GREEN, Anna Katharine. The Doctor, His Wife and The Clock.

The Mother of American Mysteries

GREEN, Anna Katharine. The Doctor, His Wife and The Clock. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1895.

Tall 16mo. Publisher’s brown wrappers illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and printed in red, printer’s device in black to rear cover; pp. [iv], 131, [1]; with 2 ff. plates comprising frontispiece repeating Beardsley’s illustration with facing architectural illustration, with tissue guard; lettering to spine faded, spine ends chipped, a few chips to upper cover; else a very good copy, uncut; nineteenth-century compliments slip of J.W. Wild loosely inserted.

First edition of this detective story by the ‘mother of the American detective novel’, with wrappers and a frontispiece designed by Beardsley.

Brooklyn-born Anna Katharine Green (1846–1945, here published under her married name, Rohlfs) was the author of The Leavenworth Case (1878), one of the earliest mysteries written by an American woman; the work received high praise from Wilkie Collins: ‘Her powers of invention are so remarkable – she has so much imagination and so much belief (a most important qualification for our art) in what she says … Dozens of times reading the story I have stopped to admire [Green’s] fertility of invention’. The Leavenworth Case introduced her detective protagonist, Ebenezer Gryce, who reappears here as the investigator of a seemingly unsolvable murder in nineteenth-century New York.

Beardsley’s image is taken from the poster he designed to promote Fisher Unwin’s children’s books. He had also designed a poster for Fisher Unwin’s ‘Pseudonym Library’, later issued in reduced form as ‘an advertisement slip for insertion in books and magazines’ (Ross 77).

The loosely inserted compliment slip may be that of John William Wild, architect, brother-in-law of Owen Jones (who used Wild’s sketches as the basis for a portion of the Grammar of Ornament), and curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum, although it was seemingly retroactively inserted: he had died, at the museum, no less, in 1892.

Gertner Zatlin 972; Samuels Lasner 75b.

SKU: 2124692