Item #815 The Magic Island. Seabrook, illiam, uehler.
The Magic Island
The Magic Island
The Magic Island
The Magic Island
The Book that Introduced Zombies to America

The Magic Island

New York: Blue Ribbon Books, Inc., (1929). Early reprint. Black and white drawings by Alexander King. Cloth over boards. Octavo. x, 3-336 pages. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. A few minor rubs to binding extremities. Hinges sound. Jacket has some rubbed edge wrinkles, shallow edge chips, and short edge tears reinforced from back side by prior owner.

Willie Seabrook, born in 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.

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.

Significantly, it was Seabrook, through this book, who introduced the idea of zombies to American popular culture.


Item #815

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