THE SHADOW OF DEATH: A Collection of Poems, Songs and Sonnets.

First edition, first printing. Inscribed presentation copy. Publisher's original thin card covers, with white folded paper wrapper illustrated in red and black to the upper panel. 79 pages. Brown coated endpapers. All edges gilt. A very good copy, the binding square and firm. The wrapper is a little worn to the spine tips and rubbed at the folds with some toning and a few marks. The contents, mildly toned, are otherwise clean throughout and without previous owner's marks. An excellent example.

Inscribed by the author and signed with his snake monogram in black ink to the reverse of the front endpaper "Annie E Paskin, the gift of the author". Stenbock's third and final volume of verse, the first edition of which is rare in commerce, and distinctly uncommon institutionally (Library Hub and WorldCat locate only seven copies: British Library; Bodleian Library; Cambridge University; National Library of Scotland; Trinity College, Dublin; Harvard University; University of California, Los Angeles). Signed copies of any of the author's books are exceedingly rare, this being the only author inscribed presentation copy of this title we have been able to trace. Of the author's two previous collections, no contemporary reviews are known, not true of 'The Shadow of Death' which the Pall Mall Gazette savaged in the issue of 1 March 1894 declaring it 'an elaborate and screaming parody of that latterday literary abortion, the youthful décadent'. A friend of Aubrey Beardsley, patron of the pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, and contemporary of Oscar Wilde, Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock died at the age of 36 as a result of alcoholism and his addiction to opium, having published just three slim volumes of poetry and one collection of short stories. William Butler Yeats in his anthology 'The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935', (OUP, 1936) describes the author, "a scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men". (d'Arch Smith, Timothy: Love in Earnest; Yeats, W. B. (edits): The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Tibet, David: Of Kings and Things).