The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn.

HEARN, Lafcadio. Edited by Elizabeth Bisland.

$6,500.00

Item Number: 118027

Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922.

The Large Paper Edition of Lafcadio Hearn’s collected writings. Octavo, 16 volumes bound in full blue levant morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, elaborately gilt citron levant morocco doublures, watered silk endleaves, top edge gilt with others uncut, ribbons bound in, tissue-guarded tipped-in  frontispieces in color. One of 750 numbered sets printed at the Riverside Press, this is number 653. Volume I is signed by Hearn’s second wife, Koizumi Setsu, in Japanese characters. In fine condition. An exceptional set.

Koizumi Yakumo, born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was a Japanese writer of Greek-Irish descent best remembered for his books about Japanese culture, especially his collections of legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). After emigrating to the United States at the age of 19, Hearn was sent as a correspondent to the French West Indies, where he stayed for two years, and then to Japan, where he would remain for the rest of his life. His best known works on Japanese subjects include: Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East (1897), Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), and Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904).