The Carnelian Cube: A Humorous Fantasy

E-103: The Gnome Press. Very Good in Good dust jacket. 1948. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. The Gnome Press. 1948. 230 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. Signed and inscribed by L. Sprague De Camp to noted book collector and my friend Tony Bambace on the title page. DJ has chipping, shelf-wear and rubbing present to the DJ especially around the extremities. Bound in cloth boards. Boards have shelf-wear present to the extremities (rubbing to bottom edges). No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. It is the evening of July 8, 1939 and the scene is the mountainous district of Cappadocia, in Asia Minor. Arthur Cleveland Finch, the story's hero, is a historian and archeologist, and he and his friend, Lloyd Owens, are on a dig, examining whatever ancient artifacts they can find in the hope of expanding human knowledge. The dig is being finance by Leo Pushman, a rich movie magnate who once read Arthur's dreary, academic tome "The American Deme; a Study of Pontus and Armenia under the Byzantine Empire" and liked it. Arthur has no idea of how Pushman even struggled through the book, which he considers to be as "dull as a third-rate sermon". Why should that "unimportant piece of prose" have attracted so much attention when his book of poetry, which was liked by the critics, sold only 37 copies? The world just doesn't seem to be reasonable Arthur thinks. Arthur and Lloyd discover that Tirdat Ariminian, one of the local workers on the dig, seems to have purloined a small find: as red carnelian cube, about the size of a golf-ball, with an Etruscan inscription on it. The cube seems rather out of place here in Cappadocia and Arthur and Lloyd think it may be quite a find. But Tirdat claims that the cube is his: that he got it from a man named Iblunos in far away Nigdeh. Iblunos was an old man, "maybe three hundred years". The stone was a "dream-stone. Arthur is bemused and that night sleeps with the cube under his pillow. If only the world were more rational Arthur laments again! In the morning Arthur wakes to a very different world. It has become exactly what he asked for: a completely rational world. But will Arthur like what he asked for, and if not how will he get out of this strange enchantment? E-106; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 230 pages .