Remembering Saki on the Centenary of his Death

Hector Hugh Munro died 100 years ago tomorrow. I'm pleased to say that I'm far from the only one marking Saki's centenary.

The BBC put together an excellent 3-hour celebration of stories and new documentary material on Radio 4 Extra. It's available on iPlayer for the next month, and, as is the way of Radio 4 Extra, will probably pop up again and again in the months to come.

You can listen to it here.

Since 2007, Richard Crowest has been uploading his readings of Saki's stories to the web. They're also available as free podcasts, and from a quick sampling, they are very good indeed. They are available on iTunes, or via his website here. Mr Crowest is doing a live show of Saki stories on the centenary itself, at the Leicester Square Theatre:

A Century of Saki, Leicester Square Theatre, Monday 14 November 2016, 7pm

You can book tickets here, and read the press release here. (I've only just found out about this event, otherwise I would have been plugging it for a while! I wish I could be there...)

The Guardian noted the centenary in their Week in Books column on the 12th, and made this laudable comment:

"If only Saki were still alive. The age of Trump needs his brutal dismantling of human stupidities."

The Guardian's piece also has quotes from two famous fans, worth repeating here:

"In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around." – Roald Dahl

"Saki's stories are highly relevant to any society in which convention is confused with morality, and all societies confuse convention with morality, so he'll always be relevant." – Will Self

Kirkus Reviews remembers Saki here.

The Saki Centenary Facebook page is here.

Details of a 'lost' Saki story now reprinted as a limited edition are here.

The blissfully perfect combination of Tom Baker reading Sredni Vashtar can be enjoyed here.

Rediscovered! A forgotten Saki/Alice in Wonderland short story

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EDITION HAS NOW SOLD OUT

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1902, AND NEVER REPRINTED... UNTIL NOW

A FORGOTTEN INSTALMENT OF SAKI'S CELEBRATED LEWIS CARROLL SATIRE,

'THE WESTMINSTER ALICE'

A STRICTLY LIMITED EDITION OF 45 HAND-NUMBERED COPIES. 

November 14th this year is the centenary of the death of Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. He was killed at the Somme, where he was serving as a Corporal, having refused a commission. He was forty-five.

To commemorate the centenary, I'm pleased to announce a limited edition booklet, which returns a previously forgotten Saki piece to print, for the first time since it was originally published in 1902. Whether you're a Saki aficionado, or an Alice/Lewis Carroll collector, it's definitely something for the completists!

It was The Westminster Alice that introduced Saki to the world. The Wonderland-inspired skewering of the political scene, together with the perfect illustrations by F. Carruthers Gould (with apologies to Tenniel) was a huge hit for The Westminster Gazette, which soon brought the series of vignettes together in a paperbound edition. Possibly to coincide with this collected edition, Munro and Carruthers Gould produced an encore appearance for their Alice, in an issue of the Westminster Gazette offshoot publication Picture Politics, several months after the last instalment, ‘Spade in Wonderland’ had been published. This piece, ‘Alice Wants to Know’ — complete with its illustration — was destined to be forgotten, and has never been included in any subsequent collected edition of The Westminster Alice. It is returned to print now for the first time, along with another never-reprinted, non-Alice political squib by Saki, ‘Government By Picture-Postcard’. 

Thanks to the talents of Martin Stiff at the design studio Amazing 15, the booklet has been beautifully laid out to mimic the design of the original paperbound collected edition of The Westminster Alice, right down to the contemporary ads on the back cover. The booklet is printed on heavy, 160gsm uncoated paper, 8pp plus the colour cover, printed on 250gsm Rives Shetland paper.

There are 45 hand-numbered copies for sale.

Copy number 1 *only* is sold together with an original copy of the paperbound edition of The Westminster Alice (pictured).
PRICE: £45 (including UK P&P) NB: THIS HAS NOW SOLD.

Copies 2-45 (Booklet only)
PRICE: £7.50 (including UK P&P)

TO ORDER: Please email me at:
withnailbooks@btinternet.com

I will reply to confirm availability, and to process payment (which will be by PayPal only: when you email me, if you confirm your email address connected to your PayPal account, I will simply send you a Paypal invoice, subject to availability of course).

Copies will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis. For non-UK orders, please supply me first with your address, so I can give you a postage-inclusive price.

Saki fans should also feel free to take a look at the Saki Centenary Facebook Page.

Saki's Centenary

It's very nearly 100 years since the death of one of my favourite writers, Hector Hugh Munro, aka Saki.

He was killed at the Somme on November 14, 1916. His work is not exactly forgotten (it's never been out of print since he died), but it deserves a wider audience.

If you're new to Saki, his Wikipedia entry will give you the basics.

I've also set up a Saki Centenary Facebook page which will be posting various Saki-related links from now on.

I'll also shortly be announcing a very limited edition new Saki publication, returning a lost story of his to print for the first time in over a century...

A 270 Year-Old Book, With A 100 Year-Old WW1 Story...

Here's a very, very special book. It fairly reeks of history. It's a breviary, Breviarium Sanctae Ambianensis Ecclesiae to be precise, dated 1746.

A lovely book then, not in particularly good nick to be sure, but pretty good considering it's over a quarter of a millennium old. It's also very rare: no copies are currently for sale anywhere online (that I could find).

What really sets it part though is the inscription at the front...

The inscription reads (with thanks to the commenter below who corrected my initial transcription):

Picked up at Martinsorte on Somme Front in a ruined home, in 1916, by Captain H. J. Robson R.A.M.C (T.F)*

Just hope the advance of the tanks is before the fall of Theepvalle** and Beaumont Hamel.

* Royal Army Medical Corps (Territorial Force). The Territorial Force was a forerunner of the Territorial Army.

** Thiepval.

I'm afraid it will take someone with better knowledge of the events of The Battle of the Somme than me to work out when this apparently contemporary battlefield inscription was written, but if Captain Robson is talking about the potential fall of Beaumont Hamel, then I *think* that puts it towards the end, in mid-November 1916. (This has particular significance for me, as it was on November 14th 1916, during the Beaumont Hamel offensive, that my favourite writer, Hector Hugh Munro, aka Saki, was shot and killed.)

The book is now quite worn, and moulded as if it was stuck in a pocket, or perhaps a kitbag, for a goodly while.

According to this record in the London Gazette of 19th October, 1917, Captain Robson survived the Somme, but retired from The Royal Army Medical Corps due to ill-health...

All in all a fascinating object, especially in this centenary year. I don't own this book, and though I can put interested parties in touch with the dealer who does own it, I'm not sure he'd ever be able to bring himself to part with it...

From Bollywood to Michael Sheen: Saki (H. H. Munro) adaptations on the YouTube

He's not been mentioned here for a little while, but longtime readers of this blog will know of the enthusiasm round these parts for the work of H. H. Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, who wrote brilliantly comic short stories where genteel society collided with often chaotic, sometimes even supernatural elements.

That admiring forewords to collections of his work have been written by everyone from A.A. Milne and Noel Coward to Will Self and The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson is proof enough of his influence on a wide selection of British writers since his untimely death on a WW1 battlefield in 1916.

He's not exactly a household name though, due in part perhaps to his stories never having made a successful jump to the great populariser of the 20th century, television. (Would P.G. Wodehouse still be quite as popular today without the efforts of Fry and Laurie? Discuss.)

That's not to say Saki has never been adapted for the screen though, far from it. Below is quick romp through some YouTube links which will prove of great interest to Saki Fanciers.

First up is a programme which has only recently (February 2015) been posted online, and what a treat it is. In 1962, Granada broadcast an 8-part series called Saki: The Improper Stories of H. H. Munro. I knew of this production's existence, but had long given up hope of seeing any of it. It's a no-frills, studio-based affair, which would have been performed pretty much as live (if not *actually* live), but with cast members including the great Richard Vernon and Fenella Fielding at the top of their game, it's a pleasure to watch.

Fast-forwarding several decades and spinning to the other side of the Earth, here are two Indian adaptations of the same short story, 'Dusk'. Perhaps there was an 'Adapt Dusk' competition, or it was set as homework at film school or something...

Here's another pair of takes on a story, this time 'The Interlopers', one of Saki's bleakest tales. The second is somewhat more polished than the first...

... and for good measure, here's a puppet version...

'The Open Window' is deservedly one of Saki's best-known and most anthologised tales, so to finish off, two versions of it: the first is a 1980s version from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the second a quite wonderful short film adaptation (retitled 'The Open Doors') from 2004, starring a pitch-perfect Michael Sheen. (Has Sheen ever not been pitch perfect in anything?) If you only watch one link on this post, watch this one. It's brilliant.

Saki Illustrations by Lynd Ward, from The Haunted Omnibus

Long time readers of the blog will know how excited I get at any new discovery when it comes to one of my favourite writers, H. H. Munro, aka Saki. Previous posts have waxed lyrical about Saki dust jackets, but this time it's some wonderful interior illustrations.

Saki is one of the most anthologised authors of all time, and it's no surprise that the editor of 1930s collection The Haunted Omnibus chose two of his stories to include. Each and every tale in the collection had the good fortune to receive an illustration by one of the very best illustrators there ever was: Lynd Ward.

I'd not come across them before, so here they are... (and should you want to read them, both stories are easily findable online, and will only take a few minutes to read. They're both utter classics of their kind).

Saki Fanciers Raise A Glass: Remembering Jack Langguth

Once a year for about a decade, I would disappear from work for an afternoon to go and have a long lunch with Jack Langguth. He died earlier this week, and it's a sign of the respect in which he was held that his passing was marked by obituaries in both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

The obits can only scratch the surface of his long career as a journalist, novelist, historian and latterly well-loved Professor at the University of Southern California in LA. Here's a man who was Saigon bureau chief for The New York Times during the Vietnam War (experiences he drew on for his award-winning book Our Vietnam), spent Christmas with Lee Harvey Oswald's mother in the aftermath of the JFK assassination (which he remembered for the LA Times here), and wrote books about subjects as diverse as black magic in Brazil, the CIA's use of torture, Julius Caesar, the second American War of Independence, and the life of Hector Hugh Munro, the writer better known as Saki.

I got to know him through that Saki biography, a superbly researched, hugely entertaining and definitive 'category killer' which is still in print. Having read the book, and enjoyed the half dozen previously uncollected Saki stories he included in the original OUP edition, I excitedly contacted him (with a surname like that, Google found him instantly) with a query about a couple of other obscure Saki tales I had tracked down. The enthusiastic email I got in return was the beginning of many years of friendship. "Let's meet for lunch when I'm in London," he wrote. So we did, and continued to do so once a year for ten years.

Jack would come to London, usually in spring, for a week or so, and cram in as many theatre visits as he could: he would literally see a different play every night, with matinees of yet more shows as well where possible. His love of the theatre was infectious, and the pleasure it gave him was palpable, whether he was praising one of his favourite actors, Simon Russell Beale, or gleefully demolishing the shows he thought were terrible.

Lunch was always at a branch of Bertorelli's in the West End, and we always raised a glass to Hector. For the first few years it was just Jack and I, but by our last meeting a couple of years ago, the merry band of 'Saki Fanciers' (Jack's term) had long since reached double figures. It's thanks to Jack that I contacted English Heritage to persuade them to give Saki a blue plaque (one was already underway, and Jack and I attended its unveiling in Mortimer St), was inspired to put together my own edition of uncollected Saki stories, A Shot in the Dark, and then asked to appear as a talking head (alongside Jack, Will Self and Alexi Sayle amongst others) in the BBC documentary The Double Life of Saki. Indeed, the creative forces behind that programme, writer/actor Roger Davenport and director/producer Andrew Hutton, became stalwart lunch-going 'Saki Fanciers' themselves.

Jack was someone for whom the word 'gentleman' fit perfectly. He was warm, generous, and that wonderful combination: unfailingly interested, and interesting. I shall miss him.

UPDATE:  Some other tributes to Jack can be found here, here and here.

A Saki Dust Jacket Surfaces in Australia... But Sells Within Hours

A quick post to cover a newsworthy event for those legions out there following developments in the World of Impossibly Rare Saki Dust Jackets. Earlier today I received an 'ABE has found the book you are looking for' linking to a copy of Beasts and Super-Beasts being offered by Dacobra Books in New South Wales. They listed it thusly:

Publisher's black boards lettered and decorated in gilt, pictorial dust jacket by Hallthorpe. Some offsetting to eps, a VG copy in a GOOD dj which is shelfworn and tanned with some closed tears. This is the secondary issue with cancel title page - the presence of the dust jacket is remarkable and is unrecorded in my reference material.

A dust jacket unrecorded in their reference material perhaps, but it has been previously noted on this blog here, and here it is again:

The Australian copy doesn't sound like it's the same copy that appeared and sold in one day in the US last year (the one pictured above, with a markedly more worn DJ than in Dacobra's description). But like the US one, it sold within hours of being listed (not to me!), for a cool US$1,250. Given what first editions of Beasts go for without jackets, the jacket has added a good $1,100 to the value of the book - and yet someone was obviously happy to pay it!

Saki Dust Jackets Redux

As final preparations are made for the 'formal' opening of The Little Shop (tm) on the 21st (do come along if you're in the area), here's a quick update entry on something from the previous incarnation of this blog. Any longtime readers will know that I get all of a flutter when it comes to rare Saki dust jackets. New readers can bring themselves up to speed with the entries here, here, here and here, but hold onto your hats, it's pretty exciting stuff. Pure bibliographical Viagra, as someone once almost said.

A while back I was contacted by a reader who ended up buying the copy of When William Came mentioned in that last entry, but also had, from another source, scans of a better copy of the dust jacket — which he kindly shared with me. See, I'm not the only one out there who's interested in this stuff.

So here, for the first time on t'internet, feast your eyes on the full DJ of Saki's great pre-WW1 satire...

Saki Sighting: Another rare dust jacket surfaces online

As any readers of this blog will know, few things tend to make me more giddy than an old Saki dust jacket that I've not seen before.

As a collector of all things H. H. Munro (and if you're not familiar with this writer best known for his Oscar Wilde/P. G. Wodehouse meets The Mighty Boosh short stories, just take 10 minutes to read 'Sredni Vashtar' or  'Tobermory'), I have previously become inordinately excited by the discovery of dust jackets — and rather wonderful pictorial dust jackets by noted artists at that — for Beasts and Super-Beasts and The Unbearable Bassington.

Now a copy of his second novel, the Germans-Invade-England satire (or rather call-to-arms, since it was published in 1913) When William Came, has turned up on ABE, complete with DJ. It's a fourth edition, which at first I dismissed as the first printing of the book in the smaller format, collected edition of Saki's work, all of which have quite scarce, but fairly boring text-only jackets, but now I've seen the photo with the listing, I realise it's a later printing, in blue cloth rather than the original red, of the larger format first edition. The design isn't as eye-catching as the ones previously featured here, but it's nonetheless another exceptionally rare survivor.

My heraldry isn't up to much, but I think that's a nicely apt mash-up of the United Kingdom and German coats of arms.

It's a shame about the extensive chipping and loss to the jacket, and at the £65 it's listed for, it's a little bit rich for me, though it's quite possibly the first and last example of it I'll ever see... decisions, decisions.

Having said that, probably the single most valuable book I own is a first edition of the same novel, signed by the author to the woman he was supposedly going to marry, but that's another story...

A Saki Letter, and an early Lady of Comics

A fly-by post today (apologies for the recent lack, but Things Are Afoot), just to link to an entry on Jot 101, a time-hoovering blog by the Big Cheese of the shop Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road. The blog posts interesting snippets from letters, diaries and general ephemera found lurking in books. This entry is about a letter by Hector Hugh Munro, sold back in 2005...

Saki letter to Annie E. Lane ( wife of his  publisher John Lane.) Not dated (July 31st.) About 1906. Sold on a Charing Cross Road catalogue 2005.

On the headed paper of the now vanished Cocoa Tree Club of St James Street in London S.W. Signed 'H.H. Munro.' Munro (ie the genius of the modern English short story 'Saki') thanks Mrs Lane for a book of her writings she had produced in 1905 about women's roles, high society, champagne etc., called 'The Champagne Standard' --'I have been enjoying its contents, which are new to me with the exception of one article which I had read somewhere. Being much out of England I have missed much of current literature...' He adds 'I hope to be able to break in upon your Devonshire fastness when I am down that way...' adding regards to her husband and sometime publisher John Lane (of The Bodley Head.) 2 sides of notepaper about 90 words.

It doesn't say what it sold for, but letters by Saki rarely show up, so I reckon several hundred pounds at least.

As for the book, copies of the rather interesting sounding (it apparently contains a chapter called 'A Plea for Female Architects') The Champagne Standard are readily available on ABE, with even a signed copy lurking in Canada for under $70. Alas, it's not the copy which led to this thank you letter from Saki. It's dedicated to Carolyn Wells, which I'm pretty certain after minimal googling is this Carolyn Wells, a prolific American author and poet who, like Annie E. Lane, was married to a publisher, in her case Hadwin Houghton, of Houghton-Mifflin.

Wells wrote over 170 books, including a bunch of mystery novels starring the 'transcendent detective' Fleming Stone. She also wrote for newspapers, and deserves her place in history alone for being what must be one of the very earliest female 'comic strip' writers. Back in the heyday of Little Nemo in Slumberland, she was writing several strips, including an equally bonkers, though now little remembered strip called Adventures of Lovely Lilly, which as far as I can tell, featured the cherubic Lilly facing down and then beating up a different large animal each week. Here, thanks to Allan Holtz, are two of her adventures, from the New York Herald in June 1907. The rather wonderful art is by G. F. (George Frederick) Kaber.

You wait decades for a rare Saki dust jacket to come along...

The Unbearable Bassington — art by Harry Rountree

There was much excitement on this blog a few weeks ago when I discovered a previously unrecorded dust jacket for a book by one of my favourite authors, H. H. Munro, better known as Saki. As this post lamented, I missed out on buying it, though the seller did send me some photos. The (wonderful) design turned out to be by the noted woodcut artist John Hall Thorpe. 

I'd surmised that this evidently extremely rare jacket must have been included with a later printing of the short story collection in question, Beasts and Super-Beasts, so I decided I'd have a quick look on ABE to see if there might be any of his other books where the reprints had dust jackets too... and yes folks, I found one. In 1924, the final Saki collection, The Square Egg, was published. The first edition came with a plain, text only wrapper (which I have), but I now know that a couple of reprints that came out at the same time — or at least, in the same year — were given pictorial jackets: the Hall Thorpe Beasts and Super-Beasts, and the thing of beauty pictured above, The Unbearable Bassington, featuring an illustration by Harry Rountree.

He certainly looks pretty unbearable, doesn't he?

(Please excuse the reflection on the photos, but the jacket came nicely presented in a mylar protector which would be tricky to take it out of!)

Saki's short stories are rightly more celebrated than his two novels (Bassington and the Germans-invade-England satire, written on the eve of WW1, When William Came), but people are still discovering and enjoying The Unbearable Bassington, and it's hardly been out of print, even as a separate edition, since it was first published in 1912.

The jacket artist Harry Rountree has quite a pedigree it turns out. A New Zealander who came to the UK as a young man (just like Hall Thorpe, except he was Australian), Rountree had a long and distinguished career as an illustrator, as this heartfelt tribute by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. reveals. The Bassington jacket was probably just 'another job' for him, but produced to his usual very high standards nevertheless. I love it.  

So when did Rountree paint this piece? Was the illustrated dust jacket only included with the 1924 reprint of Bassington, to give it another 'push', and a little bit more visibility on the shelves? The copy above (and yes, dear reader, I managed to buy this one!) is a 1924 reprint. The novel had already been reprinted in 1912 (3 times) and 1913 (twice). I think it had this dust jacket design from the outset, and I'll tell you why. Look at Harry's signature above. It's hard to see in the photo, but after the last E is a full stop, and then, after that, there's a 12: for the year, surely. So one can assume that somewhere, someone might still have a first/first in dust jacket. I've certainly never heard of one, let alone seen one...

The artist William Stout is a Rountree fan, and appears to have written a book about him, though I can't find any copies for sale; perhaps he's still working on it. I wonder if he's aware of the Bassington jacket?

Also in 1912, Rountree painted the illustrations for the first printing of Conan Doyle's The Lost World, when it was serialised in The Strand. Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. is lucky enough to own the original of one of them, and here it is, complete with a '12' after his signature.

A previously unknown piece by John Hall Thorpe?

The Saki dust jacket artist revealed!

After my previous post about this wonderful, and ridiculously rare dust jacket for a book by one of my favourite authors, I thought I'd try and find out a bit about the artist, who's clearly credited in the bottom left hand corner: 'Hall Thorpe'.

Mere seconds on Google reveal that it has to be John Hall Thorpe (1874-1947), who, it turns out, was an Australian-born artist who moved to England and made his name with a hugely popular series of colourful woodblock prints. Though he also produced landscapes and city scenes, his trademark was  flowers. Here's his single most famous print, 'The Country Bunch', made up from 15 blocks which apparently took Hall Thorpe a full year to prepare:

This print, and many others like it were hung above countless fireplaces in the 1920s and 30s, and Hall Thorpe still has a considerable following today, as this 2008 exhibition catalogue shows. He was really hitting his stride in the period just after the First World War, exactly the time he would have designed the jacket for Beasts and Super-Beasts, which includes some flowers along with the society gent and the wolf, just for good measure.

The very informative blog The Linosaurus, which contains several posts about the artist (who bizarrely does not have a Wikipedia entry yet), mentions a children's painting book with art by Hall Thorpe, but I've yet to discover any other book or dust jacket work by him: which makes his Saki design doubly rare! (And gives me another reason to be annoyed I missed my chance to buy it...)

John Hall Thorpe ended up living in Bexhill, on the South coast of England, where he died of pneumonia in 1947 (a committed Christian Scientist, he refused medical help when he got ill). If you're local to the area, you might want to visit an exhibition of his prints being mounted by Pimpernel Prints at The Seaside Gallery in Bexhill from the 10th to the 22nd of September 2012. I might pop along meself.

Is this one of the rarest dust jackets in the world?
Saki, Beasts and Super-Beasts, in DJ

I've been on holiday, hence the lack of posts recently, but before resuming normal service, here's a post about a book that is NOT for sale. I can't sell it, because I don't own it, but believe you me, if I did own it, I'd never sell it. I missed out on buying this particular copy by a matter of hours, and it's entirely possible I'll never see its like again.

Suffice to say that I'm a very big fan (and collector) of the work of Hector Hugh Munro, the author better known as Saki. If you're unfamiliar with him, his Wikipedia entry will bring you properly up to speed, but the brief version is that he wrote brilliant, funny and shocking short stories, often about genteel Edwardian society colliding with the unexpected and the supernatural, which are at their best as good as anything Oscar Wilde and PG Wodehouse ever wrote, and have influenced everyone from Noel Coward and The Goons to The Mighty Boosh. He's never gone out of print, and his collected works fit handily into one volume. (There's also a rather nice little book of uncollected pieces too.) He's out of copyright, so if you want to sample his work online, try this, or this, or this. He's well worth discovering.

Anyway, I collect Saki. Alas, when it comes to him, I'm the kind of collector who has long since passed the stage of simply getting first editions of a writer's books. I have entered the dangerous twilight world of acquiring 'interesting' editions, association copies, and - the really lethal area - first edition copies that are 'better' than the ones I already have. So, I have an alert set up on ABEbooks for any new Saki firsts that are listed. One morning a little while back I opened my emails to find an alert for a Bodley Head first edition of Saki's short story collection Beasts and Super-Beasts. An American dealer had listed it for a reasonable price, but what's this? Complete with pictorial dust jacket?

In nearly 20 years of collecting, I had never even heard of this edition of the book having a dust jacket, let alone seen a copy with one for sale. This dust jacket is, yes folks, 'unknown to bibliographers'.

I clicked through to buy it, pronto, but of course it had already gone. I evidently wasn't the only person who knew quite how rare this was. There was no visual with the listing, but I really wanted to see this jacket. I emailed the dealer, who was kind enough to send me some photos. So here, for what I think must be the first time on the Internet (and with the permission of the lucky purchaser), is the dust jacket for the Bodley Head edition of Saki's Beasts and Super-Beasts.

A cheeky looking society gent with a monocle, apparently in conversation with a wolf. Perfect.

Beasts and Super-Beasts was first published in 1914, by The Bodley Head, but this copy (or at least, this dust jacket) must be from a later printing, as the back includes an advertisement for the 1919 posthumous Saki collection, The Toys of Peace. Perhaps the first printing in 1914 did not have a dustjacket (there was a war on, or about to start) and a jacket was added to a later, post war impression, when The Toys of Peace came out, a book which had its own pictorial jacket (also vanishingly rare, but I did know of its existence, and there are a couple of copies on ABE, for a hefty price):

So there you go. For someone like me, that counts as exciting stuff.