The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, First Edition First Impression, 1915

Thirty-Nine Steps was serialized in All-Story Weekly and Blackwood‘s Magazine (credited to "H de V.", July – September 1915) before being published in book form in October 1915 by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. This is a first impression with publisher‘s advertisements to the rear. Mid blue cloth boards with titles in darker blue to spine and front board. Inside is an ink inscription, dated Christmas 1916.

As it was war time, the paper was poor quality and prone to toning. The cloth cover has marks to the spine and damage to the top. The bottom corner of the front board has been bent and the end papers cracked at the spine, but the pages are tight and apart from the toning are in very good condition.

John Buchan was a Scottish diplomat, novelist, historian and Unionist politician (1875-1940). He went to Hutchesons‘ Boys Grammar School in Glasgow and read classics at the University of Glasgow and at Cambridge. With the outbreak of the First World War, he went to write for the British War Propaganda Bureau and worked as a correspondent in France for The Times. He wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while ill in bed with a duodenal ulcer. In 1917 he was appointed Director of Information under Lord Beaverbrook and served as Governor General of Canada from 1935, becoming 1st Baron Tweedsmuir. He died in 1940 after slipping and hitting his head on the edge of a bath.