Gruesome Cargoes

London: Selwyn & Blount (1928) Ltd.. Good in Very Good dj. 1930. 4th printing. Hardcover. [modest wear to extremities, pages tanned with age, but generally a good sound copy of a cheaply-manufactured book; former owner's initials plus date & place of purchase written along edge of rear pastedown (concealed by rear jacket flap); the jacket is a bit soiled on the rear panel, with a handful of tiny nicks and edge-tears, minor paper loss at a couple of corners, and a vertical crease along the left edge of the front panel]. ("Not at Night" series, No. 4) Series An early printing of the fourth entry in the long-running "Not at Night" horror-fiction anthology series. By the time this copy was printed (February 1930, just a year and a half after the first printing in July 1928), a fifth volume ("By Daylight Only") had appeared, and is the last title in the series list opposite the title page; the jacket, however, is from a slightly later date, as the rear jacket panel lists seven titles, ending with "At Dead of Night," which was issued in 1931. The series was a publishing hit, with all the volumes going into multiple printings; there were eventually eleven volumes in the original series, which was then capped off by the publication of an additional "Omnibus" volume, published in 1937. (It was also a particularly British hit, as only the first volume in the series was ever published in the U.S. A later series of "Not at Night" paperbacks, issued in the early 1960s, presented selections from the original volumes.) The books derived most of its content from the American pulp magazine Weird Tales (100 out of the total of 170 stories, according to one source), and provided authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard with their first British (and first hardcover) publication. Contents of this volume: "Dead Man's Luck" (Lockhart North); "When Hell Laughed" (Flavia Richardson); "The Black Spider" (Edmund Snell); "The Hunting on the Doonagh Bog" (Anthon Wharton); "Drums of Fear" (Dora Christie-Murray); "The Hand From the Ruins" (Harold Markham); "A Celestial Hell" (Harry De Windt); "The Children of Bondage" (Dagney Major); "The Man Who Ordered a Double" (Rupert Grayson); "When Glister Walked" (Oscar Cook); "Offspring of Hell" (H. Thomson); "The Tomb" (Francis Beeding); "The Creeping Horror" (A.A. Rawlinson); "The Green Eyes of Mbuiri" (Benge Atlee); "The Padlocked House" (L. Oulton). .