A respectable London lawyer notices that his oldest friend has left everything to a man nobody can describe. Everyone who meets Edward Hyde comes away certain of one thing only, that there is something wrong with him, and unable to say what.
Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in January 1886 and it has not been out of print since. The story escaped the book almost immediately and became a phrase people use without having read it. Read whole, in its ten chapters, it is shorter, colder and far stranger than the phrase suggests, and it withholds the thing everyone thinks they already know until the last page.
This volume puts the novel back among the tales he wrote around it. Markheim, in which a dealer is murdered in his own shop on a Sunday afternoon and the man who did it finds he has company. The Body-Snatcher, in which two medical students in Edinburgh pay cash for what the graveyards give up and stop asking where it came from. Olalla, in which a soldier sent to a shuttered house in the Spanish hills to convalesce hears a voice singing through the wall. And Thrawn Janet, in which a minister of a moorland parish takes on a servant that nobody else in Balweary will go near.
Five works, written between 1881 and 1886, by a man who understood that the frightening thing is never the creature. It is the respectable person who lets it in.
Thrawn Janet is set in the Scots that Stevenson wrote it in, with the 1887 volume's own glosses kept at the foot of the page. Nothing is modernised and nothing is translated away.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 150 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
