Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Marianne North, Rembrandt and John Atkinson Grimshaw. A travelling portrait-painter is ordered to rest his failing eyes, and to keep the household afloat his wife Leah writes down the stories his sitters told him: a gambling-house bed in Paris that murders its sleeper, a lawyer's recovery of a stolen letter, a governess's tale of the French Terror, a Breton fisherman's secret, a mask at a ball in Pisa. Collins was thirty-two and already handling a frame narrative better than his friend Dickens; A Terribly Strange Bed is the story every anthology takes. Fifty-four plates, among them Ford Madox Brown and William Powell Frith, gather the storytelling worlds of the tales: old London rooms, courts and exiles, the stuff of the sitters lives.