The Magic Island
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1929). First printing. Black and white drawings by Alexander King. Cloth over boards. Octavo. x, 336 pages. Very good in a good dust jacket. Bound in black cloth over boards with silver stamped spine titles. Minor extremity bumps and light rubs. Jacket has edge chips, tears, and rubbed wrinkles. Spine is a bit sun faded, and there are tape repairs to underside. Still a very presentable copy of this uncommon first edition.
This is the book that introduced zombies into American pop culture. Just three years after its publication Hollywood released "White Zombie," the first of many zombie movies and shows to follow.
William Seabrook travelled to Haiti in the 1920s to explore its dark mysteries, particularly the forbidden religion of voodoo. In the jungle-covered mountains and dark valleys he found a civilization descended from African slaves, and this is his vivid account of what he witnessed in that forgotten world of black gods and black magic.
Seabrook, a native of Westminster, Maryland, was an adventurer, World War I ambulance driver, occultist, and ex-pat writer whose friends included Aleister Crowley, Ernest Hemingway, and e.e. cummings, among others.
Item #1432
Price: $300