Thursday, March 14, 2019

Very obscure Manning-Sanders novel: "Mermaid's Mirror"

I've wavered at times over the years regarding what I believe to be the most rare, hard-to-find work by Ruth Manning-Sanders. These days, I believe it's her 1935 novel Mermaid's Mirror, which was published by Cassell & Co. For a while, I wasn't even sure if it was real, because it didn't show up on all of her online bibliographies. I have never seen it for sale on Amazon, eBay or AbeBooks. And I've never seen an online image of the book or its cover. WorldCat says it's held at four libraries overseas, including Oxford. (WorldCat also says it's at two school libraries in Texas, but I'm pretty sure those are false positives.)

I have also never found a summary or review of the book, which is odd.

All I have is this Cassell advertisement, which appears in the June 9 and June 16, 1935, editions of The Observer of London.


"A deftly-written novel of strange happenings on the Cornish Coast." That pretty much just makes me want to find this book even more.

2 comments:

  1. Now I have to work even harder to manifest your next birthday present :)

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  2. I would also love to track down a copy of this! I found out that she wrote a letter on 6th June 1935 to her friend, the journalist Thomas Moult in which she mentions that "Mermaid's Mirror" is out. She says she has asked Cassell to send him a copy, and that she hopes he will be able to write something nice about it. The letters are in Leeds University's Special Collections.

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