Riders of the Silences
New York: The H.K. Fly Company, (1920). Frank Tenney Johnson. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Green cloth over boards, title and decorations stamped in black onto upper board and spine, 12mo (7-1/2 inches tall), pp. 310, (first and last two pages are blanks), illustrated with one B&W plate. Volume with fraying to head of spine, rubbing to edges and corners, traces of red staining to upper board - perhaps from original DJ, title page with 2 chips from foot due to being roughly opened, adjoining contents page with a one inch closed tear also at foot from sharing the same trauma, a few leaves with corner creases, p.o. name in ink to front pastedown and ffep. Of further bibliographical interest are the points that the single plate (touch of foxing to extremities - not affecting illustation) is tipped in at p. 295 onto a signature's terminal leaf, rather than it being used as what could logically have been a frontis (with no evidence to suggest it ever was used as one, even under magnification) and that the author's name is spelled, on both the upper board and back strip, lacking the "e" in "Frederick" as found on the title page. Good. Item #1677
Max Brand's very uncommon third book, released under one of his many pseudonyms after being serialized in six parts by Argosy in 1919. Riders of the Silences was also published in the UK in 1926 by Hodder & Stoughton as LUCK and again by Dodd, Mead in 1986 as Riders of the Silences. No other copies currently available in the trade, just one copy found in OCLC at UC Berkeley Libraries. Ref. Tuska & Piekarski, p. 184-5.
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