World of Wonders (First Edition, Inscribed by Author)

DAVIES, Robertson. World of Wonders. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975.

Octavo. Original orange publisher's cloth. Gilt lettering to spine. Unclipped dust jacket. [viii], 358 pp. First edition. Inscribed by the author on the title page: "Robertson Davies. With all good wishes to Austin Seton Thompson — a fellow author —", with the additional ink inscription "Massey College, Toronto. December 4, 1975."

World of Wonders is the concluding volume of the Deptford Trilogy. Following Fifth Business (1970) and The Manticore (1972), this series established Robertson Davies as one of the major novelists writing in English. The trilogy is built around a single act: a snowball thrown in a small Ontario town in 1908 that strikes a woman and causes a premature birth and a permanent change in her mind. That act ripples through the lives of three men across five decades. World of Wonders belongs to Magnus Eisengrim, the greatest conjuror of his age, who unspools the story of his life to a group of filmmakers producing a documentary about the legendary nineteenth-century magician Robert-Houdin. Eisengrim's narrative of abduction and exploitation is characteristic of Davies: learned, sardonic, attentive to the way in which myth and identity are constructed by those with the skill to construct them.

Davies had been Master of Massey College, Toronto, since the college's founding in 1963, and the inscription is dated from there on 4 December 1975, just weeks after the novel's publication.

Provenance: The recipient, Austin Seton Thompson, was a Toronto writer whose papers are held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. His first book, Spadina: A Story of Old Toronto, had been published in 1975 by Pagurian Press — the very year of this inscription. Davies's acknowledgement of him as "a fellow author" is not merely a courteous formula: it is a collegial welcome to a writer who had just produced his first book, from one whose work had already transformed Canadian fiction. The inscription places this copy precisely within the literary world of Toronto in the year of the novel's publication.

Near fine in very good dust jacket. Jacket unclipped; very minor rubbing along edges and some creases. Boards likewise with minor rubbing. Spine gilt bright. Contents fine, bright, and clean.

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Catalogue Number: HH000130