This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 4/8/2023
HOFFMANN, Professor (Angelo Lewis, 1839 – 1919). King Koko. London: Chatto & Windus, 1904. Publisher’s brown pictorial cloth. Frontispiece (behind tissue guard) and illustrations by H.L. Shindler. 8vo. Magic Circle Library stamp to title page and library slip affixed to rear pastedown, paper label to spine, cloth evenly darkened with minor soiling; good to very good. With David Devant’s bookplate on the front pastedown, and INSCRIBED AND SIGNED ON THE FLYLEAF IN HOFFMANN’S HAND: “David Devant / With the author’s / Kind Regards / Nov. 12. 1904.” An outstanding association copy of one of Hoffmann’s lesser-known works. Devant, the best-known stage magician and illusionist in Britain during the Edwardian era, donated his library of magic books to the Magic Circle, the club of which he served as president. The organization later divested itself of many of Devant’s books. Hoffmann was the great literary man of magicdom, whose Modern Magic, first published in 1876, remains widely regarded as a watershed in the publication of conjuring books even in the modern era, as it was among the first popularly produced and widely distributed works to reveal a wide range of secrets regularly in use by professional conjurers.