Our last week at Rooke HQ has seen all sorts of fascinating, scarce, beautiful and aged works, with our personal highlights of the week including a signed 'Mosquito Coast' by Paul Theroux, a first edition of 'Journey's End' by R. C. Sheriff, and a signed John Le Carre's 'Karla' trilogy, breaking up a week heavy with Scottish topographical works, art history and travel writing. But here in 'Through the Rooke-ing Glass', we prefer to showcase our more outlandish works, which today span some four hundred years.

Trent's Last Case

Cited by the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie, as being one of the three best detective novels ever written, 'Trent's Last Case' is in fact E. C. Bentley's first novel featuring the amateur sleuth Philip Trent. The work is cited to be the first piece of parodic detective fiction of its kind, and it follows Philip Trent as he tries to solve the murder of Sigsbee Manderson, a rich American gentleman found murdered in the grounds of his rural English home. We've added a first edition of this important whodunit to our library; illustrated with a frontispiece in full colour, it makes for the perfect addition to the collection of any keen mystery - or Christie! - fans.

The Voyage of the Jeanette

A very scarce two volume collection narrating the doomed voyage taken by George W. De Long between 1879 and 81 was particularly fascinating for us to read up on. De Long was a US Naval Officer, selected to lead the 'Jeanette' expedition, which set out to discover the Open Polar Sea, a stretch of polar sea then believed to be unhampered by ice. The expedition was successful in disproving the theory, but not quite the success they'd hoped for; after the vessel was trapped by ice and forced to drift for some two years, it tragically sunk off the Siberian coast, resulting in the deaths of twenty of twenty-three members of the expedition, including its leader, De Long, who starved to death whilst seeking rescue. George W. Melville, a survivor, managed to successfully find help, later returning to find the resting places of his fellow crew. This work is De Long's journals, edited by his wife, and narrates the journey from its exciting start until its bitter end. It is illustrated throughout with folding maps, diagrams and illustrations, including a steel frontis of its tragic author, and makes for an insight into this tragic piece of the history of exploration, presented in a fantastic pictorial binding.

Scarfe Face

It brought us great pleasure to list this 1993 first edition of 'Scarfe Face', a brilliant work on caricatures and the art of translating faces to paper. Signed by the artist Gerald Scarfe to the title page, this work use caricatures of all manner of figures from popular culture, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank Sinatra, Margaret Thatcher and Mick Jagger, as well as Michael Jackson as seen here. Scarfe is an acclaimed cartoonist and artist, known for his graphics for Pink Floyd, including for 'The Wall'; he also designed the majority of the characters in Disney's 1997 film 'Hercules'. With its witty title continued throughout in the artist's depictions, this is a humorous and eye-catching work which also serves as a thought-provoking thesis on the face. Our edition is signed by Gerald Scarfe, and presented in the original and unclipped dust wrapper.

Dr. Nikola's Experiment

Shivers ran down our spine as we gazed into the eyes of Doctor Nikola, as illustrated by Stanley L. Wood. Created by Guy Boothby, an Australian novelist, Dr. Nikola is a criminal mastermind whose life's work is in pursuit of immortality and world domination, alongside his black cat Apollyon.  This occultist villain functioned as a forerunner to Sax Rohmer's character Fu Manchu, since seen as the archetype evil criminal genius. We immensely enjoyed listing these rather sinister works, which included an 1896 first edition of 'Doctor Nikola' and an 1899 first edition of 'Dr. Nikola's Experiment', both in excellent pictorial bindings depicting the wicked mastermind that is Dr. Nikola

Africa

We are always thrilled to add seventeenth century works to our collection, with our recent addition no exception. 'Africa: Being An Accurate Description of the Regions of Aegypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid' dates from 1670, making it over three and a half centuries old, and was an important work, comprising the first attempt to provide a broad and accurate overview of the continent of Africa according to contemporary views and beliefs. Presented in its contemporary binding, our edition contains eight engraved plates, and functions as an insight into the representation of the continent of Africa from a Eurocentric point of view.





Our header this week is taken from a 1942 'The Nutcracker Suite from Walt Disney's Fantasia', a splendid narration of the famous tale as depicted in Walt Disney's 1940 film Fantasia, inspired by the music of Tchaikovsky, brought to life with illustrations by animator Art Babbitt, and transcribed for piano by Frederick Stark, rendering it a charming and unusual work.