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. It was for this reason why only 500 copies were printed in England and then in an equally small edition in the United States 40 years later.
