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Ray Bradbury. Dark Carnival....
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$1,937.50
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Description
Ray Bradbury. Dark Carnival. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1947.8vo. Publisher's black cloth, spine stamped in gilt; original pictorial dust jacket.
FIRST EDITION of the author's first book. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR on the title page: "Ray Bradbury 9/1/96."
Only 3,112 copies of this "pioneering" book were printed. "The first book by Bradbury... an American author destined to exercise an enormous influence on fantasy, horror, science fiction, and American literature in general. Many of these stories had appeared in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines in the 1940s" (Joshi).
Of this title, Bradbury himself wrote, when corresponding with Sheldon Jaffery, author of Horrors and Unpleasantries: A Bibliographical History & Collector's Price Guide to Arkham House, "...one of the original titles for the collection was something like A Child's Garden of Death or A Child's Garden of Murder. Bad, yes? I'm glad I finally hit on Dark Carnival... that was supposed to be a long story about an evil carnival which arrived in a small town late one October night. I never finished the story, at that time, so the book came out minus its title story!"
Stephen King writes, in Danse Macabre, about Bradbury: "his best work, from the beginning, has been his fantasy... and his best fantasy has been his horror stories. As previously mentioned, the best of the early Bradbury was collected in the marvelous Arkham House collection Dark Carnival. No easily obtainable edition of this work, the Dubliners of American fantasy fiction, is available..."
Condition: Touch of wear to edges and corners; bookseller's ticket to front pastedown. Dust jacket unclipped (priced "$3.00"); backed with paper on verso; spine somewhat sunned; small stain to front flap fold; some chipping and edgewear, particularly along folds; some scuffing and pale staining to rear panel.
References: Currey, p. 55; Jaffery 27; Joshi, Sixty Years of Arkham House, 24; Nielsen, Arkham House Books, 25.
Provenance: From the collection of David Aronovitz.
Auction Info
2026 May 13 The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy, Part I Rare Books Signature® Auction #6336 (go to Auction Home page)
Auction Dates
May, 2026
13th
Wednesday
Bids + Registered Phone Bidders: 2
Lot Tracking Activity: N/A
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