Lot 125
Hodgson, William Hope
The Night Land
Auction: 02 October 2025 from 10:00 BST
Description
London: Eveleigh Nash, 1912. First edition, presentation copy from the author inscribed: ‘Mrs N. Harrison. from William Hope Hodgson, Nov: 28th / 12’ on the front free-endpaper, 8vo, original blind-tooled red cloth gilt, a little toning to paper, occasional very minor spotting, some fading and rubbing to spine, slight marking and bumping to covers
Footnote
Presentation copies of this work are scarce. A horror-fantasy work and an example of the ‘dying Earth’ sub-genre, the book made a strong impression on Hodgson’s contemporaries, with Lovecraft writing that it is “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written”. In the 70s, Clark Ashton-Smith analysed the novel, writing:
'…it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story…'.
Hodgson was to suffer the same tragic fate of many of his contemporaries. He was killed at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 1918.