[Gutenberg 17809] • Sous le burnous

Not much is known of France, except that he died in 1908. To be perfectly honest, not much is known about Musk Hashish and Blood, either. It was printed in a limited edition of only 500 copies in Britain in 1900, and then printed in an equally small edition in America 40 years later. Hector France lived an adventurous life, and wrote about it with style and gusto. One reason Musk Hashish and Blood never saw the equivalent of a mass market edition during France's lifetime is because France felt, perhaps with some cause, that many of the things he described would have sent his Victorian readership into shock -- and yet there is a certain romance to be discovered amid the exquisitely-described barbarism, an exoticism that cannot be found in today's world, that makes this book a fitting entry in the Library.