Adam Douglas presents this privately printed edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, from Cranwell in 1926. This edition is also known as the “Subscribers edition”.
In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, Lawrence described Seven Pillars as an effort to combine ‘record of fact’ and ‘work of art’, “to make history an imaginative thing” (Karachi, 7/5/28), as Lawrence James, in his ODNB biography of him puts it, Lawrence created, “ a personal, emotional narrative of the Arab revolt in which reveals how by sheer willpower he made history. It was a testimony to his vision and persistence and a fulfilment of his desire to write an epic which might stand comparison in scale and linguistic elegance with his beloved Morte d’Arthur and C. M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. Subtitled ‘A triumph’, its climax is the Arab liberation of Damascus, a victory which successfully concludes a gruelling campaign and vindicates Lawrence’s faith in the Arabs. In a way Seven Pillars is a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress, with Lawrence as Christian, a figure sustained by his faith in the Arabs, successively overcoming physical and moral obstacles”.
Illustrated with 66 plates printed by Whittingham & Griggs, including frontispiece portrait of Feisal by Augustus John, many coloured or tinted, 4 of them double-page, by Eric Kennington, William Roberts, Augustus John, William Nicholson, Paul Nash and others, 4 folding colour-printed maps, that is 2 maps duplicated, rather than the 3 called for by O’Brien, laid down on linen, 58 illustrations in text, one coloured, by Roberts, Nash, Kennington, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Gertrude Hermes and others. Historiated initials by Edward Wadsworth printed in red and black.
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