THE THREE IMPOSTERS

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. First American edition. Very good. Octavo. Publisher's unfortunate choice of yellow cloth, paper spine label, decorative endpapers. 287,[3] pp., a great many unopened. Cloth is rather smudged, spine darkened with label chipped and also darkened, a testament to binding choice errors, else a very good copy without the dust jacket that might have saved it. 

"The novel comprises several weird tales and culminates in a denouement of deadly horror, connected with a secret society devoted to debauched pagan rites. The three impostors of the title are members of this society who weave a web of deception in the streets of London-relating the aforementioned weird tales in the process-as they search for a missing Roman coin commemorating an infamous orgy by the Emperor Tiberius and close in on their prey: 'the young man with spectacles.' 

Publisher John Lane of The Bodley Head, wary of the atmosphere following the trial of Oscar Wilde, asked Machen to expurgate his manuscript; Machen refused. Ultimately, however, Machen agreed to revise the description of the final scene of the book, in order to purge one word that Lane had found to be too explicit; the word was entrails" -  synopsis from Wikipedia.