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Ashenden or The British Agent - William Somerset Maugham

1928 - William Heinemann, London - First Edition
A fine copy in superb fresh example of the scarce, delicate, and striking dust jacket, without restoration, conservation, or repair.

Somerset Maugham's highly influential collection of espionage thrillers based on his own experiences in British Intelligence during the First World War.

Considered the ‘the archetype of the espionage novel’, inspiring many later writers in the genre including Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and Len Deighton among others.

A Haycraft-Queen cornerstone book. Two of the stories in
Ashenden were used by Alfred Hitchcock as the basis for The Secret Agent. 
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Price HK$ 60,000



On a Chinese Screen - William Somerset Maugham

1922 - William Heinemann, London - First English Edition
First edition of Maugham’s collection of sketches on China.

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river, with what are clearly long stops in Shanghai and Hong Kong amongst other treaty ports. Always more interested in people than places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper.

In the resulting collection we encounter Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know. In total 58 sketches.
 
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Price HK$ 15,000



The Casuarina Tree - Six Stories - William Somerset Maugham

1926 - William Heinemann Ltd., London - First Edition
First edition in the scarce dust jacket designed by Ralph Keene

Maugham’s collection of short stories by set in the Federated Malay States during the 1920s, including one of his most aclaimed ‘The Outsider’.

by W. Somerset Maugham. The stories are loosely based on Maugham's experiences traveling in the region for about a year

With a short introduction entitled ‘
The Casuarina Tree’ followed by the stories – ‘Before the Party’, ‘P. & O.’, ‘The Outstation’, ‘The Force of Circumstance’, ‘The Yellow Streak’, and ‘The Letter’. 
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Price HK$ 40,000



The Razor’s Edge - A Novel - William Somerset Maugham

1944 - William Heinemann Ltd, London - First English Edition
A fine first edition of one of Maugham's most popular works, twice adapted for the big screen, the first of which was Oscar-winning starring Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney and John Payne.

The Razor’s Edge’ follows the life of Larry Darrell, a pilot in World War I who longs to discover some transcendent meaning for human life, and for his life in particular.

Maugham himself appears in the novel, and there is some debate as to whether Darrell is a thinly disguised portrait of Christopher Isherwood.
 
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Price HK$ 8,000



The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong - William Somerset Maugham

1930 - William Heinemann Ltd., London - First Edition
First edition of ‘Maugham's finest travel book’.

‘As the urbane novelist wends his way through tropic climes, he reads Proust under the mosquito netting, listens to stories of passion and madness from British colonials gone to seed, and bears up under the merciless sun, sipping at a gin and bitters and laying out a hand of solitaire’ -
Washington Post

An account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life. [
Random House] 
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Price HK$ 6,000



Christmas Holiday - William Somerset Maugham

1939 - William Heinemann Ltd, London - First Edition
An exceptional example of the first edition, one of Maugham’s darker tales, Paris, the Russian Revolution, a lost generation and self-destruction.

The basis for the 1944 film noir, a highlight for director Robert Siodmak, starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly.
 
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Price HK$ 7,000



Black Mischief - Evelyn Waugh

1932 - Chapman and Hall Ltd., London - First Edition
‘'We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim . . .' Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea.

A superb copy, in a lovely example of the dust jacket which is notoriously prone to both toning, and also fading of the red vignettes on the spine and front panel.

First edition of Waugh’s satyrical novel set in Africa. Chronicling the efforts of the English-educated Emperor Seth, assisted by a fellow Oxford graduate, Basil Seal, to modernise his kingdom. Believed to have been a satire on Abyssinia, where Waugh spent time as a reporter, and Haile Selassie, although Waugh denied this.
 
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Price HK$ 9,000



Decline and Fall - An Illustrated Novelette - Evelyn Waugh

1928 - Chapman & Hall Ltd., London - First Edition, First Issue
‘Anarchic and experimental... Surely one of the wittiest and most original of first novels. Champagne to the particular.’ - Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement.

First edition, first issue, of Evelyn Waugh’s first novel. Illustrated with six full-page line drawings by Waugh.

After the book was rejected for indecency by the publisher of his earlier biography of Rossetti, Waugh offered the manuscript to Chapman & Hall, but he did so while his father, who was the managing director of the firm, was away on holiday. The acting-director agreed to publish the novel. Arthur Waugh returned to London to discover that his son was his firm's newest author. When Arthur Waugh's biography was published three years later, however,
Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, the two novels published under his directorship of Chapman & Hall, were not mentioned. The indelicate material, which Martin Stannard has since revealed in fact did go through some "taming" revisions, was perhaps a bit too much for the elder Waugh. 
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Price HK$ 9,000



 
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