Odes and Sonnets.
1918. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1918.
Slim 4to. 30 pages. Blue-grey boards, tan muslin backstrip with printed paper label. Very good copy of a fragile book, hard to find in acceptable condition. Bookplate of Rosa Walter Meertief.
§ First edition, copy #242 of 300 copies, with a preface by George Sterling. The very scarce second book of the fascinating writer and artist Clark Ashton Smith, friend of H.P. Lovecraft and a key contributor to the horror fiction pulp magazine Weird Tales. Of him, Lovecraft wrote "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled." His Cthulhu Mythos stories are canonical. And yet before all this, Smith wrote traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne and was praised by George Stirling as a ranking member of the West Coast Romantics including Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French. This book was an early publication of the Book Club of California and contains only hints of the horror to come. Rosa Walter (Meertief) was a member of the Jewish aristocracy of San Francisco. Item #124715
Price: $500.00