Night's Master (Signed and Lettered Presentation Copy)

LEE, Tanith (illus. Barclay Shaw [cover] & Randy Broecker [interiors]). Night's Master. Oak Park, Illinois: Highland Press, 1984.

Slim Octavo. Publisher's cloth with magenta spine lettered in yellow. Illustrated endpapers. Original unclipped pictorial dust jacket (price $35.00 on front flap). Cloth slipcase. pp. [i: limitation], [v], 162, [ii]. Interior illustrations by Randy Broecker throughout; dust jacket illustration by Barclay Shaw. First hardcover edition. First edition thus. Limited to 526 copies in total: 500 numbered copies for sale, and 26 lettered presentation copies. This copy lettered G — one of the 26 non-sale presentation copies. Signed by the author, the cover illustrator, and the interior illustrator on the special limitation page. Not for public sale at time of publication.

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was among the most prolific and the most gifted British fantasy writers of the twentieth century — the author of over ninety novels and three hundred short stories, a winner of multiple British Fantasy Awards including Best Novel, and the recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2013. She was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel (for Death's Master in 1980, the second volume in the series of which Night's Master is the first), and her prose style — ornate, sensuous, rhythmically assured, capable of moving between tenderness and terror with complete command — is among the most distinctive in modern fantasy literature. She died in May 2015; her signature on this limitation page is therefore a posthumous one, carrying the weight that such signatures inevitably acquire.

Night's Master, first published by DAW Books in paperback in 1978, is the opening volume of the Tales from the Flat Earth sequence — five novels set in a world that is, as its name declares, literally flat, beneath a dome of sky that separates the human world from the realm of the demon princes above and the underworld below. The series draws directly and openly on the tradition of the Thousand and One Nights: its narrative mode is that of oriental fable, its structure is episodic, and its presiding spirit is a conviction that the stories of human desire, folly, love, and death are inexhaustible. The demon lord Azhrarn, Night's Master, is the central figure of this first volume — a being of terrible beauty who interferes in human lives for reasons that range from malice to caprice to something he cannot quite name and that resembles, at the edges, compassion. The sequence was praised by the British Fantasy Society Bulletin as "a treasure chest spilled open with cascading dreams of silk, jewels, demon horses, perfumes, spices, tapestries, and — most precious of all — a sense of wonder." The series is widely regarded as Lee's masterwork in long fiction.

The Highland Press edition of 1984 was the first hardcover publication of the novel in the United States, produced by the Oak Park, Illinois small press that specialised in limited editions of fantasy and science fiction. The dust jacket illustration is by Barclay Shaw, the American science fiction artist whose covers for Highland Press, Berkley, and other publishers were among the most distinctive in the genre during this period. The interior illustrations are by Randy Broecker, whose work for Highland Press gave their limited editions a visual coherence unusual in small press production of the era. Both illustrators signed the limitation page alongside Lee.

The lettered presentation copies — of which this is one of twenty-six, none intended for commercial sale — are substantially scarcer than the 500 numbered copies, and circulate far less frequently on the market.

Fine. Dust jacket unclipped and fine. Slipcase shows some very mild shelf markings only. Otherwise without flaw inside and out.

This book is currently on display in our Leichhardt store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]

Catalogue Number: HH000377