Item #122798 Tales of the Old Regime, and the Bullet of the Fated Ten. Price WARUNG, William ASTLEY.
Tales of the Old Regime, and the Bullet of the Fated Ten
Tales of the Old Regime, and the Bullet of the Fated Ten

Tales of the Old Regime, and the Bullet of the Fated Ten

Melbourne, George Robertson & Company, 1897 [first edition].

Octavo, viii, 248 pages.

Original pale brown and white cloth (lettered and ruled in black), with 'GR&Co' monogrammed endpapers; cloth lightly flecked; minor loss and a few sealed tears to the leading margins of two conjugate leaves (pages 125-128), caused when an uncut edge was inexpertly opened; slight loss to silverfish to the front flyleaf; endpapers foxed, with minimal foxing elsewhere; acidic paper tanned; early ownership signature on the title page; notwithstanding, an excellent copy.

A collection of convict stories by William Astley (1855-1911), 'journalist and author under the pseudonym "Price Warung" ... Seduced by a bitter personal hatred of the "System", he was consistently guilty of overwriting and unnecessary editorial intrusion. The best of his stories are the imaginative reconstructions of convict freemasonry in "Secret Society of the Ring" and "The Bullet of the Fated Ten" ... In these stories his work compares favourably with that of Marcus Clarke' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography').

Item #122798

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