The Secret Mountain, and other Tales. With Decorations by K. Romney Towndrow.

Bookseller Notes

Inscribed by the illustrator on the flyleaf: 'To Josephine, without whom this book would have had no being - this upon the 4th anniversary of our re-meeting after very many years Dec. 8th 1923, Kenneth Romney Towndrow, Dec. 8th 1927'. The recipient was the artist's wife, to whom the precise nature of the debt in respect of the 'symbolic designs' within the book is obscure - but they are worthy of accolade, and would seem to be his only book illustration work.A collection of ten stories. As a prose stylist, Morris - a prominent theosophist, who was born and died in Wales, but resident for a period in California - was ranked by Ursula Le Guin alongside Tolkien and Eddison as the high-points of the fantasy genre. Towndrow's illustrations are equally striking, though the artist himself is not well known: he wrote a monograph on the work of Alfred Stevens, and provided dustjacket designs, all of them superb, for work by Henry Green ('Living'), Karel apek ('Krakatit'), Henri Barbusse ('Under Fire'), Walter F. White ('The Fire in the Flint'), and a few others.