101 - [LITERATURE] - SCHWOB, Marcel

[LITERATURE] - SCHWOB, Marcel The King with the Golden Mask Paris, Georges Crès et Cie, “Les Maîtres du Livre” series, 1917 In-12°. Full royal blue morocco leather, signed by H. Bellevallée. Spine with 5 raised bands, author, title, and date in gold. Lining decorated with a gold fillet and arabesques surrounding mustard-colored moiré. Mustard-colored moiré endpapers. Gold-edged pages. Original covers and spine preserved. Spine faded and ribs rubbed. Slipcase edged with the same morocco leather. A prestigious reprint of this absolute masterpiece of fin-de-siècle Symbolist and fantastical literature, originally published in 1893. This collection of twenty-one cruel, mystical, and baroque tales unfolds a world of extraordinary allegorical power, populated by masked figures, lepers, pirates, and assassins. The Crès edition is highly sought after for its typographical precision and its illustration, which opens with a frontispiece portrait of the author—a woodcut based on a drawing by Teodor Spicer Simson. Printed in a run of 1,100 copies; this copy is no. 1/48 in the “Imperial Japan” series (no. 28), following 5 “Old Japan” and 8 “China” editions. References: Talvart and Place, *Bibliographie des auteurs modernes de langue française*, vol. XXII, p. 94; Monod, *Manual for the Collector of 19th-Century Books*, no. 10381; Carteret, *The Bibliophile’s Treasure*, vol. IV, p. 362. Provenance: from the Errera family library