Full leather bound in vellum with gold tooling

M.R. James, member of the Order of Merit and Provost of Eton, combined the ability to write serious scholarship (his specialism being in manuscripts) and some of the best ghost stories in the language. He originated what is known as 'the antiquarian ghost story'. The story which he penned for the Dolls' House was a development on a theme first tried out in a story called 'the Mezzotint'; the author writes at the end of his miniature contribution 'I can only hope that there is enough of novelty in the setting to make the repetition of the motif tolerable'.

Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was a gift to Queen Mary from the nation; a showcase for contemporary craft and design, it preserved for history the ideal home of the 1920s, at a scale of one foot to one inch. Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, conceived the idea, and through her influence many famous artists, designers, authors and craftsmen contributed to the project.
The Dolls' House Library contains, alongside standard works such as four tiny Bibles, miniature atlases and a complete works of Shakespeare, around 200 diminutive editions of contemporary British literature. Princess Marie Louise personally wrote to the most significant writers of the time to ask for either an original composition or a suitable passage from work already published, transcribed by hand or submitted for professional copying. The bindings are mostly morocco leather or vellum, some with beautifully precise gold-tooled decoration. The majority of the volumes were bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, with the remaining bound by Birdsall & Son, Hatchards, A. Loosely, R. Riviere & Sons and Zaehnsdorf. Each book contains a tiny bookplate designed by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.