Blown to bits Or The lonely man of Rakata. by BALLANTYNE (R.M.) - 1889

A Tale of the Malay Archipelago. With Illustrations by the Author. London: James Nisbet & Co., 21 Berners Street, 1889. (All rights reserved.). Globe 8vo, wire-stitched; frontispiece, engraved and letterpress titles, and four plates; half-title not called for; integral advertisement leaf at end; pp.[viii]+438+[ii]; bevelled mustard buckram, blocked with publisher’s monogram device black on back cover, ruled, blocked, and lettered black, Indian red, and bright gilt, blocked matt gilt, light and dark green, on front cover, ruled and blocked black, gilt, and Indian red, ruled matt gilt, lettered bright gilt, mustard and gilt outlined black, and mustard and gilt outlined red, on spine; t.e. brown; end-papers coated dark chocolate. A little very light foxing to the first and last two leaves; otherwise a fine copy. Advance copy, with the publisher’s compliments rubber stamp in purple ink on the verso of the front free end-paper. This was evidently one of the copies sent to the author, the front end-paper bearing a tipped-on slip with Ballantyne’s signature, clipped from a cancelled cheque. Ballantyne’s bibliographer Eric Quayle, informed us in a letter some years ago that slips bearing Ballantyne’s signature were pasted in “probably by Jeanie, his wife, who, after her husband’s death in 1894, pasted spare autograph signatures in the titles still remaining on their shelves, or so his surviving daughter told me!” In our experience a scarce title - possibly because wire-stitched bindings tended not to wear well, though this one is entirely crisp and sound. Quayle, 83a; Sadleir, 100, listing a copy in blue-grey cloth with very dark grey end-papers, for which he erroneously gives the date ‘1886’ - an obvious typo: Ballantine’s Preface is dated ‘1889’; not in Wolff. All books listed by Robert Temple are first editions unless otherwise stated.