buchan john first published under (1 risultati)

Hardcover. Condizione: Very Good. No Jacket. 1st Edition. Two hefty matching volumes in green cloth with deckled edges, bound without advertisements or illustrations. In both cases the free endpapers (only) are somewhat age-browned, while the text pages (set up in two columns, magazine-style) are wonderfully clean. The May-to-August volume contains an erroneous title page indicating "Vol. CXCVIII July -- December 1915," which has been corrected in pencil to"May -- August," and fortunately the corrected dates match both the spine title AND the contents. (Yes, we checked.) "The Thirty-Nine Steps," Buchan's breakthrough espionage-based action-adventure, his first featuring accidental hero Richard Hannay, has been filmed at least three times, the classic remaining Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 entry, starring Robert Donat and replacing much of the original plot with Madeleine Carroll, a substitution to which film-goers of the time don't seem to have offered much objection. A 1979 remake starring John Mills and Robert Powell as the man-on-the-run hewed closer to the original, and made far less of an impression. After appearing here in the July, August, and September numbers of the magazine, the novel was released by Blackwood's in book form in October, to considerable success (nicer first printings of said famously fragile book now often trading at $1,000.) Buchan wrote "The Thirty-Nine Steps" while bedridden with a duodenal ulcer, an illness which remained with him all his life. Buchan's son William (later Lord Tweedsmuir?) wrote that the name of the book originated when the author's daughter was counting the stairs at St. Cuby, a private nursing home on Cliff Promenade in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. "There was a wooden staircase leading down to the beach. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are 39 steps." Actually, there were 78, but the author halved the number to make a better title. When the original steps were later replaced (with concrete, lamentably) one of the originals, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan as a keepsake. These issues of the magazine also contain much war coverage, including T.F. Farman's "Revolutionary Role of Aircraft in War" (the father of Henry and Maurice warns that "The invasion of a country by the air will be a possibility of which serious account will have to be taken in future wars") and "The Achievement of the Submarine" by David Hannay, who declares the submarine blockade of England has been "a confessed failure." (Though the Germans would keep working on it.) Reduced from $625.