Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti
London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1939.
First British edition, first printing. [x], 290 pp. Bound in publisher's black cloth stamped in blind on front board and gilt on spine. Near Fine with slight lean to binding, light foxing to textblock edges, endpapers, and sporadically to margins throughout. Offsetting from 1984 purchase slip to pp. x-1, contemporary Book Society bookplate to front pastedown. In a Very Good unclipped dust jacket with moderate wear, chipping, foxing and light toning.
A collection of Caribbean folklore from the Harlem Renaissance luminary, published in the United States as Tell My Horse. In 1936 Zora Neale Hurston was awarded a travel grant of $2,000 to study African culture in the West Indies. She spent months gathering tales and observing magic practices in Jamaica and Haiti, and it was in Haiti that she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks. It took her longer to edit Voodoo Gods, and she found some voodoo rituals too unnerving to include.
The bookplate in this copy was designed for the Book Society by Robert Gibbings, an Irish artist who ran the Golden Cockerel Press from 1924 to 1933. The Book Society was Britain's first book-of-the-month club, led by a panel of literary celebrities. It did not manufacture its own books, but bulk ordered discounted first editions from the publishers. Thousands of copies of Voodoo Gods were sent out to all corners of the British Empire, but few have survived, and copies with the dust jacket are rare.
Price: $4,800