Rare Mixed Edition TARZAN, ANT MEN Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rare Mixed Edition TARZAN, ANT MEN Edgar Rice Burroughs - eBay (item 310085815685 end time Sep-26-08 18:13:33 PDT)

This vintage hard cover copy of Tarzan and the Ant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs is a mixed edition--the first edition McClurg pages from 1924 are bound into orange 1925 Grosset and Dunlap boards. It says Grosset and Dunlap on the spine, McClurg on the title page. It's a very scarce edition.

It's a nice copy with the front and back end papers replaced, a facsimile Grosset and Dunlap dust jacket and a facsimile frontispiece from another edition. The Zeuschner Bibliography says that many copies seem to have been bound without the frontispiece.

The story is wonderfully imaginative 1924 Burroughs, where Tarzan goes into battle with the tiny ant man riders.

First two paragraphs of Chapter One:

In the filth of a dark hut, in the village of Obebe the cannibal, upon the banks of the Ugogo, Esteban Miranda squatted upon his haunches and gnawed upon the remnants of a half-cooked fish. About his neck was an iron slave collar from which a few feet of rusty chain ran to a stout post set deep in the ground near the low entranceway that let upon the village street not far from the hut of Obebe himself.

For a year Esteban Miranda had been chained thus, like a dog, and like a dog he sometimes crawled through the low doorway of his kennel and basked in the sun outside. Two diversions had he; and only two. One was the persistent idea that he was Tarzan of the Apes, whom he had impersonated for so long and with such growing success that, like the good actor he was, he had come not only to act the part, but to live it--to be it. He was, as far as he was concerned, Tarzan of the Apes--there was no other--and he was Tarzan of the Apes to Obebe, too; but the village witch doctor still insisted that he was the river devil and as such, one to propitiate rather than to anger.

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