The Classics Selections

This edition presents all ten pieces, from the nightmare of “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “In the Court of the Dragon” and “The Yellow Sign” to “The Demoiselle d’Ys” and the Paris studio tales that close the book. The notes guide you through Chambers’s Latin Quarter, his borrowings from Ambrose Bierce, and the long afterlife of Hastur and Carcosa, without spoiling the stories. For first-time readers and longtime fans alike, this is the complete book with the context it deserves.

This edition helps you read the book clearly. The new preface and notes separate what is genuinely ancient, such as the Emerald Tablet and the Hermetic writings of Roman Egypt, from what belongs to the New Thought movement of turn-of-the-century America, and they explain every unfamiliar term along the way. The complete original text is presented unabridged. Whether you are meeting Hermetic philosophy for the first time or returning to a book you already love, this is a clear, well-made reading edition.

In seven short chapters Okakura travels from the tea of Tang and Song China to Taoism and Zen, the architecture of the tea-room, the art of flowers, and the final hours of the great tea-master Rikyu. This annotated edition supplies the names, dates and context that the original assumes, gives modern spellings for Okakura’s older romanizations, and notes where he simplifies.

A short, beautiful book for tea lovers, students of Japanese culture and anyone drawn to the idea of living simply.

This edition collects six of them, “The Festival,” “The Temple,” “The Colour Out of Space,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror,” in the texts of their first printings in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. The notes explain the places, books and history behind the tales, and the preface traces Lovecraft’s debts to Arthur Machen and Robert W. Chambers and speaks honestly about the racism in his work.

Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel created the hard-boiled detective as we know him. This edition follows the first Knopf printing and adds spoiler-free notes on Spade’s San Francisco, the period’s slang, Prohibition and the real history behind the Knights of Malta’s falcon.

For sale in the United States only.

Watching from her garden next door is an elderly spinster who notices everything and forgets nothing. Agatha Christie’s 1930 novel was the first full-length mystery to feature Jane Marple, and its puzzle of clocks, notes and a shot heard in the woods is laid out fairly for every reader who wants to solve it first. The notes in this edition explain curates, inquests, barrows and the rest of the 1930 village world without giving anything away.

For sale in the United States only.

This annotated edition presents Kahlil Gibran’s complete text with all twelve of his drawings. A new preface tells the story of the immigrant poet from Lebanon who wrote it in New York, and the footnotes trace the biblical, Sufi and Romantic voices a reader can hear in it. Notes on each of the 28 sections, a glossary, a short chronology and a guide to choosing passages for weddings, births and memorials complete the book.