1925 FIGURES of EARTH COMEDY of APPEARANCES by J.CABELL antique ILLUSTRATED

FIGURES of EARTH

A COMEDY of APPEARANCES

by JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Illustrated by Frank C. Pape

New York: Robert M. Bride & Company; 1925


(American first illustrated edition of Cabell’s classic satirical fantasy novel)

Original blind ruled cloth boards decorated in gilt

decorative endpapers

Fore edge and lower edge are untrimmed

Excellent interior condition, minor shelf wear of binding

size : 6 1/3 by 9 3/4"

Text in English
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James Branch Cabell ( 1879 –  1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis.
His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular.
For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare".

Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play golf."
According to Louis D. Rubin, Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one.

Interest in Cabell declined in the 1930s, a decline that has been attributed in part to his failure to move out of his fantasy niche despite the onset of World War II.
Alfred Kazin said that "Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe".
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