Theodore S. Blackwood – författare

Before Scaramouche and Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini was already spinning tales of sword and irony. In the Somerset of 1685, a gentleman wins a reluctant bride in a quarrel over a toast just as the Duke of Monmouth lands at Lyme to raise his doomed rebellion - and a single incriminating letter, fallen into the wrong hands, can send them all to the gallows. Swift, witty, and bright with steel, this edition presents Sabatini's complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

William Dean Howells - editor of The Atlantic and the most powerful literary man in America - made his masterpiece a study not of romance but of business ethics. Silas Lapham, a rough, self-made paint millionaire from Vermont, builds a grand house on the fashionable side of Beacon Street only to find that Boston's old families will take his money but never his daughters, while a crisis in his affairs forces a reckoning with his own honesty. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates, Sargent's Boston among them.

A ruthless little farce from one of Broadway's most durable hits. Caught out in a lie, a young wife tells her husband she has had a baby - and now, at desperately short notice, must actually produce one in a New York flat, aided by a frantic friend and a rotating cast of borrowed infants. Margaret Mayo, an actress turned playwright, built a comic machine so sturdy it was filmed three times. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

From the creator of Tarzan comes a hard-driving adventure of the lowest streets of Chicago and the far side of the Pacific. Billy Byrne is a brawler and a thief, shanghaied aboard a ship bent on kidnapping an heiress - but a shipwreck, a lost island, and a headhunters' village will forge in him a conscience and a courage he never wanted. Fast, brutal, and surprisingly tender in its second half, this edition presents Burroughs's complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

Eleanor H. Porter gave the language the word 'Pollyanna' and is remembered for the wrong book - for the Miss Billy novels are sharper than their sunny reputation. Now married, Billy has a house, a husband who composes, and relatives who visit and never leave, along with the dawning discovery that being adored is not at all the same as being consulted. Beneath every comic scene runs a quiet, pointed argument about whether a wife may keep work of her own. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 42 full-page color plates.

From the creator of Tarzan comes a sweeping medieval adventure of vengeance and lost birthright. Stolen as a child by his father's enemy and raised to be the deadliest swordsman in England - but never told his own name - Norman of Torn becomes the scourge of the barons in the turbulent war of Simon de Montfort. Written the same year as Tarzan of the Apes, this edition presents Burroughs's complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 35 full-page color plates.

Maurice Leblanc was an unnoticed jobbing writer until a magazine asked him for a crime story in 1905 - and France promptly took the gentleman burglar Arsene Lupin to its heart, preferring him cheerfully to Sherlock Holmes. Lupin announces his thefts in advance, is arrested, escapes, runs his next caper from a prison cell, and matches wits with a certain English detective whose name the lawyers insisted be changed. This edition presents the complete and unabridged translation, newly typeset and illustrated with 39 full-page color plates of the era, Beraud's Paris among them.

Edna Lyall - the pen name of Ada Ellen Bayly, a clergyman's daughter who argued in fiction for Home Rule, for women, and for freethinkers - turns here to the writing life itself. Seen through the eyes of a devoted friend, a novelist endures years of rejection, a father who despises his work, and a patient girl who waits, until reputation arrives slowly and almost by surprise. Her quietest book, and exact in every publishing detail, this edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

No book has told the truth about the literary life more mercilessly than New Grub Street. Two writers stand at its center - one who can turn out what the market wants and one who cannot - and the woman who married the second on the strength of his reviews. George Gissing, who wrecked a brilliant academic career at eighteen and knew the reading room, the pawnshop, and the three-volume deadline from within, spares no one. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates, Spitzweg's poor poet among them.

A. E. W. Mason - actor, Member of Parliament, and future chief of naval intelligence in Spain - invented Inspector Hanaud in 1910 as a deliberate anti-Holmes: fat, jovial, and endlessly interested in people. At Aix-les-Bains a young Englishman falls for the companion of a wealthy widow; by morning the widow is murdered and the girl has vanished, and everyone knows exactly what to think - everyone but Hanaud. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 40 full-page color plates.