Wuthering Heights. by BRONTË, Emily - 1931

London: Duckworth,, 1931. Quarto (270 x 208 mm). Exquisite and unique contemporary binding by W. B. Knobel, with various coloured calf onlays to covers, arranged and tooled in blind to depict Heathcliff in a stormy landscape, spine in imitation of tree with onlaid hollow lettered longitudinally in gilt, marbled endpapers, silk page marker. 12 wood engravings by Clare Leighton. W. B. Knobel's own copy with his bookplate to pastedown and ownership signature to front free endpaper. Spine faded to brown, very light rubbing to extremities, minor foxing to initial and final leaves. A superb copy. First Leighton edition, trade issue, with the US edition issued by Random House the same year. Clare Leighton's (1898–1989) woodcuts inspired the set design of the 1939 film adaptation of the novel, starring Laurence Olivier. The amateur bookbinder and bibliophile William Bernard Knobel (c.1875–1951) was a successful English doctor who published studies on various medical conditions and served in the Serbian Relief Unit during the First World War. A number of books from his extensive library were auctioned at Sotheby's in 1991. Works in his own intricately inlaid bindings are uncommon.