The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent shape, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
From the dust jacket, an excerpt from Carl Van Doren's introduction:
Fifteen years ago I wrote an introduction to Walter de la Mare's Memoirs of a Midget. Now I write another in a decade of world-wide tragedy and dread. In reading the book over again I find that it seems hardly to have changed at all with the changing times.
It is a narrative seen from a point which is new to fiction: a midget's-eye view of the world. Yet the normal characters will seem normal to normal readers. There are touches of Dickens in the novel, and of farce.
Gulliver, in his adventures among the giants, may now and then be uncomfortable or embarrassed, but he is not sensitive, and he can look forward to a time when he will live with men of his own size. Miss M., who is intensely sensitive, knows –or learns –that there is no congenial country for her to return to or escaper to. She cannot have Gulliver's consolation that it is the giants who are abnormal.
The Memoirs could be the only serious book about a midget in the English language and still not be particularly notable. It could be an allegory of the handicapped, and still not rise above a well-meaning level. What gave it distinction as soon as it appeared in 1921, and has kept it fresh and alive, is its original idea, its expert handling, its affectionate realism and occasional humor, and its profound human warmth. The Memoirs from the first was seen to have a classic quality. And after twenty years, now that men and women all over the earth want if they can to draw together in sympathetic fraternity, the book means more than ever. Classics have their ups and downs, but it takes them a long while to wear out.
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