THE GOLEM

First Centipede Press edition and first edition with these illustrations. Signed by John Clute and Helmut Wenske. Original quarter cloth with pictorial boards and gilt titles to the spine. In slipcase. With a dark green silk bookmark. Illustrated with a tissue-guarded frontispiece, black-and-white full colour plates throughout the text and a portfolio of colour plates by Helmut Wenske at the rear, followed by a 'Film and Art' portfolio featuring film stills and posters. A fine copy, the binding square and tight, the contents clean and bright throughout and without previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the lightly rubbed original black cloth slipcase.

Issued in a limited edition of 210 copies, this example is numbered 57 and is signed by John Clute and Helmut Wenske in black ink on the limitation page. A beautifully produced edition of Gustav Meyrink's classic, hallucinatory gothic novel based on an old Prague myth about a man formed from the mud of the Vltava River. Originally serialised in Die Weißen Blätter in 1913 and 1914, it was first published in book form by Kurt Wolff in Germany in 1915. An immediate success, 'The Golem' sold 200,000 copies in the first year of publication. German psychedelic artist Helmut Wenske's series of 12 paintings inspired by Meyrink's novel, first completed in the 1970s, are published in combination with the source material here for the first time. Also included are images from the 1920 silent expressionist film 'Der Golem' directed by Paul Wegener, which was based on the novel.