The Adventures of an Engineer
London: James Bowden, 1898. Octavo, original decorated blue cloth; frontispiece and three plates, 246 pp., and ten pages of publisher's adverts. Boards worn at the corners, contemporary stamps of the Telegraph newspaper library, some foxing. A good copy overall. Collection of rambling adventure stories, mixing dusky villains with nascent technology in a genre that falls somewhere between boy's adventure stories and science-fiction. Weatherby Chesney was the pen-name of Cutcliffe Hyne, an obscure but nonetheless engaging pioneer of English science-fiction. Hyne was the author of a similar collection of stories, Adventures of a Solicitor (1898), but his best novel relates to the rediscovery of Atlantis, in The Lost Continent (1900). The title page of this book lists the inauspiciously titled Albatross Fishing amongst books by Weatherby Chesney, but there is no evidence this title made it to print (with no copies manifest through WorldCat or OCLC).
Hyne's stories are eminently readable, although typified by implausible plot devices and a hearty contempt for women and just about everybody except the English. Item #4170
Price (AUD): $400.00