8vo. In five volumes. xviii, 161pp, [6]; xx, 153pp, [6]; xxiii, 198pp, [5]; xxii, 181pp, [6]; xxxii, 342pp, [6]. With half-titles to each volume, a portrait frontispiece of the author to vols. i-iii, and a terminal leaf of publisher's advertisements to each volume. Original publisher's black cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine, with original pictorial dustwrapper to each volume. All fine.

The collected 'spook stories', of extremely prolific English writer E. F. Benson (1867-1940), who in his lifetime completed over fifty novels, four novel series, short stories, plays, biographies, and other non-fiction works on subjects as varied as golf and grave digging. Benson's short, atmospheric, and sometimes satirical ghost stories were often originally published in story magazines such as Pearson's Magazine or Hutchinson's Magazine, before being collected and reprinted in book form by his publisher Walter Hutchinson.

This collection, with distinctive, evocative monochrome dustwrapper illustrations, was produced by the Canadian Ash-Tree Press, publishers of supernatural and horror literature. The press received the 1999 Specialty Press Award of the Horror Writers Association for their reprints and edited collections of ghostly tales by authors such as R. H. Malden, Vernon Lee, John Metcalfe and Sheridan Le Fanu.