MOON-FACE and Other Stories by London, Jack - 1906

1906. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906. 4 pp undated ads. Original blue cloth decorated in white, green and gilt. First Edition, consisting of 8,400 copies (preceded only by a pre-publication copyright issue). Probably the best-known story in this collection is "Planchette" -- in which the spirit of a woman's dead father returns to kill her lover; it showed that Jack had evidently not outgrown his mother's belief in evil spirits. By the time MOON-FACE came out, Jack had journeyed to the Far East to cover the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst organization -- at which he tried to emulate the Great White Scribe of the period, Richard Harding Davis. He badly injured an ankle on in a leaping game with the other correspondents on board ship: "It was the beginning of a morbid worry about his physical condition, a long anxiety that would end only with his death" [Sinclair]. He returned to California to discover that his wife had attached his Hearst earnings in her suit for divorce (Bess ultimately agreed to a divorce on the grounds of desertion, after he offered to build a home in Piedmont for her and their two daughters). This is a bright, near-fine copy (light rubbing at the extremities) -- of this handsomely-bound book. Sisson & Martens p. 28; Blanck 11895.