NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Limited edition. Signed by the contributor and illustrator. Publisher's original black cloth with titles in silver to the spine, with colour illustration by David Ho onlay to the upper board and an illustration in blind to the spine, in the David Ho illustrated dustwrapper. Red silk bookmark. With illustrated endpapers. Illustrated throughout with full page black and white tarot cards, chapter headings, and various colour images of 'Nightmare Alley' cover art variations and film posters, and black and white photographs to the rear. A very good or better copy, the binding square and firm, with light spotting to the text block edge and upper edge. The contents are clean throughout, and without previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the original pictorial dustwrapper that has some rubbing to the bottom edge and is lightly faded and softened to the inside front fold.

Issued in an edition of 250 copies from which this example is numbered 48 and signed by Bret Wood and David Ho in blue and black ink, respectively, on the colophon. This collected edition includes five essays by Gresham 'Fortune Tellers Never Starve', 'The Bloodstained Banners', 'Four Legs Are Not Too Many', 'The Romany Trade', and 'My Ten Favourite American Monsters', accompanied by black and white photographs and illustrations, providing the reader with firsthand observations of the dark reality of American 'freakshows' and carnivals. Nightmare Alley is the author's first and best known novel, written while working as an editor and feature writer for true crime magazines (Fawcett Publications). A study of the lowest depths of show business and its sleazy inhabitants - the dark, shadowy world of a second-rate carnival inhabited by hustlers, scheming grifters and Machiavellian femmes fatales, the novel is the basis for the 1947 classic film noir directed by Edmund Goulding, starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray and Helen Walker. A second adaptation, co-written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Willem Dafoe was released in 2021.