Dunsany, Lord "The Sword of Welleran" [The Devin-Adair Company, 1954]

DUNSANY, Lord. The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales of Enchantment.

New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954. First Devin-Adair edition. 8.75” x 6”, 181pp. Illustrated with line drawings by Robert Barrell. Publisher's blue cloth lettered in red, in the original dust jacket. Jacket lightly toned with a small chip at the lower edge of the front panel and modest shelf wear. Book clean and sound with a small spot to the rear board. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket.

A mid-century reissue of one of the foundational collections of modern fantasy. First published in 1908, The Sword of Welleran contains many of Dunsany's most celebrated stories, including "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," "The Wonderful Window," "Bethmoora," and "Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean." Written decades before Tolkien's major works reached print, these tales helped establish the vocabulary of secondary-world fantasy and exerted a profound influence on later writers including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and J. R. R. Tolkien. The Devin-Adair edition helped introduce Dunsany to a new generation of fantasy readers during the genre's postwar revival.