The Case For and Against Psychical Belief

Worcester, Massachussetts: Clark University, 1927. First Edition. 8vo. 24cm x 16cm. Publisher's ribbed deep burgundy cloth, titled in gilt to spine and front board, with a list of the contributors in gilt. Light bumping to spine ends and with some minor signs of wear, bright, clean, and remarkably handsome. A very good copy. 365pp. Internally clean. Lacking the top corner of the front flyleaf. A collection of 14 essays from a positively star studded list of contributors speaking for and against the veracity of spiritualist phenomena, including apparation and materialisation, spirit writing, planchette communication, spirit photography etc. Importantly there are few voices definitvely claiming deception, but a number of sceptical and less credulous opinions, most notably from the usual suspects like Houdini, rather than from people like Frederick Bligh Bond whose experiments with spirit writing could be numbered among the most convincing.