Books

First edition, first impression; 4to; original green cloth-backed pictorial boards, with the Peake-designed dust jacket; some mild, typical browning early and late but a very good copy in the somewhat frayed dust-jacket with minor loss at the spine ends and one corner. Peake's first book and of considerable scarcity. It has been said by hopeful booksellers over the years of pretty much every uncommon book printed in the late 1930s, that the bulk of the edition had been destroyed in the Blitz. A piece of book lore that is mostly untrue. However the warehouse of Country Life was certainly raised to the ground. This occurred just as Slaughterboard was about to be published. Only a small number of review copies had been sent out and the book was indeed not reprinted at all until 1945. As a consequence, copies of the 1939 printing have always been extremely hard to find. Copies in dust jacket still more so. As a side note: these earlier, monochrome illustrations are far better than the later coloured versions.

Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor is a fantastical story of a captain and his crew, containing richly drawn characters by Mervyn Peake, an author known for his ability to blend the whimsical with the macabre.