Gremlins Go Home. Illustrated by Kelly Freas. [Signed by both authors and illustrator].

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974. First Edition. Signed by both authors and by the illustrator. Octavo, red boards (hardcover), gilt lettering, 150 pp. Fine in a Near Fine dust jacket with slight darkening along edges. From dust jacket: Baneen is my name. Some have called me a trickster, but I’m merely a poor, simple gremlin who came to this vast, watery planet Earth many long centuries ago. The story inside this book is about me. Oh, there are other gremlins in it of course, and even a few humans (although, frankly, they cause a terrible amount of trouble for us harmless gremlin folk). There’s a dog in the story too, a great, growling, shaggy monster who insists on calling himself Mr. Sheperton. Now mind you, humans aren’t all that bad, and a watery planet like Earth may be a fine place for them to live (though I have my doubts, there’s been so much polluting and suchlike going on in the last few centuries). For gremlins, Earth is a terrible place. All that water plays hob with gremlin magic, so that even mighty Lugh of the Long Hand, who whisked us here from the planet Gremla in a twinkling, can’t raise a single gremlin more than twelve feet into the air over Earth. Which is why I hit on a scheme (did I mention they call me the Trickster?) to borrow a little room on the ifne big rocket the humans want to send to Mars. There’s this human boy -- a strudy lad named Rolf Gunnarson -- whose father is launch director at Cape Kennedy. Now suppose I can get O’Rigami, the Grand Engineer of all the gremlin, to build an invisible space kite, and then persuade this Folf lad to attach the kite to the Mars rocket? Why then, each and every one of us gremlins could jump aboard the kite and ride off to Gremla when the rocket takes off. Of course, we’ll have to detour the rocket just the tiniest bit away from Mars, but Rolf doesn’t have to know about that. And Rolf’s dog, Mr. Sheperton is liable to be a bit suspicious of the whole plan (grouchy, that’s what he is). Then there are the poachers on the wildlife preserve where we gremlins have our camp, and Rolf’s friend Rita might not be so cooperative. But -- by the Great Corkscrew of dusty Gremla itself -- if I don’t get us gremlins back home again, my name’s not Baneen!