The Pattern of Chance. Gardiner (Gordon) Modern First Edition

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, pp. [viii], 300, crown 8vo, original black cloth, backstrip lettered in gilt, publisher device in blind to upper board, top edge orange, dustjacket with a design by Edward Ardizzone (signed 'EJIA'), very shallow chipping at bottom corners, near fine. A wonderful copy, approaching fine, of an anomalous entry in the list of early Edward Ardizzone dustjackets: his commissions in this medium in the late 1920s and early 1930s otherwise seem exclusively to have been for the UK publisher Constable. The domestic edition of the present work was published by Sampson, Low, Marston & Co, but with a non-pictorial dustjacket - Ardizzone's work only features on the US edition. The author was a Major in the 3rd Battalion, Border Regiment; during the Great War he served as Chief Intelligence Officer in Scotland, having earlier served in the Kimberley Town Guard during the Boer War siege; educated at Eton and Harvard - at the latter he went on to give, the brief biography to the dustjacket's rear flap informs us, 'the first lecture in America [.] on his friend Joseph Conrad', with an itinerant career to rival that eminent author (or, per the blurb, 'to make the voyaging of Ulysses seem like a week-end holiday'). This novel reflects some of his travels, being the story of a young Englishman in South Africa - 'plunged into an adventure of love and mystery', whose incidents are depicted in vivid fashion by Ardizzone's montage-style design.