WIDNALL, Samuel Page (1827-94). A Mystery of Sixty Centuries. Or A Modern St. George and the Dragon, Grantchester, 1889, 8vo, frontispiece and plates, original cloth-backed boards. FIRST EDITION. RARE.

WIDNALL, Samuel Page (1827-94).  A Mystery of Sixty Centuries. Or A Modern St. George and the Dragon. Written, Printed, Illustrated and Published, by S. P. Widnall. Grantchester: [S. P. Widnall], 1889. 8vo (176 x 117mm). Mounted photographed frontispiece of "The Dragon's Head", 3 wood-engraved tinted plates by the author, initials and decorations (some very faint mainly marginal browning). Original cloth-backed paper boards, spine with printed paper label, red edges, yellow endpapers (edges rubbed, scratch to upper cover, lower cover rubbed, inner hinges splitting). Provenance: Blanche Parsons, 1930 (juvenile pencil signature on front free endpaper). FIRST EDITION of this fantasy novel in the manner of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Athur Conan Doyle, in which the narrator and his companion discover a previously unexplored valley in Africa populated by dinosaurs and a pre-Adamite race of mankind who might constitute a kind of 'missing link'. The frontispiece contrives to be both comic and nightmarish at the same time. RARE. Not in Bleiler The Guide to Supernatural Fiction.