Edgar Allan Poe

The Man of the Crowd: (Low Cost). Limited Edition Edgar Allan Poe

Publisher Marketing: The story is introduced with the epigraph "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul" - a quote taken from The Characters of Man by Jean de La Bruyere. It translates to This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone. This same quote is used in Poe's earliest tale, "Metzengerstein." After an unnamed illness, the unnamed narrator sits in an unnamed coffee shop in London. Fascinated by the crowd outside the window, he considers how isolated people think they are, despite "the very denseness of the company around." He takes time to categorize the different types of people he sees. As evening falls, the narrator focuses on "a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age," whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy, and whose body "was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble" wearing filthy, ragged clothes of a "beautiful texture." The narrator dashes out of the coffee shop to follow the man from afar. The man leads the narrator through bazaars and shops, buying nothing, and into a poorer part of the city, then back into "the heart of the mighty London." This chase lasts through the evening and into the next day. Finally, exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the man, who still does not notice him. The narrator concludes the man is "the type and genius of deep crime" due to his inscrutability and inability to leave the crowds of London." Contributor Bio:  Poe, Edgar Allan A. Sanchez es ilustrador y escritor. Ha escrito, entre otras obras, Cuentos y Leyendas del Orinoco; Jimmy, el Angel en la cima del Diablo; La leyenda del Cararampio y otros cuentos amazonicos; y La rebelion de Lope de Aguirre, todos ellos dentro de la Coleccion de Relatos amazonicos y del Orinoco. Tambien es autor de Howard Pyle, el rey de los ilustradores, una antologia sobre el legendario pintor norteamericano. Ha ilustrado ediciones de El Lazarillo de Tormes y de Edgar Allan Poe y editado el libro de ilustraciones Palabras del Agua.