The Coming of the Fairies

London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1922. 139 pp. Octavo. Bound in the original green cloth with gilt title on the spine. Top edge a bit dust soiled. Original endpapers. Half title. Frontis portrait. 14 black and white illustrations. A couple of very light tide lines on the margins. A very attractive clean copy. Doyle not only believed in spiritualism and all of the phenomena of the seance room, but he also believed in fairies. In 1917, two young girls from Yorkshire produced photographs they had taken showing themselves posing with fairies in their garden. Elsie Wright (age 16) and her cousin Frances Griffiths (age 10) used a cheap camera and it was thought they did not have the technical ability to produce any sort of forgery. By today's standards the image certainly looked very much like they were put together in the darkroom. Still Conan Doyle believed them to be real and produced two pamphlets and this book on the subject. For whatever reason, the book and the two pamphlets are quite scarce and it is difficult to find a collectable copy like this of the book. 1922