Pom Harrington presents this first edition of The Rainbow. Methuen published The Rainbow in September 1915, but quickly withdrew it from sale in the face of almost universally hostile reviews and impending prosecution. At Bow Street magistrates’ court on 13 November it was banned as obscene, with the result that half of the print run was destroyed.
This is one of a handful of extant copies in the dust jacket. Methuen’s adoption of this groundbreaking style of jacket design began right at the time this book was in production, it closely resembles Conrad’s Victory and a number of the other titles in the series advertised on the flaps and rear panel of this dust jacket.
The innovation of having special designs made for the dust jacket which were neither taken from an image in the book itself, nor simply the printing on paper of the binding brasses made for the cloth, but rather a unique addition to the whole of the book itself seem commonplace now but were revolutionary at the time. English book design changed that year and, notwithstanding the destruction of half its edition, the dust jacket on The Rainbow was a part of that change.
Pom Harrington presents this stunning copy in the exceedingly rare dust jacket.
First edition, first impression, the book with the points as called for by Roberts: the title dated and on a cancel, 20pp of ads at the end, and dark blue cloth. There are two known variants of the dust jacket: one has an anonymous blurb composed by the author, is typographic, bears a price, and is very much in the style of Duckworth’s post 1913 jackets.
The other variant, the present, is identical in format to Lawrence’s Love Poems put out by the same firm in February 1913, printed in blue on a linen-effect paper. Notably it has no price, no blurb, and nothing printed on it other than a repeat of what is stamped on the cloth binding beneath. This is in keeping with all examples of pre-1913 Duckworth jackets that we have been able to examine. Roberts does not assign priority to either of the two states.
First edition, first impression in an exceptionally bright jacket. Fleming (1908-1964) finished Casino Royale over the period of two months in early 1952, while at Goldeneye, his “tropical hideaway on Jamaica’s north shore” (Gilbert, p. 16). According to Gilbert, Fleming finished the novel quickly because “he was a seasoned journalist”, but also because many plot elements sprung from either Fleming’s imagination or his memories of wartime adventures. Published in April 1953, the book was a success and Fleming would thereafter use “his Caribbean holidays to write a James Bond story every year until his premature death in 1964″ (ODNB).
J. R. R. Tolkien. The Complete Lord Of The Rings, First Editions. First editions, first impressions. The first edition was published in editions of 3,000 copies, 3,250 copies, and 7,000 copies respectively, so that there are no more than 3,000 sets in first impression throughout. The Return of the King is known in two states; the present copy is in the first state, page 49 with the signature mark “4” present and all lines of type sagging slightly in the middle. The three books together in first edition, first impression, first state are now increasingly scarce in the original printed dust jackets.
Nicholas Machiavel’s Prince. Also, the life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca.
First edition in English of Machiavelli’s famous handbook for rulers (1513, published Rome 1532), dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence from 1513.
The Prince appears to have been banned from publication in England during the Elizabethan period, though translations circulated in manuscript. It was so controversial that it had to wait for over a century, and was the last of Machiavelli’s great works, to be published in English. Even then, Dacres found it politic to frame the book with moral reservations or “animadversions”, though he did not allow them to seep into his text as did later translators Nevile and Farneworth; he also resisted more than they did the temptation to improve on Machiavelli’s style by rhetorical embellishments.
“Hitherto political speculation had tended to be a rhetorical exercise based on the implicit assumption of Church or Empire.
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