STOKER, Bram. Dracula. London: The Folio Society, 2008.

8vo. Original publisher's decorated black cloth. 355 pp., with 9 black-and-white illustrations by Abigail Rorer. Introduction by John Banville. Housed in publisher's slipcase. First Folio Society edition.

Dracula was published in 1897, and has never fallen out of print. That alone is a remarkable fact about a novel that mingles the most ancient European terrors — the undead, the blood-drinker, the creature that cannot cross running water — with the anxieties of the late Victorian world: the invasion of the rational by the irrational, the threat of the foreign, the fragility of the female body, the limits of science in the face of something that should not exist.

Stoker was a theatre man, not primarily a novelist, and the book's genius lies less in literary refinement than in its architecture — the epistolary structure of journals, letters, and phonograph recordings that creates the illusion of eyewitness testimony to the impossible. John Banville's introduction to this edition places the novel in its cultural moment with characteristic elegance, while Abigail Rorer's nine woodcut-style illustrations bring to it a quality of archaic darkness entirely in keeping with the material. A handsome addition to any collection of Gothic literature.

A pristine copy, fine in its slipcase, presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000360