04/23/2026
Coming to Manhattan Rare Book and Fine Press Fair on May 2: This multi-inscribed and heavily hand-edited, true first edition of Lilith by the poet and playwright, George Sterling.
An early 20th-century semi-neopagan, Bohemian Grove member, and American decadent from Sag Harbor, Sterling arrived to California in 1890 and rose to prominence in pre-1906 Earthquake San Francisco thanks to the tutelage of journalist and horror-luminary Ambrose Bierce (of Devil’s Dictionary fame). Later, he would inspire a young California poet and Weird Fiction writer, Clark Ashton Smith.
In general, Sterling was the eccentric type. He built an altar to the great god Pan in his back garden, engaged in polyamory, and carried around a bottle of cyanide (which he eventually used) — just in case his day went very badly. In 1905, he established the early Carmel-by-the-Sea artist colony alongside ecofeminist anthropologist Mary Austin and others.
Written in highly stylized semi-Elizabethan English in blank verse iambic pentameter, Lilith reads like a verse Vathek, an equal parts allegorical and creepy horror closet drama in 4 acts with a smattering of skillful dark humor and ironic counterpoint.
Clark Ashton Smith predicted it would be the work Sterling would be best remembered for, comparing it to Swinburne, Shelley, and Baudelaire: “In scene after scene, one hears the fugue of good and evil, of pleasure and pain, set to chords that arc almost Wagnerian.”
This copy is one of 300 signed and hand numbered from the original 1919 self-published first edition (preceding the wider 1920 and 1926 reissues) of which only 150 were sold and includes multiple hand corrections by Sterling himself as well as a two rather flirtatious inscriptions from him to California socialite Addie Stolp.
This edition was printed and bound by the California writer, suffragist, and newspaperwoman Anna Morison Reed only two years before her death in 1921 as a personal favor.
