record of clairvoyant investigations into the unseen world of nature.

Author: Geoffrey Hodson.
Title: The Kingdom of Faerie.
Publisher: London: The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd., 38 Great Ormond Street, London W.C.1, 1927.
Edition: First Edition. The copyright page states “First Published MCMXXVII.”
Language: Text in English.
Pages: xii, 112 pages.
Size: 7.5 x 5 inches.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s tan cloth binding, lettered in blue to the front board and spine. Light expected rubbing, faint handling marks and minor wear at the spine ends and corners, but the cloth remains clean and attractive and the binding is firm. Protected in a removable mylar cover. 
Content: Very good. The pages are generally clean, bright and well preserved with light age toning and occasional minor spotting. The front free endpaper bears an ink stamp of the Theosophical Society, Wallasey Lodge, together with a former owner’s name which has been crossed through, as shown. Otherwise the text is clean and free from annotations.

Estimate: USD $300–350.

The book: First published in 1927, The Kingdom of Faerie is one of Geoffrey Hodson’s best-known writings on fairies and nature spirits. In his preface, Hodson describes the book as a continuation of the investigations begun in Fairies at Work and at Play, explaining that his purpose was increasingly to explore what he understood as the consciousness of fairies and devas rather than merely catalogue their outward forms. The chapters consider devas, sylphs, gnomes, fairies, brownies, mannikins and the work of nature spirits, drawing on observations made in the Cotswolds, Sussex, Kent, Switzerland and elsewhere.

The book occupies an unusual position at the intersection of fairy lore, occultism and early twentieth-century Theosophy. Hodson presents his encounters as clairvoyant observations and interprets the fairy world as part of an ordered hierarchy of spiritual and natural intelligences. Copies of the first edition are increasingly difficult to find, and the Wallasey Lodge stamp gives this example an appealing direct association with the Theosophical milieu in which the book originally circulated.

The author: Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) was an English Theosophist, lecturer and writer whose work focused extensively on clairvoyance, spiritual development, angels, devas and nature spirits. He became one of the twentieth century’s most prolific Theosophical authors and travelled widely as a lecturer and investigator.

Hodson is particularly remembered for writings in which he described what he believed to be direct clairvoyant observations of fairies and other non-human intelligences. His books, including Fairies at Work and at Play, The Kingdom of Faerie and later studies of angels and spiritual consciousness, remain of considerable interest to collectors of Theosophy, occult literature and modern fairy belief.