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Details
WELLS, H.G. The Food of the Gods and how it came to Earth. London: Macmillan and Co., 1904.
8o. Original green cloth, decorated in blind and gilt (spine a bit cocked). Provenance: William Wymark Jacobs (1863-1943), English writer (presentation inscription).
FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED TO FELLOW FANTASY WRITER W.W. JACOBS: "To W.W. Jacobs from H.G. Wells."
Wells knew W.W. Jacobs, author of The Monkey's Paw, well enough to describe him as the "tyrannous husband" on whom he modeled the Sir Harmon character in his later book The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon. (H.G. Wells in Love, edited by G.P. Wells, Boston, 1984, p.71).
In an letter Wells wrote to Macmillan on August 9, 1905, he compared The Food of the Gods and how it came to Earth to a symphony: "it is a sort of fantasia in bigness -- a thing in three movements, with a variation in treatment in each movement, I suppose you will smile if I compare one of my books to a symphony, because you are I think of that type that does not readily perceive that living men are as good as the dead. You are as skeptical about me as you would have been skeptical about Coleridge if you had been his contemporary, or about Goldsmith, and you force me to unbecoming lengths of self-assertion" (Dickson, p.145). Wells 24.
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FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED TO FELLOW FANTASY WRITER W.W. JACOBS: "To W.W. Jacobs from H.G. Wells."
Wells knew W.W. Jacobs, author of The Monkey's Paw, well enough to describe him as the "tyrannous husband" on whom he modeled the Sir Harmon character in his later book The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon. (H.G. Wells in Love, edited by G.P. Wells, Boston, 1984, p.71).
In an letter Wells wrote to Macmillan on August 9, 1905, he compared The Food of the Gods and how it came to Earth to a symphony: "it is a sort of fantasia in bigness -- a thing in three movements, with a variation in treatment in each movement, I suppose you will smile if I compare one of my books to a symphony, because you are I think of that type that does not readily perceive that living men are as good as the dead. You are as skeptical about me as you would have been skeptical about Coleridge if you had been his contemporary, or about Goldsmith, and you force me to unbecoming lengths of self-assertion" (Dickson, p.145). Wells 24.