Greenmantle

Baltimore, MD: The Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1988. Hardcover. New/New. This book has such an unusual back story, is such "a ripping good yarn," its author was such a fascinating figure, and this edition is so handsome, that it would make a magnificent gift for a spy thriller or war story fan - but only if you can part with it. Let's start with the author: John Buchan was an Oxford-educated Scottish writer, historian, and politician. As a writer, he is best known for The Thirty-Nine Steps, a WWI spy thriller published in 1915. An influential, well-regarded public figure, and he was appointed as Governor General of Canada in 1935 and elevated to the peerage as Baron Tweedsmuir. (The Thirty-Nine Steps was also adapted for the screen in 1935 by Hitchcock.) He had always been known for his personal integrity, and he took his duties as Governor General very seriously, traveling the length and breath of Canada, including the Arctic, and he advocated that the strongest nations were those made up of different ethnicities - a highly progressive view for its time.
The Thirty-Nine Steps introduced Richard Hannay, his protagonist, who works for the British Foreign Office. Greenmantle is the second book featuring Hannay, although it is not a sequel but a stand-alone novel. Greenmantle is lauded as a "cracking WWI story" and a "ripping yarn." Scroll through the reviews in GoodReads - it is near universally praised for its characters, insight into WWI history, adventure, and suspense - you can't put it down. But as many have noted - another fascinating feature of this book is that it was written during WWI - not after - when the outcomes and subsequent events of the Great War were still unknown, so the book functions as something of an alternate history. It also has perhaps the only fictional account of the Russian front, which is portrayed sympathetically.
This backstory is one of the reasons we love antiquarian books so much. Instead of a new pot-boiler, churned out by the dozens in writing "factories" under a best-selling author's name (you know who we are talking about), we have a novel authored by a fascinating historical figure in his own right, we are reading contemporaneous historical details of the Front, and the author can actually write. Finally, it's just a good book: Scroll through the reviews in GoodReads - it is near universally praised for its characters, insight into WWI history, adventure, and suspense Put together, this means we have a novel authored by a fascinating historical figure in his own right and are reading contemporaneous historical details of the Front. This edition is far from the typical paperback of this novel, and NOT print-on-demand. This handsome hardcover, in new condition, was published in 1988 by the Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company as part of its Great War Series. Sadly, the firm has since closed. So new copies of this edition are uncommon. In the first of our two copies, an insert printed by N&A Publishing is included.