Kai Lung's Golden Hours (The Travellers' Library series)

308pp, [8]pp publisher's ads. Blue cloth-covered boards; gilt design and titles on spine. 12mo. Lightly rubbed and bumped spine ends, corners rubbed and rounded. Text block edges tanned and starting to fox. Endpapers moderately tanned. Internally neat, clean, bright and tight. A set of connected short stories by the English writer, Ernest Bramah, with a preface by Hilaire Belloc.  The collection was first published in 1922, and later reissued in The Travellers' Library series. The stories centre around the titular character, Kai Lung, a storyteller in a re-imagined Imperial China who uses artful tales to manipulate threatening scenarios.  The stories are noted for their characteristic yarn-upon-yarn storytelling as well as their wit and humour, recreating an atmosphere of a semi-fictionalised ancient China.