The Other Passenger: 18 Strange Stories

London: John Westhouse (Publishers) Ltd. Fair. 1944. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a reading copy only, with considerable external wear, both endpapers removed and hinges reinforced with tape, previous owner's name plus date & place of purchase in ink at top of half-title page, small ink check-marks next to all titles in the table of contents, small bookseller's rubber-stamp (Bertrand Smith's Acres of Books, Long Beach, Calif.) on front pastedown; all color plates are present]. (8 color plates) Highly-regarded collection of the author's short fiction, containing eighteen stories of a fantasy/horror nature, divided into two sections: "Portraits" and "Mysteries." (And if the stories are strange, the vividly-colored full-page Dali-esque illustrations are exceedingly so -- and NOTE that these were not carried over to the American edition, issued by J.B. Lippincott in 1946. See the second scanned image for an example.) The first story in the book, "The Glass Eye," is something of a classic; it was adapted for a memorable 1957 episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (with a teleplay by Stirling Silliphant). .