Modern Literature

Viii & 400 pp, red cloth with gilt medallion on front cover (no d/w), top edge gilt, top and base of spine slightly rubbed, slight dent to cloth of spine (as if a cord had been  tightened over it), some foxing to last few pages, otherwise in very good condition,  Macmillan 1932

19.6 x 12.1 cm, 530g, no ISBN

This was Kipling’s last collection of short stories, and contains the story ‘Dayspring Mishandled’. This concerns an academic who claimed to have discovered a lost manuscript of Chaucer from the 1300s, and persuaded a fellow academic to accept it and write learned essays about it.  In fact it was a forgery, and written specifically to discredit the other academic, who had stolen his wife some years previously.  When the forgery was uncovered, the second academic became a laughing-stock, and shortly afterwards died in disgrace.  All the names in the story are unusual – the hero’s name is Manallace, for example – but all contain the letter A.  If you write the names down in columns and put all the As together, you can read off the names Rudyard Kipling Piltdown.

Piltdown Man was discovered by an archaeologist in 1912 not far from where Kipling was living in East Sussex.  It was supposed to be the skull of a “missing link” between the apes and modern man.  However, in 1953 (long after Kipling’s death) it was proved to be a mixture of a small human’s skull and an orang-utan’s jawbone, and it is now thought that the archaeologist’s intention was to discredit a rival archaeologist.  There is a strong suggestion that Kipling knew that Piltdown Man was a hoax, and he wrote the short story to point out the truth. 

The book is still in print, but only in paperback, at £7.99.  Our copy is a proper sewn hardback, and will open flat.